I’ve been noticing over the past several years some really rad pumpkin designs around Halloween. My suspicion is with the onset of digital photography coupled with manipulation software, it is becoming easier for the average person to put a fairly complex design on a pumpkin.
In my Visual Literacy class, we’ve spent a fair amount of time studying all of the basic design elements such as value, shape, space, line, composition, etc. We have done a number of value studies, vector drawings and image manipulations. I began to wonder after looking at the cool pumpkin designs floating around the Internet if 1) I could create my own design from an image, and 2) if it would make a good assignment for my students to try.
I found an image from Sendak’s “Where The Wild Things Are” book. I manipulated it in Photoshop, increasing the contrast so I basically had two values, black & white. I experimented with a number of ways of achieving this, the Threshold adjustment seemed to work fairly well. But my pattern was ultimately developed in Illustrator using the pen tool.
It looked something like this:
In the process of creating this pattern, I realized that I had experienced this type of design before when I worked in a screenprinting shop. Whenever we would print a light color on a dark fabric, I found that I had to think in reverse by creating a negative of what I wanted the final result to be. Since the light of the candle in the pumpkin would shine through the cut areas, I needed my highlight areas to be the shapes I drew, and leave the dark areas as whitespace. It was a great exercise in negative/positive space.
After completing my design on the computer, I printed it, and taped it on my pumpkin. I use a sharp pointy thing to poke holes through the pattern into the pumpkin so I could see where my cut lines would be. Then I carved out the cut areas according to the pattern. One thing I didn’t do so well was consider the complexity of carving in the pumpkin. I put too many fine details in, and often didn’t leave enough pumpkin flesh between my cut areas in my design to make a solid structure, so I had to improvise when doing the actual carving.
One thing we discussed in class was the possibility for a middle value as well as a black and a high key value in this design. In pumpkin carving, some have discovered that removing the skin, but not cutting all of the way through the flesh, you can achieve a middle value as well. (Some examples are shown here.)
Now I’m not the best pumpkin carver in the world. In fact, I’ve never done anything much more complex that the traditional triangle eyes, and toothless grin of a regular old jack-o-lantern, but I really wanted to test my design skills. After transferring my design to the pumpkin, I carefully carved it out and here is my result:
And here is what my pumpkin looks like all lit up:
What do you think?
I’d say this is a keeper assignment. I can’t wait to see what my students come up with for their designs, and if they will have the patience to actually carve it out.
Now that I have sort of figured this out, next year I suppose I will have to try a design with a middle value as well.
Saw this on a co-worker’s Facebook page. Thought I’d share it here as it is worth spending 1:51 minutes of your life looking at. I found the animation & videography compelling, and the poem’s not bad either!
You may be familiar with the famous “Last Lecture” which spread around the internet last year. It was given by Randy Pausch who passed away last summer. If you haven’t seen it, you really should take a look at it.
What you may not be familiar with is the work he did in computer science. The project of his that I am most familiar with is called “Alice.” I had heard about Alice several years before I actually took the time to check it out, and after I did, I regretted taking so long.
This software is amazingly cool, and simple to use – even a middle school kid can master it. It was designed as a tool to teach the fundamentals of object oriented programming, but kids can also use it to tell interactive, digital stories in a 3-D virtual world. It can be downloaded for free from http://www.alice.org and it works on Macs or PC’s.
I have posted two tutorial pages on my website. One is an overview of basic computer operations such as input/output, storage memory, loops, decisions, and math calculations. Another is an example of how to calculate distance using the distance formula with Alice. Both can be downloaded from http://www.billgx.com/alice/
I recommend that you work through the built-in tutorials on Alice before you try to work through my tutorials. The built-in tutorials will explain the basics of the Alice interface, as will as some of the operations that Alice can do. If you are hungry for more, I highly recommend Dick Baldwin’s free Alice tutorials. It is where I went when I was first learning about the software. They can be accessed here: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm
I want to encourage everyone to TRY THIS SOFTWARE! If you have even modest computer skills, you will be able to figure this out. I would love to hear how you have used this software with your students!
