How close is my school to 1:1 computing?

Hmmm...this is a good question. As it is not MY school, I may have to defer on this one for a bit and ask Ms. Buxton, the teacher I'm working with, about this question. I'll be back!

Cool tools!

Got an idea what we're going to be doing!

Yep. Ms. Buxton is going to be teaching a lesson on Fahrenheit 451 (she's a Language Arts teacher), so we will be conducting a WebQuest/presentation lesson on censorship issues. I worry about the lesson not being too creative, but we are just at the beginning stages of planning right now. I'd like to use the Smartboard, mainly because I've never used one before! I don't know what technologies are going to be available to me at the school, but I get the feeling that they are pretty up to speed on stuff. We shall see. I have to work within the constraints that Ms. Buxton puts on the project, but I hope to allow the students to be creative and come up with something on their own, whether it be a video or poster or what have you based on what they research with censorship. We have to tie it all back to Fahrenheit 451 ultimately, which I don't think should be too much of a problem.

LoTI, My Project, and Me

These LoTI standards seem pretty hard to meet, to be honest. I'm not sure that I completely understand them. They are fairly complex and don't seem that toned down for laypeople. Maybe they just hit me on a bad day! Anyway, I am very concerned about my project going up high on the LoTI scale. I'd love to reach a four or a five, but it seems like it might be hard to integrate that because I'm going to be teaching this in a classroom that's not my own. I will be working in my friend Dana Buxton's classroom at Morgan County High School, and there is a Smartboard in her room as well as a number of computers. I haven't seen the technology yet, but I am kind of at the whim of her classroom and her methods of teaching. I have a feeling that I might have to tone down my level of technology integration because it's not my classroom, but I'm wondering if that's just me being gunshy!

We haven't really discussed the topic yet, so it's going to be hard to judge LoTI, but I know that I talk a pretty good game about creativity and stuff, but, in my limited teaching experience, I've mainly supplanted traditional methods of instruction with technology, rather than using technology for more interesting pedagogy. It's a problem that all educators struggle with, I imagine, and though I consider myself pretty creative, it's hard for me to break out of the rut of my previous educational experience. One thing that messes me up is that I like teacher-centered education. I never really had a problem with lecture, chalk, and talk, even though I know it does a disservice to tons of other students. I guess to achieve a higher LoTI level, I have to really push myself and think about the project in terms of how technology can serve it. Is technology really helping?

EDIT 7500

So, this blog used to just be for EDIT 6190, but I'm just expanding it into my professional blog, period, starting with blog posts about the class I am taking right now, EDIT 7500. Look for more soon!

Desk crits received

From: Amy Wright
Date: April 17

Lucas, I thought your project was a cool way to showcase your musical talents. It was really neat to hear all the different instruments you can play and to hear you sing. It would be helpful to include some directions and an introduction to the music house on your homepage. I know that was one of the things you were going to add toward the end after all the other stuff was done. It would be great to have the music sheets and the notes playing as the music played but I know that is a lot of programming. I am excited to see the rest of the instruments and how everything will look at showcase.

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From: Sunny Lim
Date: April 12

Hi! Lucas
First of all, I have to say that your project idea is awesome! Making your own mix song is really fun and interactive activity for users. I am also impressed with your graphic design. It is very cute and clean. I like the way that it changes its colors when it goes on stage as well. If you have different changing colors for each instrument, then it would be more distinguishable.

I only saw the basic element of your project, so I do not have whole lot to suggest changes for your project. Only thing that I would suggest, it will be fun to have some kind of features that allow users to change the beat or tone of the each instrument. But, I know that it is not a simple thing to make happen.

Anyway, I am looking forward to seeing your final project on Showcase!

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From: Erin Noh
Date: March 5

Hi Lucas,

I really liked your studio project idea from the class discussion. The Flash project sounds refreshing and interesting. Your idea is full of enthusiasm, and although I have not seen your project design, I am sure it will demonstrate your love for music and technology very well.

