Playing to learn

Designing games fits into New York's curriculum.

Miscrosoft "has no taste."

A young Steve Jobs articulates my feelings exactly.

Back to School

A new Fall semester is here, despite Summer's heat and swimming pools' call. This semester I'm teaching 5 courses: Computer Mediated, Advertising & Imagery, Game Design, Graphic Novel and Capstone. So far the students are enthusiastic, and I'm psyched to teach and have fun.

With every fresh start I feel the temptation to make goals. This semester I'm going to try to turn my grades around faster. This is difficult for me, because being a child of the free-wheeling 70s I hate judging others. But I guess it is part of the course, and I can't avoid it.

If you are one of my students always remember that a grade is simply an observation of a project at a single moment in time. It in no way reflects upon you as a person. What it can do is motivate, provide feedback for improvement, or simply reward good effort.

Snow Daze

The past two weeks have made me think more and more about my online teaching options. It would seem that in this day and age we wouldn't need to be dependent on in-person class meetings. So with this in mind I decided to hold my Motion Graphics class online last Thursday.

I sent a Sakai message to the group requesting that they log into my WebEx conference meeting, conveniently scheduled for their normal class time.

Of 14 students, only half attended. Those that did found themselves facing the harsh reality of bandwidth: apparently the voice over IP was so large it slowed the screen refresh down to an agonizingly slow creep. This made the review of motion graphics near impossible.

It wasn't until after the students logged off that I thought to try and use the land line phone teleconference option. When I did this, the screen refresh improved considerably.

Now all I need is another storm to test again...

Hey Flash Gamers: We're apparently spot on....

Jamie Oliver just won the Ted Prize.

Type in Motion

I'm always looking for examples of good typography, especially type used in Motion Graphics. Here are a few examples I find exceptional.

From Nick Schrunk

• Consciousness
• Kinetics

And other well-done examples from various on youtube. God I love the Internet.

Motivation follow up

After listening this morning to other educators' thoughts on student motivation, I realize that I haven't used student recognition to my best advantage. My two action items I'm going to try this semester:

•  Make sure students know that others are reading their blog postings. Even one comment allows a student to know that his or her work is being noticed. I'm going to see if I can't get some sort of cross pollination going with Patrick and Matt's students. 
• I also like the idea that Matt had of showing off one student's work at the beginning of each class. Perhaps I ask that student to show it off in front of the class.
  
• At the end of the semester I'm going to have the students from both last semester and this current one do a presentation in conjunction with the Common Reading.

So many things to do, but all worth it because my students really are great.

So.... Hey guys, if you're reading this, I SEE you.

 Read more >>   Options >>  

How to motivate

An easy way to motivate students is to be very clear on how different actions affect their grades. However, this tends to get compliance without spirit.

A better way in most cases is to not simply tell people what they need to do, but rather to explain  how a certain skill will benefit them in the long run. Stressing the benefits a certain action can create is much more inspirational.

(However, there is a great deal of truth to the old saying "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.")

Last note: Whatever you do, don't resort to motivational posters. They're the stuff shows like The Office are built on. Just google "motivational poster" and you'll be in a world of badness. Seriously.