Justa Junkie » Education

365 Sketches

Brian Paris — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:47:20 +0000

Joe Janes, a teacher at Second City, is taking up a big challenge today. He has committed to writing a sketch a day, everyday for a year. He is planning on posting his drafts every night along with commentary about the process. I am looking forward to reading every day. Because he is committed to doing this as a teaching exercise also, I think that there will be a lot gained by everyone reading as well as what he himself learns. I only had him as a substitute once in my writing class, but have enjoyed reading his blog ever since. So get a fast start on what may become the best learning resource for sketch writing, check out his blog at Bite and Smile.

New Way of Learning

Brian Paris — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:56:22 +0000

I never was a big fan of college. It was hard to get excited about learning information that just didn’t have any relevance to my life. I was always learning new things, but not necessarily what they wanted to teach in class. The large classes were the hardest for me. A professor spouting information that I could easily find elsewhere just didn’t do it for me.

This professor, Dr. Michael Wesch, is one that gets it. He is doing amazing things using new technology. Prof. Wesch teaches by getting every student involved in the process. He uses wikis, netvibes, twitter, RSS and other web tech in new ways. Check out the first part of this YouTube video and your will walk away questioning everything that you assumed about a college education.

Seems like other people like what he is doing, too. He just recently was awarded the US Professor of the Year.

Additional Information: Check out Prof. Wesch’s wikipedia page, and also a lot of information on his Digital Ethnography site.

Sound Slides

Brian Paris — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 09:03:08 +0000

I have been getting ready for the new semester here at school. One of the projects that the students will be working on is a photo slideshow with audio. I needed to find the best software for the student to complete the project. I had a few requirements that I would like to have in any program. First, these are Journalism students, so I don’t want anything that involves code writing. It is about storytelling, not computer technology. Second, I would like it to output a flash slideshow. Flash is a more efficient way than video of showing photos. (Although, I did look at alternatives that produced video files) I also needed to be able to edit to an audio track. Moving picture effect was also something that I was looking for. There were a couple of other things that I was looking for, but was not able to find in my search.

So after looking around at a lot of different options, I found that the best choice was Sound Slides. This was a program that was created for journalist, by a journalist. It is a very simple user interface, but it allows for high quality results. You import jpegs to create photo slideshows and audio if you want to create audio slideshows. If you are creating a non-audio slideshow you can choose the order of the photos, the transition type, and time, and change the color of the player to match your website. You can also edit captions that can be desplayed with each photo. With the Plus edition you are able to edit the pictures to your imported audio file.

There were a couple of features that I would have liked to have in the program. For one, basic audio editing would be a great time saver. Right now you have to edit in another program and import the audio file into Sound Slides. The ability to write text slides would also be nice. They have a caption feature and you can key people but there isn’t a place where you can lay out text anywhere on the screen. The best solution is to create a slide in Photoshop with any text that you want. Let me know in the comments if you know of any solution out there that has all of these features.

I have found quite a few newspapers using the same software on their online sites (or at least I think it is). Check out some great audio slideshows at the Chicago Tribune site, the Lexington Herald Leader Photographers site, or search through the Sound Slides showcase forum.

Additional Information: Eamon Hickey has a good writeup of the application on Rob Galbraith’s Digital Photography insights website. Berkley’s Knight Digital media center also has a good tutorial on using the program.

You can purchase the software, (or download a trial version), find the manuals, and forums at the Sound Slides site.