Multimedia Presentation

Week #13 - Thanksgiving

Here is a meme that I created with GIMP to illustrate my thoughts on Thanksgiving.

Week #7 - Presentations

This week, we learned about what makes a good presentation from Garr Reynolds and Chris Anderson. Knowing how to present an effective presentation is very important skill for everyone to know how to do, because there are many opportunities to make presentations, especially in academics and in the workplace.  Before listening to Garr Reynolds and reading his and Anderson's take on what makes a good presentation, I felt like I knew many of the basics that they mentioned...  Basic things like not using too many words on a slide when making a presentation with Powerpoint, and not reading word for word exactly what you are writing on your Powerpoint presentation.  How ever, there were some effective tips that I learned that are very helpful.  A good point that Reynolds presented was that it is a lot easier to keep your audience engaged when you make your presentation into a story.  I know many times that presentations can get boring and it is hard to keep people focused on the topic that you are presenting about, so telling a story to present my point will be something that I will be trying to do in the future.

I found what Anderson had to say was more informational and helpful in making my presentation skills better. I thought that his tips were great additions to the basic skills that Reynolds was providing about telling a story to make an effective presentation.

"We all know that humans are wired to listen to stories, and metaphors abound for the narrative structures that work best to engage people. When I think about compelling presentations, I think about taking an audience on a journey. If you frame the talk as such, the biggest decisions are figuring out where to start and end." - Chris Anderson.

Another important skill that Anderson taught me, was how to make effective contact in a presentation.  I always knew eye contact was important, but I never really knew how to do it without feeling awkward and weird.  Anderson finally solved that problem for me.

"Perhaps the most important physical act onstage is making eye contact. Find five or six friendly-looking people in different parts of the audience and look them in the eye as you speak. Think of them as friends you have not seen in a year, whom you are bringing up to date on your work." - Chris Anderson

This week we were asked to participate in a class presentation.  I had never participated in a class wide presentation like this and I thought it was very cool to see how easy it was to collaborate with Google Presentation.  

Here is my slide from the Class Presentation.

Week 7 - Collaborative Slide Show

Week #6

This week, we learned about being creative and why it is important.

In this week's TED video, Sir Ken Robinson discussed the importance of being creative and how our educational system is failing us by not encouraging creativity.  I thought everything that he had to say was very important and that he was actually very funny while saying it.  Our future and our education are two things that go hand in hand, Sir Ken really shed some light on that idea.  His idea that the education system needs to be reformed so that creativity is encouraged instead teaching every student to be exactly the same is a discussion that more people should be talking about.

One of the things that really caught my attention when he was speaking was the idea that with so many people getting college degrees today, it is dropping the value of having a college degree when you are trying to be competitive when getting a job.  What I find troubling about that, is while our college degrees are becoming less valuable to us, the cost of going to college has risen dramatically over the years.  I see a big problem there.

Another thing that caught my attention was when he was speaking about "the dancer" and how just because she was not doing well in the "traditional" subjects, didn't mean she wasn't great in something else... which in fact, came to be dancing, where she excelled and had a very successful career. Sir Ken said, "If she was confronted with her problem learning "traditional" subjects today, they would have said she had ADHD and told her to quit acting out..." This type of conformist way of education lacks creativity and it is bad for our future.

 Everyone has there own way of learning and a talent that separates them from the rest.  Our education system needs to utilize those talents and gifts instead of rewarding curriculums that make everyone the same.

This week we also learned about how photographs can be used to tell a story.  Photographs are an effective and creative way to tell a story, because when it is done right, the story comes to life without having to read any words.  The Big Picture website was a great example of how photographs can be used to tell a story about a subject.  In the Harvest 2013 photo story, I thought it was cool how they showed pictures from all over the world doing the same thing... Harvesting their crops and showing what they do in the process.  It is something that every place in the world has in common and it was neat to see in pictures.

The Photo Slideshow Story that I put together was one of a family dinner that I had with my girlfriend's family in Quebec.  It starts with the dinner being made and it ends with the popular Canadian pastime, a hockey game. It is posted in a separate blog post.  

Photo Slideshow Story

Week #5

Cloud Storage is a very useful tool for anyone who uses a computer.  It allows people to save and edit files from anywhere in the world with any device.  This is a such a great feature, because it is a lot more effective and efficient when it comes to productivity and collaboration than the hard disk and network storage that most people are used to.  The only issue that I have been thinking about with cloud storage is privacy.  I can see that there may be potential for files being seen or altered that you may not want other people to have access to, so that can be a big problem.  I think for now and in the near future, using cloud storage will be great for group work and things that I absolutely want access to from any place or device, but I will be thinking twice about putting things that I want to keep private of confidential onto a cloud storage service.

For Google+ Photos and Youtube, I see them as great ways to store and share photos and videos.  I was able to share an album from Google+ Photos to our G+ CCV Multimedia Applications Community.  The album that I decided to share was "My Winter Job", so that everyone can see what it is like making snow at Jay Peak.

