timcalvin

Something to keep in mind about producing.

I found this on tumblr today, and it comes from AMIT GUPTA . I have no idea if the anecdote described is true- and I don’t think it matters. The lesson here works- and not just for students, but also for educators.

…. let’s start with an anecdote from Art & Fear. It concerns a ceramics class:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Studio Test #3

We’re getting close. First half has some very basic color correction done- the lights are at 5000K, and really, to be neutral, 5500-5600K would be better. So I’ve got to pull a little red out. No biggie.

The second half is color corrected, and then has a filter applied that pushes some blue into the colors, but filters for skin tone and warms those somewhat. I’m not sure it’s my favorite implementation of the effect, and I’m looking into some more fine-control options. For now, it’s getting me the better separation between my subject and the background that I wanted.

Checklists

I’ve been reading a book about checklists. It’s called The Checklist Manifesto. The author supposes the checklist that are properly design should free our minds from the mundane tasks that absolutely have to be accomplished and allow us to focus on the more demanding and difficult creative tasks that need to be addressed as well. He offers examples from the fields of surgery, investments, law, and, most important to him, pilots.

data

It turns out there’s been an enormous amount of research done on what makes a good or bad checklist in the realm of pilots. Not only that, but the work that’s been done look at the failures and successes of those checklists and updates them regularly. This creates a cycle of creating and re-creating checklists based on the needs of the environment they will be used

in. This, the author argues, is the reason why air travel is so safe in this country, and indeed worldwide.

The book contains a series of the students observations, all of which made me think about its applic
It was powerful for me, and I suspect will will serve to change the way I interact with complex tasks in my future professional career. I never thought I would be proponent of checklists in the classroom, but the clear, well argued, and profound examples offered in this book allowed me to see the virtues of them even in a tasks such as education.ation in the realm of education. I am sure, were we to propose a checklist for creating a lesson plan in the classroom, that we would receive blowback from educators the world over. The argument about us not trusting the capabilities of professional educators, and trying to dumb something down to the check list would overwhelm us. I suspect, having read this book, that argument might be valid for poorly conceived in designed checklists. Rather, a well-designed checklist should empower us, as educators, to free ourselves from the mundane but necessary tasks that need to be accomplished in the classroom, and allow us to focus on the more creative problem-solving endeavors that we must apply ourselves too.

Highest marks.

Research List #9

It’s been a busy last week around here, but here’s the (short) list of things I’ve researched:

Crop factor on Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera (appears to be 2.88?)
Mazda 5
SquareSpace hosting
pickling watermelon rind
Aging quick-pickles (seems contradictory, but who knows?)
Looking for other educators on App.net
Better color correction in FCPX
Davinci Resolve Lite
GoRuck Sandbag (20lb? 30lb?)
Filson Guide Work Tweed Jacket (sourcing this fabric?)

Videos.

Here’s what’s going on with my videos:

My new studio is mostly set up- some smaller bits coming (today?) and it’s totally good to go.

The camera isn’t running aftermarket firmware- yet. Looking into that more.

The first focus is going to be a large series of videos on Lord of the Flies. Between me and my partner, I’m envisioning something on the order of twenty (!) videos- so that will take time. Following that substantial effort, I want to do Canterbury Tales. But that’s a while from now.

For now, I’ve shot two rounds of test footage- one to confirm that my 2700K lights weren’t going to cut it, and the second (just this morning) to see if the 5000K replacements I purchased were substantially better (they are). I’d love to have some bulbs that are 5600K, but those are a) hard to find and b) spendy. So 5000K it is. The image looks a lot better now (and the sound is far better too…), but I still need my Optical White umbrellas to get the image looking closer to what I want. I’ve included a still (of a test subject) below. Note: that still is totally raw- no post/color correction or anything else. Looks even better with some work done.

Next I need to spend some time writing and planing the episodes, as there’s a LOT of material to cover- up to and including some pre-loading that needs to be addressed.

All that said, I’ve got some impending (good) family drama that will slow things down for a bit, but I’d expect to be putting the first few episodes out before the summer is over.

Stay tuned.

Research #8

Research list for the last week:

The military’s Project Stargate
Pepper’s Ghost effect
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and Spielberg in general)
Low-Power Bluetooth
Using an iPad mini 4G as a phone
Good options for 5500K LED lights (or is 5000K close enough?)
Linux on a older G4 tower Mac
iCloud Beta of iWork (am I right it doesn’t do much yet?)
iSight compatibility
in-car Bearcat BCT8 mounting
Adjustable metal rail tie-down systems

Still thinking about breakfast.

I can’t stop thinking about breakfast.

I wake up every morning, and the first thing I do is eat breakfast. I’m unlucky, and my body isn’t a big fan of waiting to put fuel in the tank. If I delay this part of the day, I’m setting myself up for a morning full of fog and grogginess. It’s not a matter of caffeine intake, mind you- that usually doesn’t happen until an hour or three after I’ve woken.