These YouTube videos give you an idea of what can be accomplished with Alice. If you want to record your own videos, be aware that Alice doesn’t have a built-in ability to save video. Simply download the free CamStudio software (sorry it’s for PC’s only), which can record your Alice movie from your screen, and you will be set to share your work with the world as well.
For a while now, I have been pondering the notion of literacies beyond that of the written word, particularly that of visual and new media literacies. In the fascinating article “Expanding the Concept of Literacy” Elizabeth Daley goes so far to propose that multimedia and the language of the screen is the current vernacular; a true new literacy equal in importance to traditional literacy of the printed word. It seems to me that educational institutions have a long way to go towards recognition of non-traditional literacy, however I have observed some progress on occasion.
For example, Daniel Pink recently wrote about how the University of Pennsylvania, which normally assigns a book to the incoming freshmen class to study and analyze, this year has assigned a famous painting for study and consideration. I find the story interesting because it suggests a broad recognition of visual literacy as a valid and important field of study at that institution.
Intrigued, yesterday I tweeted the story out, seeking thoughts on the idea and unfortunately have been away from my computer for a day and wasn’t able to reply to anyone who responded. Some things are ill-suited for discussion on twitter anyhow, and this story and its accompanying ideas seems too big for 140 characters, so I wrote this quick post to continue the discussion. Here are some of the ideas that were suggested:
Chris wants to open a can of copyright worms…
Chris, I know we are in a mash-up world, but I’m going to have to learn a whole bunch more about copyright before I could effectively lead such a discussion. And it seems like the more I learn about it, the more confused I get. Still, it would certainly be interesting! How much is fair-use? How much can you expect to use before you get into legal trouble, etc.?
Jeff gets right to the heart of the matter with a suggestion of turning it into an explicit lesson in visual literacy…
Most of my students are definitely left-brain oriented, and this suggestion would certainly lead to some lively debates and discussions. What do you think of doing this debate-style and just randomly having people argue for and against? I would love to get some engineering technology students arguing for visual literacy because I certainly more often hear arguments against needing this kind of knowledge.
Then we have Dr. Taylor confusing the heck out of me…
This is why I think some things are better discussed somewhere other than twitter. When we abbreviate to the point that the message becomes confusing, maybe it’s time to take it to the blog? Rel ` icons? Is that religious icons? Ren ` ports to Cubists & Bacon? Not sure what ren ` ports is either.
I’m liking your postcard idea, but would like some further clarification on this before I comment further. I hope you can take my gentle ribbing, but either I’m just too tired or too thick-headed to decode that last tweet.
We have some terrific ideas starting us out here, I’m wondering if anyone else would like to weigh in?
At my school, we have a freshman experience class, although I am not directly involved with it. I’m not sure if they have an assigned reading assignment, but something that the incoming freshmen could do together to start developing critical thinking skills I think would be awesome. Why not a painting? Congratulations Penn, I think this is a fabulous idea for welcoming new students to college, and getting their feet wet in the world of literacy. Perhaps a video lesson might be great as well. Show them an indie or foreign film that none of the students are likely to see.
What do you think of using a film for developing visual literacy? Video is definitely a part of this generation’s lives, the trick is finding a film that they haven’t seen yet.
One film I have shown past groups of students is the French film Amélie. It is full of complementary colors and stunning visual imagery. I have yet to have a student who has seen it before I have shown it to them. Most are skeptical that they can watch and enjoy a non-English film with subtitles, yet most are surprised at how well they can follow the story.
If you have more ideas & suggestions on developing visual & new media literacies, I would love to hear them! I’m particularly interested in seeing detailed plans on how these literacies are being taught.
I’m also interested in hearing what you think about the whole notion of alternative, non-printed literacy.
Last weekend I had the chance to visit with some corporate-world people whose opinions I value about Snack Bars & Social Media in the workplace. (Ok, they were my siblings.) One is a software engineer for a large food producer, one works for an international hotel chain, and one works for a regional bank. All of them said that their respective employers do not permit any form of social media (blogging, facebook, twitter) on the corporate networks.
None of them saw the value of a company permitting even limited use of the technologies at work. I told them about IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines and that company’s stance on employee participation in social media. The banker told me about an article that said banks shouldn’t use Facebook for marketing, because the audience doesn’t want to be hammered with marketing information all of the time.