The only suggestion I would like to make is you might want to narrow it down to one or two ideas and focus on those for this project. If you haven’t visited the New York Philharmonic Kidzone website, please take a look. It is a fun site and they offer a huge selection of helpful resources for music. This website has composer’s gallery, instrument storage room, composition workshop, musician’s lounge, game room, and many more. http://www.nyphilkids.org/main.phtml

Good luck! I can’t wait to see how your project turns out.

Showcase time.

Here is a link to my project.

It started as "The Musical House" (which is still a great idea that I hope to use one day) and now it is called "Let's Mix A Big Gray Song", which definitely doesn't roll off the tongue but did not do permanent damage to my sanity like the Musical House would have. It's an ambitious project that I hope to resurrect someday.

Ultimately, I think that my project is something of a semi-success. It works if you let it load all of the way and hit refresh, which isn't exactly very elegant. It also has problems with looping. Well, it has ONE problem with looping, namely that it doesn't loop at the end of the song. I have got to figure this aspect of the project out, but I really don't have time. Certainly not before the showcase.

Things I do like? Well, I like the graphic design I did. I used Adobe Illustrator's live trace function to mutate various clipart I found into more artsy and contrasted black and white images. I remember Dr. Branch saying a long time ago that it was recommended to never go above four colors on any website, and I took that to heart because it worked with the clean design ideas I had.

Most of all, I think my project is fun to play with, and I hope people enjoy using it!

The home stretch!

Click here for my project.

I haven't made much in the way of programming changes on the project this week because I have been trying out a new way to get the music to work. Per the suggestions of Daisyane Barreto, I have been trying to move the music to timelines rather than loading them into each symbol. I think this is probably the way the music should work. It keeps stuttering in the music from getting all of the tracks off-track. I hope it works because right now, this thing is really chugging along.

In other news, I have to build the graphical elements for the "stage" and searching for all kinds of metaphors, including an actual stage of sorts, but I'm thinking about keeping it very simple. I would love it, honestly, if I could make the site without any directions at all, or maybe have it say, simply "drag." That would be fantastic, and it would certainly adhere to the tenets of John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity (maybe a tad too much!), of which I am a big fan. I won't go into all of them here, but the first two are Reduce and Organize, which is something I need to do in all aspects of my life. Basically, Maeda proposes a continuum between these two concepts:

How simple can you make it? <---> How complex does it have to be?

I don't think my project has to be very complex to be honest. I chose drag and drop functionality because it was very simple and it would make the user feel that interacting with my Flash project was more tangible and satisfying. Dragging something around is a lot better than clicking on it, in my opinion, in terms of immersion, but that could be personal preference. Regardless, I need to make it obvious to the user that they are supposed to drag the object to a certain while keeping my "stage" free of verbal clutter. I really want it to be visually striking.

Desk Crits: Sunny Lim and Suhwa Lee

Project Name: Crisis Management Communications Plan
Creator: Sunny Lim

Looking over your project, I have noticed that the design has changed quite a bit since the last time I looked at it (only a week ago!). It's good to see that you are using the ACA-approved colors and stuff (I know them well). The e-handbook uses a nice bit of ActionScipting, that great book-turning effect. I've seen that one around recently...is it free somewhere? Anyway, that looks really great, but I wonder if maybe the red of the book is a little too dark as a background, but certainly everything seems legible. Also, a concern might be its ability to be updated. I know, from working with the ACA in the past, that they are usually concerned about being able to update material and unless they have access to the raw flash files they can't do that. My suggestion (and you probably don't have time for this) is to make an alternate, "bare bones" no Flash site to complement this one that can be linked from the beginning.

I'm looking at the representive case section and it looks good, though there is a blank box in the upper left that I don't understand. Perhaps a video is going to go there, but it pushes everything down so I have to scroll up and down a bit. It would be great if it all fit on one screen, but, like I said, I don't know what your plans are for the project. At the bottom it says, "Additional information: find out more case" and I think it might need to say "more cases", right? Also, the steps in assembling a crisis team don't seem to be working, but maybe that's because you haven't finished them yet! There should be a space after the comma after the word "sober," by the way; I know that's nitpicking.

