When it’s all over …

… it’s not unusual to feel slightly down and loose-endish. I’ve come to expect this at the end of a course so I wasn’t surprised when today’s rather gloomy and damp weather seemed to mirror my mood. Sometimes there’s this odd aimlessness which follows the final exam or submission of an ECA and it might take a day or so to adjust to ‘normal living’ again

Many students will already have decided to continue with their Open University studies and might even have registered for their next course. Some, like me, might be taking the summer off because of family and work responsibilities with a view to possibly signing up again in the autumn. Others might just have done one single course and don’t intend to do any more. That’s one of the great things about being an OU student

One of the best things about studying with the Open University is the amazing sense of camaraderie and mutual inter-student help that marks many of the course conferences. Admittedly, some courses have very quiet conferences but some, like T189, are characterised by lively exchanges and extensive information sharing. Many strong friendships can be forged that transcend the course itself. So it’s hardly surprising that some students are now posting messages of thanks which include rather plaintive questions about how long the course conferences will be accessible on First Class. The usual time is six to eight weeks after the course finishes but I’ve noticed that the T189 conferences have become noticeably quieter towards the end of this week.

So I decided to create a message board which past T189 students can use after our course conferences are closed. It’s not restricted to those who have already studied T189 – everyone is welcome whether they’ve signed up for the second presentation in October or are thinking of taking the course at some time in the more distant future.

I’ve tried to cover all topics and I’ve added a Suggestion Box forum so that anything I’ve overlooked can be pointed out, discussed and (hopefully) implemented. There’s also an Informal Course Feedback forum where students who have taken part in the first time presentation (which wasn’t entirely trouble free …) can offer their suggestions for improvements and additions to the course team for future presentations. Please be courteous and constructive in your comments – this is not a place for disputes.

T189 Digital Photography Unofficial Forum

There are lots of free message board systems out there but I opted for Yuku which, although still in beta, does offer a lot of options. I’ve deliberately made the board open to everyone so you don’t have to register for a Yuku account to read and participate. Hopefully it will be easy to use …

Note that this is an UNOFFICIAL board which is not affiliated to the Open University in any way. Any views expressed within the forums are those of the original poster. Please treat others with respect and courtesy.

See you there

Flummoxed …

I just popped in to check on my blog one last time before I shut down the computer and finish off the packing ready to go away this evening and I was … well … I think ‘gutted’ might not be too strong a word … when I read a comment made in response to my previous post. I’ll paste the comment and my reply just to make sure they don’t get overlooked.

Your pictures are very very good. Loved the waves crashing on the stones, especially. But what I really want to say is, that I’m very glad I happened upon your blog, because I did consider doing T189, but now I’m really pleased I didn’t, because I’d be so embarrassed by the inadequacy of my photos, if your standard is anything to go by!

Comment by nomdeplume — July 7, 2007 @ 10:00 am

Oh No! nomdeplume, I’m writing this blog in the hope that people will be inspired to take the course, so it’s really upsetting and disappointing to read that you’re PLEASED you didn’t do T189 because you feel your photos are inadequate

Surely the whole point of taking a course like this is to improve your photography and creative skills? If you start from a high point, where do you go from there? Better to start from not-so-good photographs and end up with brilliant photographs.

I don’t think I would have managed to produce the ten ECA images if I hadn’t done the course. Part of T189 is learning how to correct and enhance your images using Elements 5 – it’s astonishing what you can do to rescue a so-so image. If you saw my ten images before I edited them, you wouldn’t be quite so embarassed – trust me!

It’s a striking fact that lots of students are now posting delighted comments on our conferences about how much they have improved and how much the standard of photography has rocketed between weeks 1 and 9. That’s what we all hoped for when we signed up for the course!

Please think again and consider signing up for T189 – I PROMISE you won’t regret it …

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!

* * * * * * * * * *

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!

* * * * * * * * * *

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

* * * * * * * * * *

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

Berry Deep France

Cornish Dreamer

* * * * * * * * * *

Enjoy!

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 ….

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!

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!