T189-ers on Flickr and Britblogs

Just after lunch I successfully submitted my CMA for T189 through my OU StudentHome page. There’s only one CMA and it’s a twenty question multiple-choice affair with simple tick boxes to indicate your chosen answer. It’s worth 10% of the marks for the course and, admittedly, you don’t actually need it to pass the course but it seems daft to skip it. The deadline is Monday so I imagine there will be a few students submitting tomorrow as well.

Things are relatively quiet on the T189 First Class conferences front this weekend, apart from an ongoing discussion about whether you can pass T189 without using Elements to edit any of your images. Theoretically, if you shot virtually perfect images with your camera, this should be possible. However, even the best images can often be ‘tweaked’ by a little judicious cropping or ‘digital darkroom editing’ using Elements. I think the question originally arose because it was suggested that those students who had had almost insurmountable problems watching the tutorials and practising the techniques demonstrated, might be disadvantaged by this fact. On the other hand, I would imagine it’s perfectly possible to get so carried away with all the wonderful options offered by Elements that you end up over-editing an image. Perhaps moderation should be the keyword when preparing the T189 ECA?

Downloading the new .avi files from the T189 website is proving to be quite a long-winded process. I thought rather than ask for a new disk, I’d just work my way through the videos, download them to my hard disk and probably burn them to a DVD for reference purposes. I’m not surprised to discover that my download speeds have dropped significantly this evening, when there are probably a lot of other T189 students also downloading the videos. I’m lucky enough to be able to download during the daytime when the speed is much better. I’ve completed downloading tutorials for Weeks 1 – 6 inclusive so I just have 7, 8 and 9 to go. Already I’ve accumulated 1.5Gb of files in the New Tutorials folder so it’s a task that definitely requires patience!

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I’ve added a sidebar blogroll link to the first presentation T189 student group over on Flickr which can be found here:

T189 OpenUni 2007

It currently has 65 members and readers of this blog might like to pop over and take a look at our talented crowd!

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I’ve also joined Britblog which is well worth supporting and provides links to an amazing variety of British blogs:

Welcome to BRITBLOG: The Directory of British Blogs

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Plus a couple of my personal favourite blogs to add to the mix …

Berry Deep France

Cornish Dreamer

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Enjoy!

Words of Wisdom

Today, while browsing blogs, I came across a stunning image entitled ‘Patience’ with the following commentary by the photographer (I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting it in full here …) and it really struck me deeply.

As T189 has progressed, I realise that I often don’t take enough time thinking about a shot or assessing its potential- I’m often a bit short on time and have to grab the shot quickly almost in passing. The thought of having three whole hours to take a shot just leaves me speechless with awe and admiration. I really DO need to take more time over my photography.
Source Image Link

Truth be told, I still use the large format camera more than I thought I would be given the proliferation of digital cameras. It is so much easier using a small camera (ease of use, easy to carry, quick, convenient, etc), but what also gets lost is the patience factor. It’s like driving a Porsche. You don’t tend to drive it slow. So you miss out out on the journey. You become more interested in the car and the destination.

Recently I used my large format (4″x5″) Linhof for this shot. The fact of the matter is that using a large unwieldly camera slows me down (which can be a good thing in photography), become contemplative, and perhaps most importantly, enjoy the moment, the surroundings, and be patient. I waited 3 hours for this shot. Took me half an hour just to set up the camera down by the waterline.

I’m not sure I would have slowed down if I was using my Canon digital camera. I would have been more inclined to take some shots in less than ideal light conditions and then race ahead to somewhere else…………..

J Alan

Update (and correction)

Firstly the correction – it seems that the statement from a Red Group T189 mod that dialup students would be getting priority for the new tutorial disks isn’t completely accurate. ANY student who sends a request to a designated OU email address will get one of the new disks. In fact, despatch has already started using First Class post to get the disks to the students as fast as possible.