No kidding. The traditional marketing approach of shouting at customers is not what Social Media is all about. It is all about conversations, not about one way broadcasting. My banker sister challenged me to describe a way that banks could effectively participate in Facebook and other social media. I asked her what sort of messages banks try to convey in traditional marketing efforts and suggested that new social media could also send these same messages but in a different way.
This week I had the opportunity to sit down to visit with Grant Griffiths, a guy I am continually learning from. He says:
“Social Media Marketing is more proactive. You’re actually doing something on the Internet to try and generate traffic to you and usually it’s in the form of providing information… You really want to become known as the place to go for answers for whatever you are blogging about.
So if you are a banker wanting to use social media for marketing, it makes sense to blog about the financial questions that potential customers might have. If you can offer helpful advice, it becomes a win/win situation. Facebook could be used as a form of blog by posting notes pages about your blogging ideas. Or you could keep a separate blog, then link to it through your Facebook profile.
In any case, a professional who effectively engages in Web 2.0 discussions can represent the corporation in a very positive light, and put a human face on what might otherwise be perceived as a soul-less organization. The corporation who discourages these discussions simply keeps people wondering about what goes on inside and what sort of people work there. These corporations also miss opportunities to respond to complaints and criticisms that are bound to crop up.
For further information Common Craft has an excellent video series that explains several related ideas in an easy to understand format. This video talks about Social Media in general.
Explore the possibilities and embrace the social media. If you don’t, just hope your competition doesn’t either.
This week I started working my summer job at Twin Valley Telecommunications. As a computer technology professor, I believe it is really important for teachers to get real world experience in their subjects to stay relevant in the classroom. It is my second summer of working there, and one of the things that impressed me last year that I had almost forgotten about is the snack bar.
Candy bars, soda pop, bottled waters, cookies, crackers, you name it- they probably have it. It makes a statement about the TVT company culture; they care about their employees and they want to encourage the people to work there to feel right at home.
What if when considering the very cool idea of a snack bar the leaders at TVT thought “We shouldn’t put snacks in the break room because if we do our employees will spend all day there munching on snacks instead of working“? Ridiculous, right? An employee who didn’t “get” that snacks are there to make people feel comfortable and welcome and spent the entire day in the break room gorging themselves on goodies would soon be sent packing.
What is so different about the thinking of a company (or school) who denies access to social media technologies such as Facebook, YouTube, and other popular social media sites for its employees at work? “If we allow our employees access to social media sites, they will spend the entire day doing that instead of working.”
Hold employees to a measurable standard for performance on the job. But don’t try to ban a specific set of social media technologies.
Scott is absolutely correct in noting that companies do not usually try to control other minute-by-minute behaviors such as restroom visits, hallway chats with colleagues, or coffee breaks and it is foolish for them to try to limit or ban participation in social media because it is the single most powerful and cost-effective method of spreading ideas on the planet.
However social media frightens many corporate leaders because it is poorly understood and runs counter to conventional wisdom on how companies share information. Usually corporations are tight-lipped and information comes out in a trickle of well-crafted, professionally designed (read boring) press releases. To many, blogging and other social media represents a risk of embarassment or disclosure of confidential trade knowledge through unsanctioned outlets. However this perspective misses the entire point and potential of social media.
For an example of a company that does “get it” when it comes to social media, check out IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines. IBM is setting an example of innovation with its embrace of employee participation in social media. Instead of stifling them, it is actually encouraging employees to participate in the read/write web and become evangelists for the IBM brand.
This issue is all about trust. Schools don’t trust students or teachers to do the right thing. Companies don’t trust employees. but the problem lies not with the technology, but with with setting expectations and ensuring those expectations are met. When a company blocks access to social media, it is blocking access to its own future growth and when a school blocks access to social media it is blocking access to a student’s future growth.
I guess I can live with a private enterprise putting shackles on if it so chooses, but slowing students understanding unnecessarily is shameful. By blocking access to social media in school, we force students to participate in the read/write web elsewhere, and often without guidance or supervision. When left to their own devices without any guidance, social media for youth often becomes exactly what we fear for them in the first place- a pit of ignorance. If we open the gates at school, and have teachers thoughtfully guiding social media interactions, it can provide unique learning opportunities unlike any other.