I assume you are still working on the simulation because I couldn't get it to work. Also, the resources link was not working, but that might be coming as well.

I hope this helps you, and if you update it over the weekend, let me know!

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Project Name: Online Survey
Creator: Suhwa Lee

Wow. The project looks really fantastic. I think your design sensibilities are good. Everything is very clean and easy to read. On the first page, it should probably say "More DetailS about Online SurveyING or SurveyS" (I capitalized the missing letters there for you). That's just a grammar thing.

The use of voice is great. I think that maybe you could put a note under the audio controller that maybe even says something as simple as "audio," just to let the user know that that's what it controls. Right now, the play button seems to suggest to me that it controls the graphic right above it.

Moving ahead, I think that the quizzes are amazing. More nitpicking: I noticed that the "mail" option in the first survey looks like the graphic has been shrunken but not scaled. It's a little squished-looking. The same goes with the "online" option next to it. It seems strange next to the other two. Also, in Lesson 3, one of the subheadings should say "GuidelineS for designing effective questionnaires." The "q" in questionnaires probably shouldn't be capitalized either. In that section there is a lot of text and it seems different than the rest of the project, which is not so text heavy. Is there any way to break it up, or add audio to it. I'm probably adding to your workload!

Other than that, I find it hard to find fault with the project. Great work!

So, it's sorta working?

I think this is my "think upper duck" moment. I've gotten the ActionScripting pretty much working, but the sounds are clipping and occasionally stuttering, meaning that the tracks get off from each other and create the dreaded cacophony that I keep harping on. I wonder if the clipping is caused by the volume being set at too loud a level. Really, the whole thing is just chugging away right now, with framerate dips and skips galore. Because the audio is streaming (10 1MB apiece MP3s working in concert!) it seems to tax Flash's capabilities. I might have to move the audio elements to timelines or something, but I'm not really sure what to do here, to be honest. The response to the project at the showcase was encouraging, but I'm still not sure the thing functions well enough to be called a success.

Also, my drag-and-drop elements overlap each other right now and that causes Flash to get confused. When one of the elements sits on the other one it activates it, which is frustrating. I want to create boundaries or borders for the draggable elements so they don't get the opportunity to overlap, but I can't find the code anywhere. I like the interactivity of drag-and-drop versus just turning something on and off with switches. It feels more visceral this way; the motions increase interactivity and make the user think they are actually doing something.

I've spent so much time working on ActionScripting that I'm not sure if I can start over again to get this thing working. What I will probably do is create a dummy project to fool around with while keeping my current progress intact. I still have quite a bit of graphic design ahead of me, too. That aspect of the project is taking longer than I thought. I'm trying to adhere to two or three colors only, but some of the comments at the dress rehearsal seemed to suggest that my project appeared drab, so maybe I should inject some new colors here and there.

The project as it stands

Here it is!

And, yes, it's not working very well right now.

I hope this works...

The recording session went very well, though I must say that I came up with a much different song than I expected. I thought I was going to create an ornate, orchestral tune that would have lots of different elements with which to interact. Instead I wrote a three chord rocker that's not exactly muscular, but not exactly a musical pushover. The instruments used are as follows:

Bass drum
Snare drum
Ride Cymbal
Maracas
Tambourine
Piano
Synthesizer
Treated Piano
Bass
Background vocals
Lead vocals

That's still plenty of instrumentation to use and more than enough for me to wrangle for the scope of this project. I'm breaking down each recorded track into a separate mp3 and loading those into Flash. And this is where it gets tricky. Everything has to line up perfectly, and if there is any delay from track to track then the whole thing will descend into cacophony, which is a word that keeps coming up in the journal entries, much to my chagrin. I envision (and hear) the entire thing in my head, but I'm really worried about getting it to work.

I have pretty much got the actionscripting finished insofar as I have made the stage where the graphical instrument representations will be animated and "create" sound once placed. I have gotten the animations to work. One thing I would love to do that eludes my grasp is make it so that each dragged element bumps up against the other instead of laying on top of each other. There has to be an easy bit of actionscripting out there to get around this.