So reports are already coming into the conference saying that, with a little tinkering such as the video codec download I had to do yesterday, the new tutorial videos are playing fine. Previously disgruntled students are expressing delight and satisfaction about being able to watch the tutorials without any problems. This afternoon I’ve downloaded (in the background) all five of the week 1 video tutorials and can report that they amount to 309Mb. So it is possible to download them if you have a reasonably fast broadband connection and, hopefully, an unlimited download option!

And now, folks, I have to go and make dinner or my family will go hungry tonight ….

Why has T189 been such a rough ride?

In my personal view, I think T189’s first presentation has suffered from a combination of problems -

1. It was oversubscribed to a significant extent. Tim commented on a previous blog of mine that the deadline for registering was April 17th but it was closed two days early. This meant he missed out on registering despite being ready to do so – how many others were in this position, I wonder?
2. Coping with the load of up to fifteen hundred users proved too much for OpenStudio and it collapsed spectacularly over the Bank Holiday weekend in May when lots of students were taking advantage of time off work to take and upload images. A skeleton holdiday tech staff were obviously stretched to their limit trying to resolve the problems.
3. The difficulties with the DVD weren’t foreseen, although given the number of students who reported some synchronisation problems with the tutorials was pretty high, you might have expected some of the beta testers of the course tutorials to have experienced similar problems.
4. The T189 website’s “News” section simply wasn’t functioning at all during those first critical two or three weeks of the course. Timely and informative announcements posted here would have lessened the number of frantic questions and complaints that mounted up in the conferences from desperate students.
5. OpenStudio suffered very badly when compared to Flickr, an online photo sharing website with which a large number of T189 students were already familiar. Clearly some significant upgrading and re-writing of the program will have to take place before the next presentation to provide a much more useful and user-friendly interface..
6. The experience and equipment of T189 students showed a huge variation from those who were discussing high end (£300 upwards) lenses for their expensive DSLRs and the absolute beginners who were probably reading through their compact computer manuals for the very first time. Maybe next time an ‘Experts’ conference would be an idea?

Hopefully 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 will have been addressed effectively ready for the start of the next presentation of T189 in October 2007. Since our course is due to finish in mid July, the intervening weeks should give the course team and the technical staff behind the websites, enough time to iron out the wrinkles and present the next group of students with a freshly polished and de-glitched T189 ……

Videos and First Time Presentations

Well, I duly checked out the new T189 .avi format videos on the website and downloaded the longest one at nearly fifteen minutes. It wasn’t far short of 95Mb and it took about 10-15 minutes in the background while I was doing other things. I opened it in Windows Media Player (I’m still using WMP 10 because I’m not so keen on the interface of WMP 11 which I have on my laptop). I got sound but no video … hmmm …

… back to the T189 course website and to the page about the .avi videos. It seemed that the download and installation of the Xvid codec should resolve the situation. I duly clicked the link, downloaded the file which was less than 1Mb, installed it and returned to the downloaded video. This time it played perfectly in the WMP window and I could maximise it to full screen if I wanted more detail.

Am I being a cynical old student to wonder if the reason Adobe’s Flash format was used to create the videos had something to do with the licensing agreement for the provision of 1500 or so Elements 5 software packages? Its astounding ability to gorge itself on every scrap of available computer memory surely wasn’t a newly discovered problem?

Since I did have audio-visual synchronisation problems with the DVDs that I was originally sent, it was nice to have one playing so smoothly in WMP. However, figures given on the T189 website indicate that the number of students having problems with the DVD tutorials amounted to about 5% of the 1500 or so students signed up. A significant number, to be sure, so I’m happy to download the new format videos in the background while I’m doing other tasks on the computer and let them take priority for the despatch of new discs.

In fact, the T189 websites says that students on dial-up will be getting priority for the new discs … that made me frown a little so I went to check on the website for the course hardware specifications. It doesn’t actually say you need broadband but, speaking personally, I think trying to do the course using dial-up is going to make it very hard work indeed given the amount of data that needs to be uploaded and downloaded during the course.