I think the Love & Logic philosophy of Jim & Charles Fay has it right: give a kid a job you know they can do and then pray that they mess it up. When this happens we have what is known as a significant learning opportunity. When we ban social media from school, we are stealing from kids an ability to learn about regulating their own activities. Personally, I’d rather have kids learn about the consequences of wasting all of their time on Facebook at school than at their first job.
This morning just after waking I was greeted by an excited 7 year old, bursting at the seams with enthusiasm. Are you ready, Daddy? she asked. Still groggy, I rubbed my eyes and asked, Ready for What? Video! was her enthusiastic reply.
Oh yeah, the night before when we were watching her hermit crab pets, I mentioned we should make a video of them and put it on her new blog. So this morning at 6:30 am, she wanted to get going on it.
Emily, you’ve only been a blogger girl for one day. Can I at least get a cup of coffee?
This is a perfect example of the power of 21st century literacy. Writing is still important, but only part of the equation. So what is the difference between the literacy of today and the literacy of the past?
As a technology guy, I am always intrigued by the gadgets & tools that technology offers. But I always try keep in mind that the technology is not the end, but only the means.
Contrary to what some may think, 21st century literacy is not about technology, it’s about relationships. It’s about conversations. It’s about connectedness. The new technologies are just enabling the connectedness, the conversations and the relationships to happen in real-time without regard to place.
In one day, Emily discovered this idea and was hooked. Admittedly, I gave her a jump-start when I mentioned it on Twitter and a number of people from around the world visited and commented on her new blog. It appears that she may even soon have an 8 yr old e-pal in Australia who is also a girl blogger, thanks to an online conversation between her mother and I. She is also invited to work online with an elementary math class in Virginia.
The seeds for all of this were planted last year during the Summer Olympics. Both of my kids were amazed to learn that it is nighttime in China when it is daytime here. A few days ago, Emily asked me again about time zones, and about how in some places it is winter and other places it is summer. I thought the best answer might be to correspond with someone in Australia, where it is both opposite time of day and opposite season.
So I put out a tweet on Twitter about my daughter’s interest in learning more, and within a few minutes I had a reply from a teacher in Victoria, Australia with an 8 year old daughter who has a blog. After chatting back and forth for little while, we thought if Emily also had a blog, the pair could easily correspond back and forth.
When I showed Emily her new blog, she took to it like a duck to water. Certainly the immediate feedback she received helped to motivate her. But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her working so hard on composing sentences and sounding out words to spell.
My wife Wendy also noticed how hard Emily was working, and asked me why all schools don’t use blogging to teach writing. Why indeed? It is an excellent question that all of the teachers who do use blogging are wondering.
There are a number of reasons why they don’t, ranging from simply not being aware of the possibilities, to a fear of the unknown. Parents and educators who didn’t grow up in a digital world are understandably uncomfortable with all of this. But as a technology professional, I can honestly say I am less comfortable with putting my daughter on a school bus each morning for her eight mile commute than I am with her sitting down at a computer and writing about her Webkinz animals on her blog.
For some reason people think there is some sort of bogeyman out there waiting to harm kids if they go online, but honestly I can only think of the Florida cheerleader MySpace incident where online activities were related to a problem in real life. I’m sure their are more, but the incidents are rare.
There are certainly a lot of things that threaten the well-being of our kids in this world. I would no more let my kids have unsupervised free access to the Internet than I would turn them loose to roam the streets of a large city alone. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take them along with me for a visit. There are plenty of cool things to see and do in a city, just as there are on the Internet. If there is any real threat to our kids today, it is the threat of being left behind as the world moves ahead without them.
Instead of banning cell phones, iPods and social networking tools, schools should be finding ways to leverage the digital communications tools the students are already using. For example, a school can invest hundreds of dollars on electronic “clickers” used to record class surveys in real time, or they can use free online services to record text messages sent by cell phones that do the same things. Schools can (and have) invested thousands to bring internet access into the classrooms, but many students bring their own wireless internet access each day on their phones and are simply told to put it away.