Of course, none of this matters, as The Arcade Fire beat me to the punch. There budget is probably much greater than mine.

Starting to get worried...

I think this is the point where the panic sets in. My project is a fine concept thus far, but it has failed to move from the concept stage to anything resembling something some human being would want to use. I've scrapped two graphical concepts, one visual metaphor, and a few thousand lines of actionscripting to end up where I am right now, which is nowhere. Yeah!

In one bit of good news I am finally scheduling a recording session this weekend to get the music done. I am using my friend Ian Darken, who

Desk Crit: Lenrose Fears

Project Name: Dan's Gym website
Creator: Lenrose Fears

The project is looking great so far. In fact, you are much farther along than almost any project I've seen thus far. I really think you should work to contain all of the information in a stable container. On every page, there should be the same navigation bar and graphics. This allows for much easier navigation and it certainly looks more
professional. It should be easy to accomplish...you just use the "save as" function on the index page and rename the page as something else and then add the content to the template set forth on the index page. It's hard to explain here, but I think I showed you how to do it.

Also, I like the graphics in the health tips section. Are you getting external content for each one of these health tips? Since you are so close to being done, you might want to create some more interactivity in some of these, perhaps a Hot Potatoes quiz or something like that.

I might shrink the graphic on the left side to give the content more room. The guy on the left flexing his muscles has a little bit of digital artifacting going on, suggesting that he was maybe smaller and has been upscaled. Shrinking should take care of that.

Desk Crit: Fred Zimmerman

Project Name: Alternative Energy
Creator: Fred Zimmerman

It's a good start. I understand that the project is early.

Right now, the flags are activated by rollover. The text that pops up is huge and it stays there in a separate window afterwards. It would be great if it showed a small preview text that could then be clicked to bring up more information. The pages shouldn't overwhelm the map.

There's an awful lot of content, so make sure your scope is fairly narrow. Take care of the bulk of the project and then start to expand to the accoutrements! I like the animation of the graph, and a few more of those would be nice, but don't get too bogged down on them without finishing the map and the basic page.

It's a little hard to read the United States tag. You could consider changing the colors or adding a border around the text. Perhaps you could use a box with alpha transparency underneath to set that area apart. It's important to keep colors consistent in web applications, so that the user knows what each element does every time.

It needs some sort of introductory or explanatory page or text, of course, but it is early, like we've discussed. I like the Flash movie at the beginning.

Oops.

So this post should have happened the week before Spring Break, yet somehow it slipped my mind, even though I know what I was going to say. Mea culpa, perhaps? Let's had back into the Wayback Machine...

The Musical House metaphor seems to be something of a fools errand at this point. It's an idea I would like to explore in the future, but, for now, I need to keep things simple. What I'm afraid of is how much time in general my project will take, as the recording of the music and generation of the art has been a major portion of my activities thus far. I'm rather ashamed that I have nothing to show for my project yet other than a bunch of failed actionscripting.

I am going to probably do more of a musical themed project wherein people turn the instruments on and off by dragging them onto a "stage," so to speak. That's the plan anyway.

My roommate (aka my artist) is very, very busy right now, so I've decided that I might do something with photographers or clipart. To be honest, the latter is a last ditch effort. I mean this as no offense, but I see too many educational projects that make use of really bad clipart, the same stuff that Microsoft has been peddling in PowerPoint and other Office products for a while. I'd like for my project to have original content if at all possible, but I know that's a difficult proposition.

The recording of the music is actually going pretty well. I hope to have something finished up in the next few weeks. I think it's gonna be pretty simple two chord stuff with a lot of percussion, which is not unexpected given the fact that I'm a drummer.

At an impasse...

I've got something up and running that seems to be a very, very early prototype of the project. Right now, I'm just trying to get my Actionscripting up to fire code, so that I can program the darned thing how I want to. I can create the "stage", so to speak, wherein the items will be dragged and then animated. I can get them to do stuff once I drag them to the stage. All of this is good.

