Quandrary!

Oh Fuji, what have you done???

Thrown a spanner in my works, that’s for sure *sigh*

I was almost settled on the S5600 over the S5700 when I found that there was a brand new S5XXX camera just released – the Fujifilm Finepix S5800 which is SOOOO tempting! It’s supposed to be available from October 2007 but the first ones are now appearing on Ebay and a seller has it for sale on Amazon as well.

It’s around the £150 mark at the moment but I’m waiting to see what price it will be from Amazon itself a/. because it will be post free and b/. I do value Amazon’s customer service. I bought an Archos Gmini MP3 player last year and it went wrong within a week – I was able to print out a personalised returns label from the Amazon site, send the faulty player back and subsequently received a brand new one in less than ten days.

So, not surprisingly, I’ve put my new camera plans on hold for a little while so I can save up the extra cash to get the S5800

Not feeling QUITE so down :-)

My disappointment at my T189 marks is now mellowing and it’s certainly NOT going to stop me taking photographs! *lol*

Having a Fuji camera, I signed up with the MyFuji website and registered my camera. They send monthly emails and stuff, run competitions and forums, have useful Photography tips etc. Recently I received an email offering a 15% discount on Fuji refurbished cameras It’s valid to the end of the month and I have some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket so what to buy? I think a bridge camera would be the best option and, hopefully, nothing too bulky or heavy that would make it difficult to carry around. So …

Fuji Finepix S5600 Zoom

OR

Fuji Finepix S5700 Zoom

(Sorry Georgy, I really can’t afford a proper DSLR – in fact, I think it would be wasted on me to be honest!)

Decisions …. decisions …. decisions ….

Catching up

I haven’t had much time on the computer over the last couple of days because The Artist has needed it for Gallery work. Also the weather has been so changeable that I haven’t been able to get out and take any photos either. It’s midsummer and it feels more like March!

So I copied the .avi tutorials onto a DVD and booted up my laptop, intending to work downstairs, but I found that I had sound and no video – just like I had done when I first tried to run them on the Office desktop. That was a severe disappointment because there’s only one phone line and only one broadband modem – both attached to the Office desktop where The Artist was working. So I couldn’t even go to the T189 website, follow the link to download the codec that made the video work properly and resolve the problem.

Never mind, I thought, son is away and his computer is even MORE powerful that the Office desktop so I headed into his room, booted his computer … and got exactly the same result.  Now all three of these computers are running Windows XP Home SP2 and are updated to WMP 11 so I’m at a loss as to why they won’t run the .avi videos without downloading the extra codec. I tried Realplayer … no luck … the DVD players … still no luck … this was getting very frustrating…

In the end, the only way I could watch the Week 8 tutorials (yes, folks, I am behind with the course) was to get the original DVD supplied for T189 and try that on son’s computer. Fortunately, given the ‘oomph’ that his computer packs (he plays a lot of computer games) it made short work of the tutorials and I got to watch the first four all the way through without any glitches, out-of-synch problems or crashes.

But this only goes to show that the new video tutorials haven’t completely cracked the problems that some students experienced when trying to watch them.

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.

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!