I’ve neglected my blog a bit this summer as my attention has began to really zero in on our final research paper. But I wanted to pen a quick update about a project in Design. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve had a rewarding experience in the Design strand working on SliceThatPi.com with Simon and Mars. One of our final project has been to create some videos promoting the product, the design process, and how it works. I focused on the design process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=40&v=Yxw_Uu1R_gs
My main takeaway from this project was how quickly it came together. I look back now on the video we created during Cadre Camp and the Learning Theory Trailer and remember it taking a painstakingly long time to complete. This guy zipped together fairly quickly and I think that happened for a few reasons:
- The more you use the technology, the easier it gets. So I’ve gotten pretty well acquainted by now to the voice over technique I’ve been using for videos. And I was able to crank this one out with Garageband and a Blue Snowball microphone. This was not the quickest process early on in MALT nor the best quality. But the audio for this video really came out well. I highly recommend the Snowball as a tool for doing these.
- Summative projects already have the ingredients. Its a matter of putting them together. The fact is is that this story was already written. I was able to quickly comb through blog posts that either myself or Simon had written about our experience, look through an assortment of shared Google doc files, and the completed website and, bam, there’s a story. This is why I advocate so heavy for reflection. It makes the end result much more effective when you can look back at your thoughts and pull together what had actually taken place.
- It was fun. Here’s the funny thing. Maybe it didn’t come together fast. Maybe it took a few hours and it just felt fast. Either way it did because it was fun to do. There is something inherent in creation that feels a hell of lot more fun (and valuable) than our usual modes of assessment.