My intention was to drop that self-audit on Saturday and then catch comments on Monday ’cause the blogsphere is supposed to hibernate over the weekend. Then I filmed an Indian wedding all of Saturday (crazy-fun. one of the coolest weddings I’ve shot.) came home at 23h00 and crashed, totally missing all the commentary you guys threw back and forth.
Including, but not limited to:
This was the first year I gave course evaluations. I probably chose this year because it was a pretty good one and I figured I’d receive mostly positive marks. Lame, right, but not as bad as it sounds.
Fact is, I wobbled out of my first two years, hitting my door’s crash-bar shoulder-first, staggering out into the sun with a long list of Things Not To Mess Up Next Year underarm.
I had the same wobbly feeling this last spring but a much shorter list. I needed student contributions so I adapted a college course survey for high school math and passed it out. I had a student collect the completed surveys and put them in an envelope. I told my students they should keep their anonymity and that I wouldn’t check ’em, anyway, until after grades froze. And I didn’t.
Here’s the survey in pdf.
Every question ran along the Likert scale from Strongly Disagree (1) to Strongly Agree (5). Here are the results, a little commentary, and full disclosure.
Okay, taking a break from my summer thing for a sec. I’ve been cutting together a video of Monday’s bbq picnic. Quad core G4. Gazillion-inch display. Very fast. Very fun.
In these situations, a lot of novice editors start by fastidiously cutting to the beat. They’ll line up a few clips haphazardly and then painstakingly trim lengths so that the clips change right as the bass guitar kicks in or the cymbal crashes or whatever.
That’s what this Final Cut Pro application does to you. Simply because you can manipulate audio and video, you tend to.
Thing is: my best work here could stand without music. My first priority is to cut a story together. I distort reality by taking two different angles on two different dives (for example) and cutting them together so it looks like I had two cameras watching one. I hold some shots longer than their surroundings to build anticipation. I can slow action down by cutting late; speed it up by cutting quickly.
The point is: only once the story is any good do I start adding these little musical flourishes.รย But to novice editors, those little flourishes are the prize. You’ll see them tapping the “m” key, sweating raindrops beneath pro-level headphones, marking the beats perfectly, en route to a perfectly lifeless video.
Here’s hoping the connection between video editing and presentation design is linear enough that I can skip it. Gotta crank out four more videos before tomorrow night.
[Big ups to Sara from the comments for listing Cartesian Cartoons, which is exactly what I’m looking for, right down to the creepy troll dominating the front cover.]
Thanks a mil, on both counts.
Edward Tufte hates PowerPoint. Off a recommendation from the comments (see? I listen to you people.) I ordered up Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
Defined bluntly, if you were to pull out any stock listing from a newspaper grifted from your neighbor’s lawn, you’d find hundreds of listings in a space that’s no larger than โ well โ that’s no larger than a newspaper, I guess. Lotsa numbers in a small space is high resolution
PowerPoint permits only a few numbers even though you’re projecting it onto the jumbotron of Presentation Room 1. Unacceptably low resolution
The pamphlet also validates the School 2.0 refrain that PowerPoint is, from core to skin, an egocentric tool, one which helps presenters subjugate their audiences, forcing hapless conference-goers into chairs, tying them down with nylon cord, and then telling them things.