Professional Portfolio Artifacts [Pepperdine OMAET paper]

Pepperdine OMAET – EDC630: The Practicing Professional – Summer 2002

When I think about what I will take away from the OMAET program in terms of artifacts, I think about how we’ve been challenged and the kind of skills that have come out of our exercises and projects

Tech Skills – Media

We were told at VirtCamp that it really wasn’t about ones technology skills and maybe because of that the first project that I jumped into I jumped in way over my head. Yes I’m referring to the dreaded Virtual Pet debacle where I spend two weeks trying to learn how to use Macromedia Flash from scratch and ended up with “white cow in a blizzard” after two-days, a non-interactive bouncing ball after the first week, and a marginally interactive bobbing head after two weeks. It was a great idea, but you’ll notice that I haven’t revisit Flash animation in the intervening eleven months. It did take one more debacle, but I eventually learned to scale things down a bit so that I could actually finish some of these projects. I very much love animation and plan to revisit my belove Flash program after OMAET is over. Not long after the Flash/Virtual Pets thing, we had a Blue Print Project for EDC664 and after talking with Greg Thompson about new models for storytelling (non-linear), I thought to create one such story using a story that I’d previous done a first draft on. Well, that turned out to be too big to handle and I ended up not so much creating a non-linear story as much as finding a new avenue for publishing by converting my text to Adobe Acrobat PDF format and PDA Palm DOC format (so that you could read the story like an e-book on your PDA). You can download these examples (and learn how to create your own e-book at this link. Before I began the OMAET program I’d registered for my Earthlink webpage but I’d never gotten around to actually doing anything with it. So the first real website that I created was the one that I created for this program (and the Lego/Logo was the first page). Needless to say I’ve become quite comfortable working with webdesign and concepts of Internet communication. So in addition to my Pepperdine OMAET Portfolio site (in the years since, the original website is gone, and this portfolio is based on that website), I’ve also become the webmaster for my school site, TwainTalk_Online (image versions), and see it as a real resource for supporting student learning and staff development. Just recently, as part of my ARP next step, I created another site called the Tech Teacher Forum (PDF version) to promote and support my computer teacher group. And, yes, that poor original earthlink page is getting a facelift to Air, Dirt & Ink2 (or ADI2) [link no longer works] so that I can move some of my prose to the web. Even before leaving VirtCamp I was called upon to use my video editing experience to create our cadre’s very wonderful V2TV video. And since then there have two similar, wonderful projects with Sissy Lorenz and Henry Price using iMovie. But what I really want to highlight about these two projects wasn’t the technology that we used but how well these project went and turned out because of the wonderful level of collaboration and friendship that we had working together.

Collaboration

I cannot even imagine now how my experience of the OMAET would have been different if it hadn’t been for the working relationships that I have had this year. The most significant and accidental collaboration came about because I didn’t want to do my first Tapped-In session alone. Henry Price and Sissy Lorenz were working on their Virtual Pet and I was invited to join them at Sissy’s computer lab. Just before the TI session began we called up Greg Thompson and Michelle Catlett in a separate AOL/AIM chatroom and thus our “Back Row” group was formed. I know that there is some controversy about these “private” chat sessions taking place during TI and whether they take away from the experience of the other cadre members. But my take is that as graduate students we’re the ones who determine how we are to create our own education and as such we choose to create a digital analogy to the group of students sitting together as they work. It really made this difference between this being a fully engaging experience or just another “mail-it-in” kludge. Of course the infamous Furby videos that we created for EDC634 are very near and dear to my heart. The entire pre-production process was done online with AOL/AIM chat and I immediately learned that flowing text was not enough to keep the conversation focused, so I decided that we needed webpage support so that all of us could look at and interact with the same text (and yes, there is a “behind the scenes” video in the works). The other amazing thing is that after only meeting three times online, we were able to re-draft the stories, videotape them, edit them and upload not one but two videos in a single day. Amazing work done with amazing people: Sissy Lorenz, Henry Price, Vicky Storey, and Michelle Catlett. For EDC668 we need to create a streaming media project so this time Sissy, Henry and I created our own radio program “Cooking with Crumble” on Internet radio station KBOR [link no longer works]. Recording our voices directly to Sissy iBook we used iMovie to edit down the five or six separate segments to make the show. Again, one online meeting, one night of writing for me, and one day to record, edit and upload. We are a great team (and yes, another behind the scenes video . . . man, I’m going to be very busy after OMAET). Most recently I’ve had a chance to organize our “Future Scenarios” project for EDC667 and work with Henry Price, Stephanie Arthur-Tennenbaum and Greg Thompson. After a couple online chats to discuss the setting, I worked with the outline application, Inspiration, to explore the possible scenarios, published the outline and then each of us took one POV/one scenario and created a webpage/journal. I created the index page but Greg had the most difficult assignment by creating a streaming media version of his character’s journal. Again, it was another stellar performance by a stellar group.

Writing

Have I mentioned how much I love writing? Well, I certainly got a chance to stretch that muscle over the course of this program. For EDC633’s ZPD project I created a tale about the Farmer’s Son who wanted to be more than . . . Then for EDC664 I got a chance to re-explore an old story that I’d written about a little boy named Briff as part of my blue print project (which I mentioned in the “tech skills – media” section above).As much as I loved these projects where I used fiction, it was the reflection pieces that really pushed me. For EDC639 I really looked hard at past mentoring relationships and paternal relationships in my essay about “Learning by Example.” Then more recently for EDC667 I took another real close look at the people and things who are very important to me in my Mission Statement. Funny thing was that it was the Mission Statement project that reminded me about how much I loved writing (and other stuff that used to be important to me like writing music). JBB