Tech+Projects+and+Other+Creations

This page is going to be dedicated to experiementation on a graduate scale - and for other folks too. The remix assignment for ENED 8741 was quite the learning experience - both in technical terms and as an exercise for brain exhaustion and media converter frustration.


 * Project #1 - Summer Remix 2009, ABCs of High School**

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While this project proved to be the most difficult and time-consuming of the summer semester, it was probably the one that taught me the most about various facets of technology that I had never thought to use before. Most of the tools - Moviemaker, Voice-thread, Flickr - I was aware of as applications, but never was very interested in how they could be used in my life or in my classroom. I am far from being technologically inept, but I never considered it was my job to teach students the technical aspects of software programs and online tools. Now, however, I almost find that this could be an unspoken rule or duty that teachers need to educate students in whatever manner is necessary for them to create successful lives beyond high school.

With that said, I was very intimidated when I learned about the nature of this project at the beginning of the semester. I could craft a decent Powerpoint presentation easy enough, but the remix was beyond my previous realm of knowing. What I did know, however, was that I wanted to create something that was current and timely and that folks could relate to in a fun, but thought-provoking, manner. The week that Michael Jackson died, several of use were talking in class about the possibility of various pieces and satired, but some were a bit trepidatious as to bad taste or insensitivity. I wasn't so much thinking in terms of a Jackson satire, but using his music to keep my work fresh and present-minded. (Something that always connects with students.) The Jackson 5 song "ABC" immediately came to mind with the obvious school connotations, and I started forming more concrete ideas.

I knew that I didn't want to do a photostory type thing, as that really would not challenge my abilities very much, so I picked John's brain a bit about using Microsoft Moviemaker. It seemed rather straight forward in its approach. And I set my next task to finding my pivotal piece of music for the underlying track. Of course, I didn't actually want to pay for it, and I went about trying to find a site that I could rip it or download it without the annoying money transaction. Alas, that was not to be. Several site that claimed to have the song gratis were simply trying to get more traffic on their pages. Some songs were free, after you paid for their media converter software or song subscription. I did discover one copy that I could actually download for free, but the quality was so poor, and the track actually skipped as if there was a scratch in its virtual CD. I finally had to swallow my pride and buy the song from iTunes.

My next mission was to find visual pieces that would appropriately compliment the audio track. For this, I went hunting on YouTube. There is a plethora of pieces for the using, but converting those pieces to something palatable for Moviemaker was another matter. I first started utilizing the Zamzar media converter that was illustrated in class. However, Zamzar's actual goal is to get folks to buy the upgraded version and steer away from the freebie edition. And as such, the download times were so ridiculously long, that it made using Zamzar rather impossible. It was also during my trial with media converters, that I discovered the heinous world of the codecs. Apparently, these tiny codecs were invented to make everyone's life rather miserable concerning media conversion and became the general bane of my existence. The video and audio programs that were free online often demanded that additional downloads be installed to run the conversions properly. And after many downloads, restarts, and supposed fixes, several promising sites proved worthless. MediaConverter worked well and was fast, but only offered 5 conversions in a 24-hour period in its beta edition. U-convert-it seemed to be running but retained the flash-video embedded in the audio-video interweave, and thus refused to run on Windows Media Player. I finally found a beta site in form of vixy.net, and while the system was not foolproof, it was reliable enough for my classroom needs.

At this point, I wasn't completely certain of how I wanted the remix layed out, but I had a general idea of the content. The Jackson 5 song taled about love being so easy and carefree, and of course how to equate that with education. Teachers know that surviving high school can often be a miraculous accomplishment, and that the path to success is rarely pothole-free. Initially, the piece was supposed to speak about the trials of high school and satirize the a, b, c, 1, 2, 3, mindset of many people today. However, a conversation about learning responsibility in another class tweaked my perspective a bit. Educators appear to have the majority blame concerning the poor educational progress of American youth. However, in the grand scheme, their influence pales to that of parents. A group of disgruntled parents attracts much more attention at school board meetings than disgruntled teachers. What disheartened me was seeing parents use that enormous influence to kvetch to administrators about parking passes, dress codes, and cell phone violations. Hiram has more square footage of instructional space in the trailer park than in the physical building proper, with disgustingly poor technology connections. But no parents are marching on the school board with those concerns. The remix at that point became more of a public service announcement to invite parents to work together with teachers for the educational betterment of their students.

Once I had all the video pieces I thought I might need and pulled and converted them, I started on the task of jigsawing them together. Jason gave me the heads up on the TuneClone application, as Apple is evil and would not allow songs that I previously owned or had bought from the iTunes store work in Moviemaker. And John gave us the downlow on putting slides into the piece from Powerpoint, but first converting them to jpeg files. So much learning! My head still hurts. Everything appeared to be going smoothly, as I storyboarded my ideas first, so I knew beforehand how everything would fit together. That is until I started to trim the video clips to fit the song length. Ten seconds of video became a garbled mass of pink and blue pixels. And forget the splitting option - the first half would fine, but the second would be unviewable. For whatever reason, I was able to get some pieces to work and not fragment themselves and I kept those in the mix. I added in Google image stills to fill in for some video spots - YouTube couldn't illstrate everything I wanted to say. After stretching and shortening, tuning transitions, and adding animation, I think I might have a product that I don't immediately want to toss out the window. Even now, there at least a dozen changes I would like to make. And while I think the message is an important one, the technical lessons we experienced were invaluable.