This is the last post for three glorious weeks…
why?
On Saturday I am marrying the beautiful Nicola (who I still can’t believe said ‘yes’), and then we are off to Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The Maldives operate a ‘no shoes, no news’ policy which frankly I can’t wait for.
So for those of you that are in education – enjoy what’s left of the summer term, and I hope you have a well deserved summer break!
With the Introduction to Adobe Captivate 2 course complete, what’s next?
Well, next up on swict.com after the school holidays will be a course on Macromedia (?) / Adobe Breeze. Breeze is an add-on to Microsoft PowerPoint that let’s you turn your PowerPoint presentations into interactive Flash based resources. You can add in swf’s, accompanying audio and best of all quizzes. No huge learning curve then, if you know how to use PowerPoint – and if you don’t, then you’ve got all summer to get yourself up to speed by using the swict.com course on PowerPoint! Better still, if you work in education in Argyll & Bute, you can get this plug-in for free… more on this to follow.
What else? After the summer holidays, we’ll also see a course on creating blogs using WordPress and two (yes, 2!) courses on Adobe Flash CS3 – one covering the basics of creating timeline animations, the other looking at more object oriented programming with ActionScript3 – how will you be able to contain your excitement over the summer…?!
The rest of my time out of my ‘day’ job until the end of February is going to be spent both producing myself, and helping teachers and students produce their own interactive curricular resources. These resources will be freely available online. Initially, the subject areas for this will be Primary RME, Gaelic and Science, but if this is something you would like to be involved in, then please get in touch with me.
Today we look at quitting.
You can find it here, or by typing the following address into your browser:
http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/41.asp
All of 54 seconds today!
And that’s it! I hope you’ve enjoyed this little adventure in learning how to use Adobe Captivate 2. I haven’t covered everything that the program can do (this course was really just an introduction), but hopefully I’ve started you on a great journey?
If you do go on from watching these tutorials to making educational resources, then please let me know – who knows, maybe we could even collaborate on something that you’d love to create?
Thanks to those of you that have waded your way through this material, and to those of you that have been unpaid content editors – a huge ‘thank you’ to those that pointed out the problems! – if I’d have done it without you, the tutorials quite literally wouldn’t have worked!
I posted on Saturday that I was reading ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ by Andrew Keen, and that I would come back and share my thoughts as soon as I had finished it. I’m not that slow a reader, honest! Rather I had a few too many other things to be getting on with, but I find myself with a bit of time to devote to it this morning.
My first impressions? I agree with a huge amount that Keen has to say. Even in my lifetime, I have seen the gradual erosion of our culture and intellectual debate by two forces – ‘those that shout the loudest’ and the ‘lowest common denominator’. With the advent of the read-write web, these have become much bigger driving forces. Allow me to explain:
In general, bloggers and other self-publicists are not thorough enough. Keen is right to point out that traditional means of publishing have to conform to standards – authenticity, reliability, editorial review. Primary in all of this would be that an editor would not let me publish something from their publishing house that was not reliably sourced and referenced. The mere threat of litigation drives this quality assurance. Whilst I may not agree with the driving force, I certainly agree with the process of quality assurance.
Blogging and self-publicism on the other hand are driven largely by hearsay – the innumerable times I’ve read on someone’s blog about ’something’ they’ve picked up on someone else’s blog, who in turn didn’t bother to say where they got it from. I’m sure you’ll have tried to follow these back yourself – quite often, it is a really difficult process to chart back to an authoritative source that can be referenced as ‘primary’. The worrying result of this would be that ideas and initiatives are not being attributed to individuals, but rather to communities or groups that actually had little to do with origins of ideas aside from their free publicity.
When I was a postgraduate researcher, the notion of academic enquiry and authenticity was paramount. One would not consider presenting a paper that had not been thoroughly researched, cited and referenced. Yet the vast majority of blog posts that I read are not. Worse still, the majority (and I mean this quite seriously) are shameless theft of the ideas of others. I have been just as guilty of this as many others – quite often I’ll find something that I regard as innovative or cool on the web and talk about it on my own blog. At best, this is third hand knowledge. Whilst I don’t doubt that my opinion may be of interest to some, the originator deserves the credit – quite often, as I’ve already stated, it’s difficult to find out who this actually is. That in itself is not good enough.
I mentioned two forces though – ‘those that shout the loudest’ and the ‘lowest common denominator’. Let’s look at these in turn.
‘Those that shout the loudest’
If you type the word ‘Captivate’ into Technorati – (in their words – “everything in the known universe about Captivate”) you get me before you get Silke Fleischer, the product manager for Adobe Captivate. Does this mean I know more about this product than the product manager? Of course not. Yet according to Technorati, I have more ‘authority’ on this subject than them. Why do I rank more highly than the product manager? Simply, because more people link to my blog than theirs. Therefore, in the malleable world of social networking, someone can appear authoritative, without truly warranting that title.
