digital age – Doug Connery e-portfolio

DVD Authoring

In the summer of 2011, my son Linden and I went on a 14-day wilderness backpack in the Canadian Rockies. I was the photographer and took many pictures. Once we got home and down loaded the pictures to a computer, I organized them and deleted the not so great pictures. In the end there are about 560 pictures or about 40/day. From there the next question was what do we do next other than use them as a slide show screen saver. I did use one of the pictures on the mast head of my ETEC 565 e-portfolio website seen above.

Over the fall I took MET course ETEC 540: Text Technologies. We had some self-directed time to play around with some technologies. I took the opportunity here to create a video of the pictures of our trip. I used Windows Movie Maker and did two versions with the best pictures, full length, 16 minutes and a 4 minute trailer. I posted the trailer on U-Tube and gave the U-Tube link in my course discussion posting so all could see. The link is here: Ball to Boine to Burstall trailer. I created the full length version so we could show friends. The trailer is about 400 Mb and the full length version is about 1.6 Gb.

At the end of each year on December 31 or January 1, I always do DVD backups of files on my computer. So I did this with several DVD’s as I had taken lots of pictures throughout the year. I make two copies and send the second copy’s to my son’s house for redundancy.

For this exercise I decided to create an additional backup CD just of the two video’s (trailer and full version) and the 560 images. In total there is about 3.4 Gb of data, plenty of room on a 4.7 Gb DVD. As I had just completed doing my yearly back-ups four weeks ago, the process was fresh in my mind. However when I only burn DVD’s once /year it does take a while to figure out where the blank DVD’s are, which of the two DVD players on my PC to use, which software to use (default windows or specialty) and how to use the software. So this exercise with everything fresh in my mind, only took about 10 minutes to do: five minutes to find the DVD, find the files, the software and hit ‘burn” and five minutes to create the DVD. As I don’t have a second computer or DVD player in the house, I made sure it worked on the PC’s second DVD player. Since I was familiar with the process I found the process was not labour intensive, not challenging and there were no surprises.

As an addition to this exercise we should ask ourselves, are DVD’s still relevant in this day and age where we can post our videos and images on the cloud, for example through U-Tube and Flicker. This question came to me when I brought the newly minted full length version of the video over to my son’s house in November on a flash drive so he could have a copy. His comment was why didn’t you just post it on U-Tube like you did the trailer, this eliminates the need for flash drives and DVD’s. I really did not have an answer to his question that fit into his digital age context. For me however, I am happy with a DVD backup (several now) of my video Masterpiece and all of the pictures.

Faculty Observations – Digital-age teaching professionals

As I am an administrator at a post secondary institute, my posting will be based on general observations of faculty in the programs offered in my department: a School of Business. Many of the faculty are mid to late career Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. As the Baby Boomers retire, new faculty which are Gen X/Y are being hired. These new faculty are gradually shifting the acceptance of digital age learning into a positive light.

Even through I work for a Polytechnic where transforming lives through technology is a core value, many older faculty and surprisingly some new hires, are not embracing technology as much as they could or are encouraged to. My institute is also skills based and it is advised by industry input, thus the need for technology is focused more on competency with industry standard productivity tools rather then social media or alternative presentation tools such as Prezi.

So when we encourage faculty to design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments, many push back and question why they need to change. For example last week I was an observer in a facilitated session with one of our programs where faculty were revising their program teaching philosophy. After developing a philosophy with key works such as technology, interactive and constantly changing, several were surprized to learn that they were going to revise their courses to be close to fully online. The push back was fairly intense as they envisioned re-developing thier courses in a face to face format, even though their courses are currently blended using a learning management system (D2L) and students all have laptops. I suspect these instructors are not using the courses in the LMS and I am not sure what they are telling their students to do with the laptops in class.

For me in ETEC 565, I see an opportunity to learn more about digital age learning so I can help move faculty along the spectrum from entirely face to face towards richly blended and fully on-line. Some of the topics that I would like to focus on are: LMS and other web based approaches, assessment tools, social media and collaborative writing and intellectual property rights/copyright.

I am also experimenting with technology and I am creating this post on the tablet that I received for Christmas. It is a bit clumsy compared to my usual keyboard and desktop computer but appears to be working.