“As part of the course you’ll be asked to share your images. You’ll need to have access to an internet connection to be able to upload your images to the photosharing website and to view and comment on other people’s photographs.

You are likely to be spending most of your time studying online, which may mean extra charges to your telephone bill – unless you have a package that provides unlimited access to the internet”

Now the actual computer hardware specifications are pretty high (I’ve seen minimum specs mentioned on the conferences of of 2Ghz processor, 512Mb ram and either Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista – Windows 2000 cannot run the provided Elements 5 software) soI don’t think you’d expect many students to venture into T189 with a dial-up connection. Of course, I may be wrong because I don’t know the exact figures but even the 8Mb broadband users were saying that OpenStudio was slow. However that’s a whole different can of worms ….

Bill Larnach commented on my blog entry yesterday as follows:

“I’ve also done several first presentations and while problems have become expected, I’m not sure this should be accepted. In my view, it is unacceptable that the OU seems to use students on some courses to beta test software and online material. In many cases students are left to discover basic problems such as broken links or lack of proof reading, which can cause no end of confusion”

I do agree and it certainly seems tough on first time presentation students having to iron out all the glitches before a course really settles into its stride. However, I also think that the pressure on the OU to keep up with the increasing demand for technology-based and technology-backed courses might be part of the problem. I doubt if the first presentation of T189 was designed to handle the number of students that ended up registered. Hopefully lessons will be learnt and new pre-course testing procedures put into place that will lessen – although not completely banish – first time course presentation blues.

Nevertheless, some students on T189 were severely miffed to discover that you could withdraw from a 30 or 60 point course and get a partial refund but this didn’t apply to 10 point courses. There were calls for students to get a partial or even a total refund – some even called for the course to be halted. Obviously this won’t happen but I feel perhaps the OU ought to make some gesture of apology/recompense because T189 has certainly been a very rough ride at times for the first time presentation guinea-pigs.

DVD problems solved … hopefully

A message has now appeared on the T189 website ‘Newsfeed’ section that gives fresh hope to the students who have been having insurmountable problems with watching the DVDs:

Good news for those students who have experienced problems viewing the video tutorials. As of now, we are making the full set of tutorials available on the T189 website in a new format that should solve the severe problems 50 or so of you have experienced . To access these, you need to go to the T189 resource page on the website by clicking the Resources tab and follow the link under “video tutorials”. A copy of these files will be sent out on disk to those students who have emailed the special email address to tell us they have had severe problems. These will be posted on Friday 15th June by first class mail.
Once again, we apologize to those of you who have suffered from various technical problems relating to the DVD. We hope you can now all get on, watch the tutorials and practice your image editing skills.

Course Team

Well, I suppose it’s better late than never but I can understand the intense frustrations felt by those students who were unable to watch the DVDs.  We’ve now started week 7 of the course so they will have to work hard to catch up on the stuff they’ve missed. But at least they have a chance now … if they have enough time.

This is one of the accepted and expected drawbacks of signing up for the ‘First Time Presentation’ of an OU course – I should know better because I’ve done several now and there hasn’t been one that was problem-free. T209 famously had a piece of networking simulation software that produced exactly the opposite result to the one expected! This piece of software had to be used for one of the assignments and, basically, it was producing spurious results which meant a student couldn’t write a sensible answer. In the end, as long as a student provided screenshots of the results provided by the programme together with their reasoning why the results should have been different, they got the marks. But it was a stormy few weeks on the T209 course conferences, I can tell you …. the T189 conferences have been mere ripples compared to the T209 waves!

Grab that camera again!

I spotted this male blackbird sunbathing on the concrete wall alongside the steps up to our Gallery this morning and fetched my camera to see if I could get a good shot or two. It’s the sort of opportunity that suddenly presents itself and you don’t have much time to think about composing or setting up the shot … even if it IS still there when you get back with your camera!

Enjoying a spot of sunshine!