Here are my struggles:

I have to get someone to help me with the art. I am not an artist, nor do I claim to be. In my 6210 project, I was tagged as the graphic design person because I have a working knowledge of fonts and what not to do in regards to design, but that does not make me a practitioner of graphic design. I feel like my entire Studio experience has been pulling the wool over people's eyes, doing just doing enough to get by! That's an exaggeration, of course, and I'm probably being a tad self-deprecating, but sometimes I do feel that way. My roommate Kay is an artist, and I may get her involved. She seems willing to help, so that might work out okay.

I'm trying to decide whether to have the different elements--the couch, the blender, etc.--all dragged to a stage and animated immediately or dragged to the stage and the activated with the click of a button. I prefer the former, but the latter may be easier. Here's why: getting the music attached to each animation to sync up is going to be a real problem. Things could get really cacophonous if each sound file triggers separately. If all of the animations trigger at one time, then the sound will be fine, but I'll lose some interactivity. I like the idea of dragging and dropping musical elements to the stage in real-time to see how they work together. If there was a button, it wouldn't be as interesting to me. However, if I could find some way to export the created song to an MP3? Well, THAT would be quite interesting. Of course, that seems way beyond my powers. Like, way, way, way, WAY beyond...

Still trying to figure it all out.

My concept is fairly simple, but it seems complex to execute. Isn't that always the way? I want to create something called "The Musical House" in which the user drags and drops different elements to a "stage" (in this case, the visual metaphor would be one of a house, almost like a dollhouse), wherein these elements--say, a couch or a blender or some other element that would go in a house--would make noises that would eventually create music. Maybe a bed would make a squeaky sound or a microwave would ding or a spring in a couch might go boing. A TV could make static perhaps. The user could "dress" the house however they saw fit.

As one can plainly see, there is not a lot of educational content to this product. I can't figure out a way to get it to be educational, and I'm not sure it needs it. It just seems like something that would be fun to use. As I start programming it (and I'm currently boning up on my ActionScripting and testing some things out), I'm sure it might change and I might see a way to insert an educational component. Gizmos that are haphazardly instructional have always interested me. So much educational stuff out there is missing fun. Perhaps I could have each element represent a different note on the scale and all of it could be represented on a staff outside of the house. That might be pretty interesting, actually. I should type in this journal more often!

The beginning...

I've been toying with a lot of different ideas for my project, and I'm really having a hard time deciding, though it's probably about time that I just get going and start building the thing. I know that I want it to involve Flash because that's the software application I really want to learn the most. I'd also like the project to involve music in some form or fashion because that's just something that interests me. In particular, I'm interested in the concept of helping users create music without having to know how to play music. Learning to play music is like learning another language, and that can be a daunting task to a lot of potential music performers. If you get students/kids/whomever excited about the very notion that creating music or art is fulfilling then you can lead them into the direction of formally creating music.

The reason I took EDIT 6190 again, however, was partially to "let her rip," so to speak and do something creative and maybe a little lacking in a specific purpose. I'm attracted to projects that are educational by accident or as a by-product, the kind of instruction where the learners remark afterwards, "I just thought we were having fun!" That's a lofty goal, and plenty of software developers with more resources and experience than I do have failed at creating that kind of instructional material. This is the kind of thing I hope to do one day.

We'll see where this is headed...right now I have the idea of a dollhouse that can be populated with different musical objects like squeaky chairs, noisy blenders, and singing portraits. I see it in my head, but I have no idea how to get it to work on the screen.

Testing 1,2,3!

Hi. I am Lucas Jensen, and this is my new blog. I will be using this blog as my journal for the course EDIT 6190 at the University of Georgia.

This is my second time through the Studio, so I thought I might try something different for my journal entries this time around. I hope it works out okay. I'm pretty familiar with Blogger and the ins and outs of it. I tried to set up a Wordpress blog, actually, but apparently my email address is already in use for another blog, which I honestly can't remember creating (and can't remember the username or password either!). Oh, well. This shall have to do. Here is a picture of me right now:

I need to shave.