IT 573
Introduction to Multimedia in Instruction
This was the first of three courses that I took with Ed Counts. The course was really, essentially, an initial exploration for most of the class participants into what novel sorts of ways you can present information with multimedia software that you can’t really do as readily or successfully in other formats. We looked at several examples of good work that previous students had created in the course, and then learned how to use software to create our own presentations.
Among the projects for this course were photo galleries, videos and animations. I decided to sort of blend a couple projects together for one assignment, and created a “video” that was a sequence of a whole lot of still images. My wife and I had focused a webcam on some pumpkin seeds, and as a result I had literally hundreds of photos – taken at a two minute interval – of newly-sprouted pumpkin plants growing, and more interestingly, visibly following light over time. The resulting time-lapse video allowed for a glimpse of plant life that wouldn’t even be perceptible by direct human observation. This was the sort of thing I hoped to derive from the course – here was information that I don’t think could really successfully be conveyed any other way, at least not with the same sort of impact. You can state, in words, plants will follow light, and people can understand that and know it to be true. To actually see it happening is another thing altogether.