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!
Refreshing the memory
I decided this morning that I would revisit my OpenStudio weeks and re-read the comments that students made on my images just to refresh my memory. I also went through all the images on my Flickr photostream as well and did the same. It’s interesting that there isn’t necessarily a correlation between the two – an image that was liked on Flickr and got several comments might be languishing un-commented on OpenStudio. I’ve now got a good selection of ECA ‘possible’ images and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to choose between them.
I’d like to get a fairly broad selection of images rather than mainly macros or mainly landscapes. One of the trickiest subjects has been portraits which have been common amongst other student images but which I find very difficult, not only because I feel self-conscious about photographing other people but also because most of the folk I know would run a mile rather than let me take their photo! If I do manage to ‘snap’ someone it’s usually a spur-of-the-moment candid shot – grabbing the opportunity when it arises – so the images tend to be less than perfect technically but usually capture a great expression or a special moment.
The other problem I’ve had has been weighing up one image against another and trying to determine which one should be included in the ECA panel. It’s very difficult to make a decision when you’re comparing two very different images. Adding the potential for editing in the Elements digital darkroom just complicates the issue for me especially since I’ve not mastered all the techniques in the tutorials, especially the more complex week 8 techniques. Anyway I’ve always had problems making decisions and the final ten images for the panel is going to take a lot of time and deliberation.
We’re also going to be away for four days over the weekend so that raises the prospect of taking more photos which will then throw all my ECA panel plans into disarray!