As a result of knowing this about myself, I make sure two things are always true:

My house has supplies for breakfast
I am up early enough to allow time to utilize those supplies

I’ve begun to realize in recent years that both of those things are not true for many people. Often there’s a trade off between sleeping time and waking early enough to eat. Or there isn’t (for one reason or another) food around to eat. Or- and I’ve seen this in my own very young children- some people need to wake up a bit before they eat a meal.

But, sooner or later, not consuming calories in the morning begins to have negative effects on people. It’s science, folks.

Time for an analogy, people. If we, as educators, are a race car team, we are looking to extract as much performance out of our cars as humanly possible. We try to buy the right (and best) equipment. We try to hire the best and most dedicated staff and drivers. We work long hours and think hard about changes that we might make to extract more and more speed and performance. So far so good, right?

So why would a race car team not care about the quality of gas they put in their car’s tank?

Many of you might not know that race cars don’t (usually) run on pump gas- what we buy at the gas station. Typically, normal household cars run on something like 87 octane gas. High-end cars might require 91 or even 93 octane to run properly. And when I say properly, I don’t mean “best” or “at maximum potential.” I mean run. Once, years ago (and before kids) I owned a silly car. As a result of some changes I made to it, it would not run on less than 93 octane. The engine computer simply wouldn’t allow it. Running anything less than 93 octane had a very real possibility of physically damaging internal engine parts (bending valves being the most likely).

If we want to maximize the performance of our students and prime them to be in the best possible learning condition, how do we ignore the fuel they use? We can’t. I know there are long and in-depth laws regarding what may and may not be served in a school. Fine. That’s great. But for our best bang for the buck we need to be dealing with breakfast. Here’s couple of reasons:

Most of the school day is before lunch.
The way you start a day has a lasting effect on the quality of the rest of the day
It’s a chance to front load nutrition for the day
It’s the most neglected meal

I’ve written before about my thoughts on a school fruit bowl. That’d be a great start. I don’t think you even need to go wildly beyond that. Some yogurt (can you imagine home-made yogurt? Awesome). Some granola, maybe. Maybe, if this is a working thing, we do a once-a-week big breakfast event thing. Trot out the big guns. Eggs. Who knows?

I know we have breakfast for a population of students that need it right now. That’s a good thing. I’m simply arguing that they all need it- and that if they need it, it’s an opportunity to tilt the field in their own favor and set them up for success.

Now, where to find the money?

My RSS reader

Google Reader is dead. Long live Google Reader.
Amidst the panic and mayhem surrounding this, I decided to view this as an opportunity. We often resist change, actively ignoring of dismissing new options for arbitrary reasons mostly related to them being new. Even more often, the new product is missing some “vital” feature we just can’t possibly live without. Some examples:

The first iMac that (gasp!) didn’t have a floppy drive.

The first laptop that didn’t have a DVD drive.

The first laptop that didn’t have a hard drive.

And so on.

But what I’ve found from each of those things happening is that the removal of the feature becomes an advantage. My thinking becomes more flexible, and I find that I can solve the same sort of problems as before. What I saw as a disadvantage becomes an advantage.

So when Google decided to kill Reader, I was sad. It was watching a friend go. But I knew that the options to replace it would be better and more powerful. More flexible. Worthy.

And so it is. I’ve been using Feedly now for a few months, and it is better than Reader was. It syncs between multiple devices. It’s very pretty on my iPad. The Chrome plugin is pretty nice. It even works properly on the screen of my phone. And the handling of going to the full article from the stub is lovely and (above all) fast.

My iPad Homescreen

People seem to be endlessly interested in what apps I use on my iPad, despite my insistance that it isn’t about the apps at all. My choices move around pretty often, but as of today, here’s what I’m using most:

In the dock, you’ll find my most-used apps. These include Drafts, Feedly, iBooks, Mailbox, Wikipanion, and Chrome. Of those, Chrome, Mailbox, and iBooks are pretty simple. Drafts is an amazing app I’ve written about before. It functions as my go-to for anything I’m going to do with text. Once I write it in Drafts, I can push that text into whatever app I need to be able to manipulate it. Feedly is my replacement for Google Reader, and Wikipanion is what I use to read massive amounts of Wikipedia articles.

And that’s it, really. Pretty simple.

I don’t want your revolutionary idea.

Revolutionary ideas are nearly useless in education. They won’t happen. Nobody is willing to dismantle the educational system entirely to rebuild it some other way. It’s too much work, with to many vested interests, with too little money available and too much money at stake. This idea of revolutionary change is like moving something heavy with one big, hard shove. Possible, but dangerous. Risky. Unlikely.

What we need to aim for are sustained small changes. Incremental moves that slowly and surely move us in the right direction. If you found my previous article about fruit in schools small and trite, put it in this context: I might actually get that change in place. I might also be able to get other small changes like that in place. The cumulative effect of these seemingly small changes can cause large and meaningful changes to a school or district. Think of this like moving that same heavy thing with small, measured, incremental shoves. Metered. Doable. Sustainable. Likely.