The knock on affect of this can be quite serious. Just because a lot of people are listening, doesn’t mean you are accurate or authoritative. To be either of these, you need to have rigorous discipline in referencing and authenticity – neither of which are pre-requisites of the socially networked world. As the socially networked world relies more on hearsay than authenticity, there can be damaging consequences to getting something wrong in public.
‘Lowest Common Denominator’
I suppose this is the factor that troubles me most. Whilst wikipedia has the capacity to be updated by a huge number of experts, it equally has the capacity to be corrupted by the ill-informed masses. It’s the underlying problem that I find more interesting than this though.
For the sake of this argument, suppose I am a ‘world’s expert’ – peer reviewed and acknowledged – on a certain subject. Why would I update a free encyclopedia with my knowledge? In order to attain this knowledge, I would presumably have spent a huge amount of time researching the subject and developing my thoughts and opinions. Unless I have inherited or won great wealth, this will have to have been funded somehow, either by a salary or by an organisation interested in my research. Without this, I would not be able to spend the time researching. If I give this research away, then I have removed my capacity to earn from it. Collectively we could gain from my research, but individually I would lose – it’s therefore against my self interest to give something away for free. I’d love to think that I was altruistic enough to see the advancement of the collective knowledge being a noble cause, but equally I’ve got to eat?
I think, like Keen, that we live in worrying times. We sit on the cusp of removing intellectualism from our economy. The results of this will be quite devastating. We will have a collective mass that knows a little, but few (if any) that know a lot – without them – the expert – then we don’t progress. With no financial incentive for the expert to share, they will wisely remain silent.
I’m not going to romanticise any of this though, and just like Keen I am no technophobe. It seems clear to me that on reading Keen’s book that there are two things we need to do more than ever in education.
1. Teach safety. I’ve met loads of great people through technology. I think. Although on reflection, a lot of the people I’ve ‘met’ I actually haven’t ‘met’, nor am I likely to, owing to their location in the world – I think, although on reflection, they could be anywhere? Our students need to know this. They need to know people may not be who they claim to be, and they need to know what is ‘ok’ to share online. Perhaps more importantly, they need to know what not to share.
2. Teach professionalism. Information is only as valuable as its accuracy. This needs to be explained to our students and clearly understood by them. They need to adopt this as their mantra for their own publications.
Recently, I was involved in a discussion online about whether I would continue blogging. I said that I probably would for the near future, but sometime soon that I think I would move on. I suspect that I will continue to use the blogging platform to share the tutorials that I have produced (merely for the RSS feed then!), but I think sharing my thoughts online is coming to an end. I know that I’m not professional enough in my writing, and I don’t think I have enough interest in self promotion to continue with our electronic equivalent of the vanity press.
Having read numerous posts on the web decrying what Keen has to say, I’m more than happy to lend my copy of his book to anyone that would like to read it. Just give me a shout.
In the last lesson of this week, we’ll take a look at publishing your project. By now, you’ll have invested quite a bit of time creating your project, so this lesson will show you how to let others see it, or interact with it.
You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:
http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/40.asp
This one is interactive, but if you watch it all it’ll take 4 mins 18 secs.
At the beginning of next week, we’ll think about quitting – literally.
Captivate 2 on it’s own is very powerful. Combine this with a Learning Management System, and you’ll begin to see just what you could do. Today we look at the quiz manager, and how to make the most of the data a Captivate 2 project can generate.
You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:
http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/39.asp
This one takes 4 mins 25 secs.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at publishing your project.
(You can tell I’ve got other things on my mind at the moment, can’t you!)
One of the many aspects of a Captivate 2 project that you can alter is how one slide moves on to the next – today we look at transitions.
You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:
http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/38.asp
This one takes a mere 49 secs.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at the quiz manager.
Today we look at resizing your project so that it can be viewed comfortably in the browser. There’s nothing worse than a project that isn’t displayed properly in the browser window, forcing you to scroll to keep up with the on-screen activity. Fortunately, Captivate 2 makes it a simple process to resize your project.
You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:
http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/37.asp
This one takes 2 mins 51 secs.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at working with transitions in your project.
There must be something about Monday that makes me forget to add the link to the next tutorial! I’m sorry about that for those of you following this.
Today we look at working with project properties and preferences.
You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:
http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/36.asp
This one takes all of 4 mins 7 secs.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at resizing your project so that it can be viewed comfortably in the browser.
I picked up Andrew Keen’s book ‘The Cult of the Amateur‘ this morning in Borders, and am about 1/2 way through it at the moment. Sobering reading. I decided after reading so many people’s views on their blogs about a book they hadn’t actually read, that the best thing I could do would be to read it for myself.
Once I’ve finished it, I’ll come back and share my thoughts.
