Posts
Jim Parkinson, 1941–2025
10 months ago
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
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...
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...
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
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
From Nick Schrunk
And other well-done examples from various on youtube. God I love the Internet.
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