Final+Reflection

Keith Pierce EDET J650 Internship Fall Semester 2010 ** __ Final Reflection __ **
 * __ Overview __ **

Well, the semester and my internship comes to a close and I am having lots of mixed feelings about it all. First, I must thank my mentor (Dr. Smyth) who always has great ideas and directions when it comes to any project. As usual, I have learned a lot from him in many ways. The project was one that I had hoped would be beneficial to the Educational Technology program in that it would help recruit new students to the curriculum. The basic premise of the project was to create some video content that would promote the program through its main website. I did a lot of searching for just the right mix of visuals and words that would assist anyone looking for a good technology program to consider this one. Time will tell if I achieved that goal. I think the project overall has merit and I know I learned a lot about several media concepts. Using the ADDIE model in creating anything is good and I think it can be used many other areas besides making instructional design assignments. I employed it in my entire process and I will discuss this in greater detail later in the reflection. I must admit that I had one area of difficulty that gave me fits of depression, frustration and aggravation. Did I mention it made me crazy? The annotated bibliography was for this project a bear. A snarling, mean and nasty grizzly bear. I spent an inordinate amount of time reading articles whose titles seem to indicate good relevance with my project but ended up having little if any application. I will talk about this more in my “I’m pulling my hair out” section of the reflection. Even though this was frustrating, I did learn something from it that’s very important. Perseverance is something not really discussed much in our culture but I think it has lasting and positive quality for anyone who has experienced it. . . . eventually. Lastly, I enjoyed having a worthwhile project with a positive objective attached to it. This helped me focus on the big picture while making all the small pieces of the picture come together with some cohesion. I enjoyed having a game plan that seemed to have promise of success and would help me learn more about creating promotional products. For me this was in itself a successful venture in that I was creating something outside of my “comfort zone” of expertise with just enough struggle to it that allowed me to acquire some new skills especially in organizational areas. ** __ Learning Opportunities __ ** Learning to organize a production is skill that takes a long time to develop. Just like in editing you learn that you don’t have to shoot the raw shots in the order that they will be presented, so it is with this kind of project. I knew that many of the backgrounds and video inserts would need to communicate a message. These messages are given to the viewer either directly or indirectly depending on the nature of the overall project. An example would be displaying a map showing where expected recruiting of students might occur. This of course would be an illustration of direct communication. More subtle messages are given through an indirect method of planting ideas in the mind of the viewer. An example I used was a background I used that has multiple pieces of “educational” pictures moving through the frame. They included things like rulers, protractors, formulas, etc. I got this idea from observing the (hundreds, I think) videos from other websites and carefully observing the shrewd way that some had injected ideas about education into each of the videos. This stayed with me throughout the project. A wise person once said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I certainly learned some new strategies for promotion by observing and emulating what others had done in their promotional media. As I stated earlier, the annotated bibliography gave me fits. I read numerous articles whose apparent theme was research on video as a recruitment tool only to discover that using video in the study was very small or didn’t have much relevance to what was concluded. Although this was frustrating, it did have some valuable lessons with it. I learned to do word searches within the body of the article to see if applicable keywords were present and then I could read several paragraphs adjacent to the word to discover if the study had merit for my project. Another thing I discovered was that the studies I did find that had good relationship with my project were typically positive in finding that video was significant in influencing potential students. This was encouraging news for me in several ways. Of course I wanted my project to have significance, but I also wanted some affirmation about video for general educational purposes. The studies confirmed this for me because several articles cited studies done to confirm videos’ role in learning. It seems like a small and obvious thing for many that video is valuable in education but it was great for me to see these affirmations since I have spent over 25 years in producing video for education. Whew! I’m just happy to learn I haven’t wasted my time. Another lesson learned in this internship is time management. I usually manage my time well, but taking a class, teaching a class and working full time can stretch anyone’s ability to organize their schedule. I had set apart specific times each week to help me complete the next step in each phase of the project. It wasn’t hard to schedule the time it was simply hard to stay on the schedule. It comes as no surprise to anyone in this internship that pressures from a variety of areas will quickly compromise your schedule. I had to make my time spent on project tasks was a priority that did not get moved to the “back burner”. ** __ Difficulties __ ** Scheduling was certainly a challenge for this project. Recording a person who has an extremely busy schedule is tough. They are available when you aren’t and vice versa. This was overcome by simply being flexible in my schedule. I had to move some events around on the shooting schedule to accommodate this but eventually this was solved. Testing for the correct format to record with was also a difficult test. Producing streaming video is at its best a horrible wretched animal that should be put out of its misery as soon as possible. There are many things to consider when producing good video streams and I did a lot of testing and research to cover all possibilities. I tried several different streaming strategies such as JW Longtail and Sorensen squeeze only to find that these take a special setting on streaming servers. Trying to get an IT person to understand what your ultimate goal is and why those server settings are important was a hurdle I couldn’t jump. Even after deciding to record in high definition, I found that editing large files like HD video can and did produce many hiccups for my production computers. I did manage to find several ways to edit with smaller files while maintaining good quality. Even keeping good quality throughout the process doesn’t guarantee good streams since you finally must transcode the files into a compression scheme that can ruin all the beautiful images that you’ve recorded. I also found that acquiring royalty-free images can be a daunting chore. After checking many of the free sites, I had to settle for some images gotten through Clip Art where I have a membership. Many of the free sites for images didn’t have very specific images for my project and I spent way too much time trying to search new sites. I also have some video that is royalty-free and I was able to glean a small amount from my library. In retrospect, I would have been better served to plan and record my own shots with appropriate permissions. This sounds like a huge amount of extra work but I think I would actually have saved time by doing this. Finally, the biggest obstacle in this project was the audio portion of the video. I have conducted many interviews where editing the words for content, although difficult, was the best way to produce the coherent message. The message came through the words but I was not satisfied in the production. Voice inflections on words that should have been definitive (indicating an ending thought) were fluid and thus indicated a very different context. This is mainly why my project remains in progress. The only way to overcome this is by recording the session again with a teleprompter device. Since those I interviewed now know the final message I wish to communicate, I can write their thoughts into a monologue for a teleprompter. This will give them the opportunity to correctly inflect words and phrases that will give a decidedly professional look and feel to the video. ** __ Successes __ ** I think that I improved my methods for delivering streaming videos. This is important for my department at USC Aiken since we have an assortment of methods for delivering videos both on and off campus. The biggest success I think is the creation of the message needed for recruiting students. Although it is still in the refinement stage, I feel confident that with some revisions in the production and script phase the project can be a very good addition to the ED TECH website. I especially like some of the new methods I discovered for streaming videos that might be a viable solution in the future for the campus. These would be a great answer for streaming if the technical issues can be resolved. Another success is recording in high definition video. I had made a goal this year to save money in the department by not using tape any more as a means of recording. This has helped propel us into using high definition video on a routine basis and should increase the quality of our recordings. It certainly helped in the recording of the interviews since I could increase significantly the amount of color correction employed to enable chromakeying to be more effective and distinct. I should also emphasize that recording this way increased the ability to capture single frames of video with or without chromakey material for producing things like promotional additions to webpages. The project is ongoing. I like to think that some of the hurdles in the project assisted me with course corrections in the final project production. My aim is to complete the videos as soon as scripting is finished and new recordings can be arranged.