Saturday 31 January 2015

Being More Open…

There was some discussion on the importance of being open in our EDCI 569 discussion this week.  It comes on the tails of an interesting Twitter thread that I saw this week and this tweet by @ChrisWejr:

I’ve been inspired by the idea of openness and what it means for me in my own reflective practice, and those words of Chris Wejr, encouraging us to share our attempts, our mistakes, our “doing”. It’s a “walk the talk”-“be the change” kind of philosophy, one I always believed I embraced. In reflecting, however, I know I can do better, be more consistent, and be more aware. It takes time and effort, yes, and as someone who has little time or energy these days, it would be easy to fire off my excuses. I want to do my best and be my best though and live what I preach to my own kids and students; you have to take risks, make mistakes, and reflect in life if you want to grow and maximize who you are as an individual. In my mind, living this way is indicative of true engagement in one's own life.

As part of my move to walk the talk, I am sharing out my #tiefitbit activity for this week.  Like my fellow fitbitter, @ThorneSD35, I am competitive, as much with myself as with anybody else, and I’m finding this #tiegrad group of fitbitters to be extremely motivating. I had a successful week this week and, as best I could, recorded my 10000 steps efforts via my iphone through pictures and video.  I was quick to put out a first video, really with the intention of taunting my fellow fittbitters, and that was successful overall (as a video, not necessarily as a taunt!).  My next cluster of videos and photos sat on my phone for the week and I wasn’t sure exactly how I wanted to use them. As I loaded some of the videos onto youtube, a few of them loaded upside down. I searched how to correct this, I came upon: “How to Flip or Rotate a Video” which provided me with two methods, depending on my needs. I used the youtube method and, voila, discovered a whole new dimension of editing on youtube! Excitement ensued! I used the “enhancements” tool to, not only rotate my upside-down videos, but also to “auto-fix” them. How sweet is that??  But that wasn’t all…While I was waiting for my video changes to save, I noted an option I hadn’t seen before:  “Combine multiple clips and publish new videos. Try the YouTube Video Editor” .  Well, um, okay?

So, another new venture:  combining and editing my videos using the Youtube Video Editor. I hoped it would be a quick experiment, and generally it wasn’t hard to learn, but midway through my creative process I started getting error messages and, upon further explanation read that it can sometimes take 30 minutes for the errors to get sorted out. This was somewhat frustrating, but, as the message communicated, things seemed to right themselves within about 30 minutes.  I liked how easy it was to drag my videos and photos into the video creator and insert transitions between them.  I didn't like the music choices youtube offers; some sounded ridiculously cheesy and many others just sounded like bad-movie instrumentals. For this project, however, I just chose something random that, to my ears at least, sounded tolerable. I really would like to learn more about using music in my visual creations and, on a side note, have a whole bunch of drafted bits and pieces for a copyright blog I am writing. But that's a different blog, for another day...not today.

In the end, I had success, overall.  I didn't manage to effectively capture my 9:30-10:30 pm walk about the neighbourhood after class last Thursday, but otherwise the video does summarize the gist of my week as I tried to achieve my daily 10 000 steps and keep up with my cohort fitbitters.  


My learning successes:
  1. I did it—I made a video using the youtube editor
  2. It successfully presents my fitbit activity for the week (and, in many ways for the month)
  3. I was able to include videos, pictures and music in the video
  4. I problem solved successfully (rotating videos, adding music to a video) 
  5. I am sharing it out

My learning areas needing improvement and/or more time:  
  1.  Fading music in and out of a video;  regardless of my attempts to problem solve this one, I did not figure it out
  2. Including more variation in images (ie. Less selfies)
  3. Consider a shorter video…I think this runs a little long. 
  4. Figure out if I can add music that is more to my taste and allows me to be a little more creative on that front.

In summary, this week I am proud to share that I did learn and what I learned.  I’m walking the talk and I’m feeling good about it!  Next up?  My #tieyoga attempt to video document some of my learning process through my online yoga practice. Maybe I’ll vlog it out.

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