Saturday, May 21, 2011

Wk3-1 DB Quickies: Difficulties starting new programs/breaking the norm

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A little bit over a year ago one of the instructional designers had a class that a faculty member hated to teach, and the ID wanted to find ways to stimulate student participation. It was a humanities class and we were going through the materials to see what sort of videos I could produce for it. I noticed that there were some paintings of Dante Alighieri (the writer of the Divine Comedy) and I started to wonder if I could find an actor to play him, and she said, could we animate one of those paintings. I did some research and found a program called Crazy Talk, and it can animate almost any face to follow an audio script. I found a voice-over talent that sounded regal and sophisticated (instead of going cliche and using an Italian accent), and I found a glass mural of him that served my purposes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhf9hE1UffU To see the animation, please skip to the first minute (the video is truncated for copyright reasons). The faculty member loved it, and she now only teaches either online or hybrid because of this.
I always try to find a new angle to innovate in education and video (that’s why I’m getting this masters), and I love a good challenge. But things at work have turned sour lately and we have a new leader who doesn’t respects our online paradigm. My Action Research deals with this and I tried to find a solution, but with so-so results. Mainly, things change so fast, that you go against something, and before you know it, people are looking at you weird, because the thing doesn’t exists anymore. Now I’m getting Adobe CS5.5 to see what’s new (it comes with Audition) and to see if that could solve some new challenges in education…

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