Blackbird up close and personal

We have some very tame birds in our garden – I suspect this is the cheeky chap who comes into the house occasionally for a look round to see if he can blag some food. Fortunately our cats never really bothered with birds (although the local rabbit, mouse and rat population did come in for a lot of feline attention over the last seventeen years) and anyway the ones in our garden have a very loud and efficient warning system in place if they see feline intruders. I once found our tabby slumbering peacefully on the grass in the sunshine oblivious to five blackbirds all shrieking their alarm calls from the surrounding trees and shrubs.

Week 6 Assignment

Since our one course CMA (computer-marked assignment) is due for submission by June 18th, the Week 6 assignment is optional. Please don’t take my efforts too seriously – it was a bit of fun, quickly snapped and quickly edited (hardly T189 portfolio material …)
Take five photos that form a set linked in some way, for example in technique (e.g. motion blur, macro, small depth of field), colour theme (e.g. reds, natural colours, cool colours), or subject (e.g. portraits, landscapes, still life). Upload the photos to OpenStudio. Can you spot the linking theme on other students’ sets?

So I’ve posted six – can you find the subject that links them all together?

So these are bulldog clips

Quite a new rucksack – bought last month.

Yes, it’s a Tilley hat! (quite a new once since it was a birthday present in April …)

Rather old and battered – an easel.

Fabric roll of ‘tools’

Small steel vacuum flask (usually contains black tea)

I suspect that the input from students for Week Six may be rather less than for previous weeks. There are several probably reasons – it’s now mid June and people are going on holiday before the schools break up for summer, some students have said that they are behind and trying to catch up (mainly because of the DVD fiasco) and some are just busy with other courses and commitments.

I’m off to study my printout of the CMA ready to submit tomorrow (if all goes well ….)

Another ‘Grab the Camera’ opportunity

I rushed up to the office after dinner when a Chinook helicopter suddenly hove into view through our patio windows and passed overhead. Snatching my camera from its recharging cradle, I burst out of the front door and watched the helicopter slowly circling in to land at the heliport. Unfortunately I just wasn’t quick enough and it had vanished behind the trees before I got my camera fired up and focused *sigh*

But, in the meantime, I’d noticed en route through the office that the sunset had definite promise, so I kicked off my slippers, pulled on a pair of wellies and headed down towards the beach. Both our kitchen and home/business office are on the side of the house facing the sea so it’s impossible not to notice a promising sunset developing through the windows. It was a calm still evening which was why the Chinook’s double rotors had sounded so deafeningly loud – a very distinctive deep whump-whump – as it had passed over. I crunched down over the sand and headed for the water’s edge where I took a series of shots. I switched between the camera’s ‘auto’ setting, the ‘evening’ and ‘landscape’ modes, and used the full optical zoom on the 6Mb maximum image setting. This was the best of the bunch and no, I didn’t bribe the seagull to fly past just as I clicked the shutter!

Then, at about 9.15pm, just as the sun was disappearing from view and I was crunching back up the beach, I heard the Chinook’s rotor blades start up at the heliport. So I headed for the bank at the back of the beach and climbed onto the end of a boat trailer parked in the long grass where I teetered, a little unsteadily, waiting for the helicopter to lift off. I hoped it would pass overhead as it had done before but I was out of luck – it lifted, dipped to 45 degrees, circled round and headed away in the opposite direction. I did get a couple of shots but they weren’t very exciting although they were, recognisably, a helicopter. I suspect that, if the Chinook had indeed passed overhead, I would probably have had to crane backwards so much on my precarious perch to get a shot that I would have overbalanced and landed unceremoniously on my backside in the long grass!

On a side note, a gentleman came strolling along the path and stopped to join me as I waited for the Chinook to appear. We chatted briefly about helicopters and sunsets.  Being a T189 student, I couldn’t help noticing that he was dangling a top-of-the-range black Canon DSLR camera by its bright red Canon-emblazoned strap from one hand but I didn’t have the nerve to ask if I could have a look at it. In the event, he admitted that he’d spent so much time looking for a suitable spot to photograph the sunset that he’d missed his opportunity. He made no attempt to get a shot of the Chinook as it rose from behind the trees and disappeared in the opposite direction.

