On podacsting...

While this is not new technology, it's one I've never really gotten into but am rethinking doing so. Reason being is that I have an almost three hour, round-trip commute everyday between home, my kids' schools, work and back and could be using that time with some quality listening.

Don't get me wrong, I love my music, but the only reason I don't listen to more audio-books is because they're expensive. Good podcasts are free. I've got a couple different MP3 devices I can load up with some of these and plug in for that tedious drive. Sure may help with the stop and go traffic I hit every day on Hwy35.

Thing is, I can only do podcasts or audio-books when I'm driving, any other time, I can't sit still long enough to enjoy them. Go figure.

Inspiration and WHY do we go to college?

Last week's assignment is a little late but I still wanted to post it after viewing the videos. We had to wathc three videos talking about creativity and education. In this video:



...Sir Ken Robinson brings up a point that the education system around the world has been modeled after the university system that was re-designed because of the industrial revolution for the sole purpose of getting a job in industry. Mathematics taking the top slot in education while arts take the bottom.

I remember making a joke while growing up that all I wanted to do was draw pictures on the sides of cereal boxes. I knew early on that I wanted to be an illustrator, a cartoonist and a graphic designer. Now, I design web pages and only do it because it pays the bills. I hate it. I'm not a developer but fill the role because I was led to believe that drawing pictures was no way to make a living.

Exact same thing happened to my music. I was told that playing guitar, or bass was only good for a hobby. People were not allowed to make a profession out of it, though those that did, fill the record and cd libraries of everyone who told me I can't do it.

I'm not the type of person that can sit in an office all day and thrive in ANY sense of the word. I feel creativity atrophying and dying. If I lose my ability to create, I lose who I am. Period, end of story. For that reason, I don't worry about my oldest kid graduating high school with a C average in math or history, as long as she follows her dream of being able to cook. She wants to go to culinary school. THAT is her creativity. Who am I to say otherwise? Shame on anyone else who does, or anyone else who HAS...

...to anyone else before.

Z

Mind mapping...

Assignment for this week was to create a mindmap for a project. I chose the development of my company's web portal and found this tool a great method for creative thinking in instructional design. The mindmap is easily portable and can be created anywhere, piece of paper, dry erase marker board etc. I can be edited by multiple participants and is an easy way to distinguish categories when using multiple colors (I need to find a digital tool for creating this on the fly like in MS OneNote)

Other great advantages to this tool are that it's a fast way to generate ideas, it's easy to adapt the branches to a hierarchy or architecture if needed and the multiple branches can connect to other maps for larger projects with each branch the responsibility of different teams.

Here's my rough map:

Digital version:

Z

Designing for learning...

I enjoyed the case study from this past week about the group of students that got together, complained that their instructor was giving them too many writing assignments that they thought had no bearing on that class since the all completed English 101 two years prior.

 It seems to me that a few of the students in my class, empathize with the students, and understandably so, I however, tend to lean more towards the teacher's perspective. If your writing is bad, it needs to be fixed. If you're going into a field that is heavily dependent on your writing... you need more practice.

I spent four years at different art schools in my effort to become an illustrator and graphic designer, the one constant throughout every school, every level was the need for life drawing. Just because I took two years of it as a freshman and sophomore in college, does not automatically make me a character designer or an animator. Drawing figures, much like writing, it a skill that atrophies through lack of use.

While I has probably one of the most hectic schedules I've ever had, I still make every effort to get all my assignments in on time, no matter how many a week there are. Do I make them all the time? No, but that doesn't give me reason to criticize the instructors syllabus.