Link to: My Winter Job Album

 I was also able to link my YouTube Channel to our G+ Community page.  Something that I learned in this assignment that I never knew before was that you can create your own channel for sharing videos that not only you make, but other videos that are already on YouTube as well.  I always knew that you could view videos and post videos on YouTube, but I never knew you could create a channel where you can share videos that you made and other videos that you like, all in the same place.  I look forward to adding videos to my channel in the future.

Link to: My YouTube Channel

Visual Literacy

After reviewing the material on visual literacy, I learned that there was a lot more to being literate than what I first understood.  When it comes to being "literate", I found that Doug Belshaw had a great point.

"Literacy is a characteristic acquired by individuals in varying degrees from just above none to an indeterminate upper level. Some individuals are more or less literate than others but it is really not possible to speak of illiterate and literate persons as two distinct categories." - Doug Belshaw

 What he meant by this, is that everyone sees things in there own way.  It may be because of their background, culture, or generation, but when they see something, they understand it using past elements and aspects to comprehend what they are actually looking at.  I can relate to this in my life.  My twin sister and I have grown up using computers and can navigate through them fairly easily to accomplish what we are trying to do.  My parents on the other hand were always amazed at our comprehension of computers, because they had no idea how to use them.  My dad especially... He always claimed he couldn't even turn one on if he wanted, but I am sure it is more stubbornness than truth.  But when it comes to diagnosing a problem with a motor, tearing it apart and putting it back together so that it works, I would have no idea about any of that.  I am not mechanically inclined one bit.  However, my dad is and in fact, he is very good at it.  Which makes the point, just because one person doesn't understand something, does not mean that they are not literate... Because they are probably very good at understanding something else.

Belshaw taught me how messages can be presented in a very effective way through the use of his eight essential elements of digital literacies.  With a mix of elements like cognitive, constructive, connections, civic, critical, creative, confident and cultural, the viewer of the message will be able to better comprehend what you are trying to say.  I could see some of these elements being used in the Three Little Pigs video and that is why I found that video to be effective.  It presented a message, without actually saying the message.  That message was that through news and social media outlets, many points of views and "spinoffs" are created from when the original story first broke of what really happened to "the three little pigs".  All those point of views and spinoffs lead to more serious issues that changed the world, socially.

This was the first visual image that I decided to create.  I created it with the "Gimp" photo editing software program. I used Gimp, because I was very familiar with Adobe Photoshop in the past, but I currently do not have that program on my computer, so I used Gimp, because that program is very similar to Adobe Photoshop and it is free.  For my image, I decided to use an image of one of my favorite big mountain snowboarders, Xavier De La Rue, dropping in on a very gnarly line that I would even be scared to do in my dreams.  I used the word committed, because in order to ride down a slope at a pitch like this, you have no choice but to be exactly that, committed. 

Copyright & Fair Use

Copyright laws protect the creator of original work from others completley duplicating their work to present as their own. It is important to have copyright laws, not only to protect the creator of original work, but also to promote creativity and ideas in the community. If everyone just used someone elses idea word for word or mirroring the exact same image of the idea, the evolution of culture and ideas would ultimatley suffer and quite frankly, the world would be a very boring place. In our academics, using copyrighted material in the wrong way is not only wrong and could potentially get you in trouble with the school, it is also illegal. An example of copyright law being broken is a televised program, like a hockey game, being video recorded and placed on youtube video. Fortunately for everyone, there are ways to use copyrighted material legally in a way that does benefit society. It is through fair use. Fair use is the use of copyrighted material only to illustrate your point. It does not mean you can simply copy and paste copyrighted work and use it as your own in your work. Fair use of copyrighted material is only appropriate in situations like commenting or critiquing or copyrighted material, illustration or example of copyrighted material, incidental use of copyrighted material, culturural rescue, launching discussion with the use of copyrighted material, and mashups of copyrighted material. In these different ways, you are able to spread new ideas through the use of old ones. In this way, culture is preserved and evolved. An example of fair use is a television program, like the hockey game in the above video, being video recorded, but this time, the video is used to show the reaction of a bar crowd. I have one question for this weeks topic. As a business major, I have been wondering if there are any restrictions or rules that apply to fair use when it comes to commercial use. If you use copyrighted material with fair use, can your work be sold?

Introduction to Multimedia Applications & Tools

After reading the wikipedia entry on multimedia, I now have a better idea of what multimedia actually is and what it has the potential to be. Multimedia is a combination of multiple forms of media, hence "multi"-"media". Some different types of media that can be combined to become multimedia include: text, audio, still images, animation, video, interactivity, etc. Multimedia is how a lot of today's information is exhibited and transfered to people all over the world. An example of multimedia is a powerpoint presentation, where still images, text and occasionally audio and animations are combined to present information.