So not only does the early bird get the worm but the opportunist photographer gets the shot!

The more you put in, the more you get out ….

It’s a good approach to take when studying any subject whether at a conventional university, the Open University or any other educational establishment. When I started my OU studies with T171 (now discontinued and replaced by T175), it had a significant online course material/conferencing element which was quite a revelation to me. As we struggled to grasp the basics of writing html in Notepad and banish the dreaded ‘red cross in white box’ problem on our webpages, we helped each other out, sharing information, useful websites, tips and tricks. In fact, in the last seven years, almost all of my courses have had online conferences.

Obviously, when there are nearly 1500 students on the course as is the case with T189, there will be a huge variation in levels of student participation and approaches to studying. We’ve been divided into Red Group and Blue Group to make the numbers more manageable but we don’t have the smaller tutor groups with personal tutor that you have on a full OU course. We do, however, have a team of Moderators for each group and they have been tireless in their efforts to cope with streams of questions, queries, grumbles, complaints … and praise.

The T189 course conferences have been extremely busy and I fully sympathise with those students who have limited study time. Keeping up with posts and fishing out those useful tips and information is quite a time-consuming task. At the time of writing this post, each of the four original student conferences for T189 have three or four message archives each plus a further 200 – 300 messages contained in the conferences themselves. The Moderators frequently archive messages to ensure that the conferences do not slow down to an almost unusable extent. So you can get an idea of the number of messages that have already been posted during the first six weeks of the first presentation of T189 – lively? Definitely!

What has been interesting is the level of support, collaboration and help within the course conferences. Since T189 is specifically titled “Creating and Sharing Better Images” this is a cornerstone of the course and some students have been tireless in their efforts to help others. Given that Photoshop Elements 5 has its own peculiar quirks and the fact that some of the techniques it uses to edit images are pretty complex, a huge number of questions and queries have been posted by bewildered students. Yet it seems that no question is too difficult or challenging for the gurus and amateur websleuths *smile*

I have to be honest and say that, if you really get bitten by the photo-editing bug, I’m sure you could spend ten hours a week just using Elements! I don’t find it particularly intuitive myself and I’m used to Paintshop Pro which meant getting accustomed to a different way of doing things. More than once I’ve muttered a few unladylike words under my breath at the ‘bossiness’ of Elements. I already had my own system of downloading images into folders with specific names inside a Main folder called ‘Cameras’ (we have our computer set up to use an older Kodak DX3500 and my Fuji Finepix F700) and I quite often re-organise my images to combine folders. I usually do this in Windows Explorer and I soon found (as did other students) that Elements really dislikes having this done outside its interface. However, doing the same task in Elements isn’t as simple as ‘Shift + Click”, ‘Cut/Copy’ and ‘Paste’.

Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised at the speed with which Elements performed Full and Incremental Back Ups of my image folders. (My first back up revealed that I had nearly six thousand images to catalogue!) There was an extended discussion on the T189 conference about backing up and the general consensus of opinion was that an external hard drive was the way to go. Some students nervously admitted that they had never backed up, did not understand the pros and cons, and weren’t sure about how to go about it. As always, a plethora of helpful and informative posts, including links to bargains currently on offer on hardware suppliers’ websites, and explanations about C: drives and multiple drives followed the initial shy queries.

Personally, I have a 160Gb Maxtor One Touch USB 2 hard drive which I use for back up purposes. It’s plugged into a USB port at the back of my computer so all I need to do is switch it on at the wall socket when I need it. One interesting tip – if I switch it on before I switch on the computer, I get an ‘Operating System Not Found’ error. It seems that the computer is looking for Windows on the One Touch drive before it arrives at the internal hard drive. It caused a bit of panic the first time it happened, I can tell you!