Class Projects

On Wednesday, we had our dry-run of our final projects. Many of the projects were extremely impressive, but what surprised me more than anything else was the wide range of topics that everyone chose to focus on. Not only were all of the project topics distinct from one another, but most were also in different forms of media. Of course this only lent the question of what were some of the remaining media formats that were not covered by the presentations given in class. In searching through Google, I found this interesting site that identified some of the different types of basic mediums for educational instruction:

Text

Out of all of the elements, text has the most impact on the quality of the multimedia interaction. Generally, text provides the important information. Text acts as the keystone tying all of the other media elements together. It is well written text that makes a multimedia communication wonderful.

Sound

Sound is used to provide emphasis or highlight a transition from one page to another. Sound synchronized to screen display, enables teachers to present lots of information at once. This approach is used in a variety of ways, all based on visual display of a complex image paired with a spoken explanation

Video

The representation of information by using the visualization capabilities of video can be immediate and powerful. While this is not in doubt, it is the ability to choose how we view, and interact, with the content of digital video that provides new and exciting possibilities for the use of digital video in education.

Animation

Animation is used to show changes in state over time, or to present information slowly to students so they have time to assimilate it in smaller chunks. Animations, when combined with user input, enable students to view different versions of change over time depending on different variables.

Graphics

Graphics provide the most creative possibilities for a learning session. They can be photographs, drawings, graphs from a spreadsheet, pictures from CD-ROM, or something pulled from the Internet. The reason for this is that images make use of a massive range of cortical skills: color, form, line, dimension, texture, visual rhythm, and especially imagination.

Interestingly enough, most of our projects integrated more than just one of these basic media formats and as many of the descriptions above indicate many of these are most effective when used in conjunction with another basic medium, as with audio and graphics.

Further research (which will certainly be done with completion of our final papers) will give more insight into the benefits of using one media format over another. I am completely excited about showcasing my project as well as understanding some of the shortcomings of why some of the projects were better teaching and learning tools.

Ideas Ideas Ideas

During this week's class, we were able to provide feedback and brainstorm with two different "future" ventures: one of which was for-profit while the other was non-profit.

I was actually quite surprised by the fact that they both seemed to be struggling with relatively the same issues, namely idea generation. I understand that they were both in the very early phases of development and the for-profit venture already had a general idea of what their product or solution would be, but they were both still trying to gather feedback from users and hoping to generate new ideas to incorporate into the solution.

This “prototyping” of sorts only leads me to call on what I have learned during my time at the d.school here at Stanford. From my own work on projects, I’ve learned that generating viable ideas for solutions is a very tough thing to do. Part of the philosophy that I appreciate of the design methodology taught at the d.school is that of generating as many ideas as you can think of in a short amount of time. Many times this leads to completely out of the box ideas (some completely ridiculous!) but undoubtedly will in some way or another generate at least a jumping off point for a new idea.

Someone recently shared this quote from www.kottke.org, which I also think is a good summary of the d.school’s method of prototyping and ideation and really exemplifies the benefits that can arrive from working toward quantity over quality when ideating:

"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."

I’m curious about what methodology both ventures that spoke to us during class had used to generate ideas. I suppose the non-profit venture was still in the very very early stages and was still scoping out what her venture would look like. The for-profit, however, seemed to have already generated several ideas about other features for their solution. Perhaps they also tried throwing out as many ideas as possible. Using us as a means for more ideas was also probably a smart idea ;-)

Sustainability in Non-Profit Online Ventures

Among discussing a wide array of learning theories at the onset of class, we also got to dive deep into a few online ventures that Professor Kim thought would be great to discuss. The particular website that my team was focused on was http://teachaids.org/ which is a non-profit online venture that is focused on HIV/AIDS education through the production of video lessons.

While investigating how some of the theories that we have been learning in class could be applied to this particular website, my team and I determined that it seemed probable that the efforts by this non-profit were fairly sustainable. In my own opinion, I felt that this was the case particularly because of the ability to maintain funding. HIV/AIDS education in my opinion is something that will undoubtedly continue to receive large amounts of funding from large corporations because it is such a humanitarian effort and because to some degree it inhibits market growth in the disease stricken regions which is arguably a market that many corporations would like to tap into.

During class, however, there seemed to be some shared reservation about the possible sustainability of this particular organization. Beyond funding the reason for the skepticism in sustainability seemed to be lack of possible growth of content generation.

I decided to do a little Google searching to see how other non-profit organizations manage to maintain sustainability in content development as well as in funding. I found a quote from an individual from e-democracy.org that I felt was a good summary of what online non-profit ventures should strive for:

“The non-profit online services that work, understand that what they deliver is more important than who they are and their public interest philosophy and approach. I think our challenge is to find ways that build from public interest motivation in such a way that they truly build better and more cost effective forms of online content and interactivity.”

Relating this directly to http://teachaids.org/ I feel like this quote helps summarize what will need to be done to maintain their content sustainable through the upcoming years. The questions to ask is how they will design content that will build on the current public interest motivation while continuing innovation and cost effective strategies. I’d be curious to know what type of strategies the developers have been doing, as well as how in touch they are with the motivations of the communities that they are targeting.

While looking for other non-profit organizations that have won the sustainability game over the years, I ran across a ranking of the most successful non-profit brands. I couldn’t help but agree that the more powerful brand the non-profit has the least likely content sustainability will be such a huge problem. While not totally relevant I figured I would include this chart as I felt it was fairly compelling.

I can only hope that any non-profit work that I become involved in grows a brand as successful as some of these.