Projects like the Washington County kids visit to Washington DC for the inauguration gives me some hope. They were sent with a mission to not only witness history, but to report about it to the folks back home. Unfortunately for the project, the wireless access was clogged in D.C. limiting the amount of information flowing back home, but the concept was sound. I know a number of people in this area began testing the waters of Web 2.0 as a direct result of this initiative.
Of all people, I fully understand that it takes time to implement change in school systems. I would just like to encourage parents and educators to learn more about 21st century literacy skills. (A good place to start is the 2009 International Student Blogging Challenge) As we learn about powerful learning tools such as blogging, my hope is that we will start to see a whole new approach to how we do education. By the way, we finally did get the hermit crab video posted today!
For a small town Clyde, Kansas has a lot to offer. We are kicking off 2009 with a series of economic development workshops. The first is called Using Videos and the Internet in Marketing offered by your’s truly. I am writing this post, not only to share with regular TechIntersect readers, but also to use as a reference for people attending the workshop.
Now I am not a marketer by trade, but have had a little background in the subject over the years. I am more of a technology geek with an interest in business and entrepreneurship, especially now that my wife has opened a business Wendy’s Party Treats. She depends on me to get the necessary binary bits flowing.
Being geographically remote has it’s challenges, but many mail order companies actually appreciate being in the center of the USA, with only a few days shipping required to any address in the country. If we can learn to take advantage of our FTTH high speed internet, I believe the opportunities for our residents can be unlimited.
Big changes going on right now
If you aren’t already aware, there have been some big changes going on all around us. It is as if we are living in the time of Gutenberg’s printing press and the idea is just catching on. Indeed, something every bit as revolutionary is happening and the people who can recognize it and harness it stand to benefit the most.
Just as in Gutenberg’s time, the general population was widely illiterate due to a lack of inexpensive reading material, I believe in our own time most people are technologically illiterate for a similar reason. We have only recently witnessed the very first generation that has grown up digital. Not too terribly long ago, all of the amazing digital media devices that we now take for granted were either prohibitively expensive, or had not yet been invented. For example we now have:
iPods
digital cameras (still & video)
cell phones
laptop computers
Wii consoles
broadband connections
My Journey – Web 1.0
As far as the widespread availability of Internet goes, I was an early adopter. Mosaic was the first graphical Internet browser, released in 1993. By 1994, I was regularly using Netscape Navigator which was the new name later given to the Mosaic Internet browser. I was even creating my own web pages on Geocities and on the now defunct Dustdevil.com servers. There was no local connection number in those early days, so all of my internet activity was paid with long-distance fees in addition to my internet access fees.
In those days, if you wanted to publish something on the web, you needed to learn something of internet technologies like web servers, HTML, and FTP. Not a big deal to a computer nerd like me, eager to learn, but to many it was a sufficient barricade to stop people from contributing to the web’s content. However, for those interested in learning more about the basics of developing web pages, I am offering an online course on Web 1.0 technology.
However, most people are not interested in even learning the web technology basics. It is no surprise. Most people don’t know much about how their cars operate either. They just want to drive, they don’t want to be mechanics.
Web 2.0 – The Read/Write Web
In the early days of the automobile, motorists needed some mechanical aptitude to drive because cars weren’t user friendly. As cars became more reliable and user friendly, non-mechanics could operate them as well. In recent years, the same thing has happened with the world wide web. Normal, non-geek people could finally contribute thanks to the Read/Write Web. Fellow K-State Professor Mike Wesch explains it in his wildly popular video: The Machine is Us/ing Us.
After Wesch’s video had over 1 million views in just a few days within it’s release, I knew I had to meet this guy, so Wendy & I invited him out for lunch in Aggieville (Manhattan, KS). It’s a good thing we met when we did, because in the months following, Michael Wesch has become something of an international celebrity, winning many awards and having many demands upon his time. But the story of a guy with an idea explained in a simple YouTube video gone viral made a great impression on me. That experience marks the beginning of my beginning to understand Web 2.0, and probably the starting point of thinking about this kind of workshop.
My lights are beginning to come on.
