Helton, Design Journal 5

Making good progress on my animation this week. Instead of Blender or Synfig, the two tools I looked at for my tool learning videos, I decided just to go with Powtoons. I found a template that works well with the topic I'm going to be doing for my animation, and it's very simple to edit. I'm still interested in getting better at Blender, but that's on a different timescale than this course.

The worst part of Powtoons is navigating what is free vs what you need to pay for. It did give me a four-day pass to get free access to more content, and that's the motivation I need to get the animation done this weekend. It's going to be a good bridge between the more technical information I'm focusing on in EdApp and the sociocultural theories that we work with in the course I'm teaching. I'm treating it as a teaser trailer - it will come at the end of the EdApp content and before the more traditional work of the Ready OER Not Course itself.

My brother came to visit recently, and I offered to crochet him a blanket as a post-Christmas present (blankets take a long time). He picked out a yarn he liked, then we were looking through patterns online. I pointed out one, a ripple afghan pattern, that I thought would look good with the yarn he chose, but he didn't care for it, so we kept scrolling through results. He pointed to one and said he liked that one... it was another ripple afghan. I told him it was the exact same thing as the first one I showed him, and he insisted it was different. We were both right. The first example was done in a bulkier yarn with a different type of colorway than the yarn he had selected, so the effect looked very different. I, the expert, was able to "translate" how the pattern would look in his yarn without considering the experience it takes to get to that point.

It reminded me of the Razzouk and Shute article we read earlier this semester. Using and adapting OER is also something I'm an expert in, and I need to remember as I am creating this course that I need to build experiences where teachers will be able to experiment with the materials on their own.

Reference.

Razzouk, R., & Shute, V. (2012). What is design thinking and why is it important? Review of Educational Research, 82(3), 330–348. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654312457429