Last spring, I attended SXSW. I wrote about it here, so I won’t go into great detail now. Suffice it to say, SXSW convinced me that blogging, podcasting, and other Web 2.0 technologies are not just narcissistic fads, but in fact new ways of having global conversations. Not long afterwards, I started this TechIntersect blog. (Penelope Trunk has written about why she thinks blogging is essential for a good career.)
Some Books to Read
Since SXSW I started reading about things Web 2.0 and I have learned some fascinating things. Here are a few books to consider:
We are entering into a world where people are no longer content to be passive consumers of media. They want to participate in a conversation, including conversing with the companies with whom they do business.
Ever feel frustrated by the fact that you were a nameless face when dealing with a large organization? Smart companies counter this frustration with professional corporate bloggers.
I certainly do not have all of the answers about marketing your business with the Internet. However, I can tell you that traditional marketing strategies, e.g. the Billy May’s shouted message, is losing favor with people.
Sure, Billy is a millionaire and people buy his stuff, but that doesn’t make his methods right. E-mail spamming makes a lot of people angry too, but enough people respond to it, and the cost of the method is so low, it is worth doing. Read Seth Godin’s suggestions on writing personal e-mails.
The Billy Mays advertising method is still working, but I believe his days are numbered. One reason for this belief is because young people don’t watch television as much as their parents did. In eighty years of television history, only recently has television watching declined in popularity, thanks to the Internet.
Check out what Kathy wrote about teachers and marketers to learn more. (This philosophy is the same as former GE CEO Jack Welch who wrote in “Winning” that real leaders reach a point where they are more concerned about helping their people succeed than in helping themselves succeed.)
The book is a compilation of essays about the “future” and how new media impacts the human experience. One of the best was by Buckminister Fuller, whom I first learned about in a Chad Davies physical science class as an undergraduate. Fuller writes:
Born utterly helpless, and gaining independent competence only slowly, youth’s reflexes are preconditioned to expect some older authority to be responsible for its welfare. Youth assumes that the political authority is a public parent. When dissatisfied, youth protests to the authorities assuming the authorities can, if they wish, make everything satisfactory. Often, the “authority” lacks such capability….
It’s a question of problem ownership
Hmm, an insight I had not before considered, but almost certainly true. Thirty-five years hence, nothing has changed with these youthful expectations. I have been watching with great interest the US presidential election of Barack Obama. People are excited and incredibly optimistic about everything he is going to fix. I predict a certain amount of disillusionment because some problems simply are not as solvable by political authority as they are by the person(s) closest to the problem.
In It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy author Michael Abrashoff writes about his experience as a destroyer skipper who went against the traditional Navy hierarchical approach to decision making by empowering the sailors closest to a problem to solve that problem. It is an ingenious approach that makes a lot of sense but is a little scary to the leader who feels like they might be giving up control.
But as Jim Fay explains with his Love & Logic philosophy, control is at best an illusion. Fay says that control is a bit like love in that you only get it when you give some of it away. The notion of letting the owner of a problem solve the problem is a classic Love & Logic approach to teaching responsibility, yet how many times do we see authority figures using top-down management techniques that do not empower the owner of the problem to solve it for fear of “losing control”?
Hierarchies vs Flat Organizations
Much has been written recently about a “flattening” that is happening thanks in no small part to the popularity of Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat:A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century“. Friedman discusses how technology is enabling participation in the global economy of anyone, anywhere at anytime.
Hierarchies tend to remove the leaders further from the people doing the work and solving the problems, leading to bureaucratic inefficiencies. With all of the improvements in communications technologies, I find it amazing that still today the number one problem most organizations face is a lackof communication.
One of the best books I have read about combating the tendency of buck passing and general lack of personal responsibility is “QBQ The Question Behind the Question” by John Miller. If it is an issue where you work and live, I highly recommend this read!
This clip is a good example of multi-track audio mixing. I wouldn’t have thought to screen capture the editing environment as it plays; pretty clever!
My digital media students will be doing this sort of editing with the free program Audacity. We have a new digital media degree, and this semester will be the first formal introduction to non-linear editing.
” David Meerman Scott writes that it is simply a matter of trust.
