Pixeled Multimedia Teachers Association

Finally, our blog has been unblocked by blogger. It took 5 emails for them to get around to looking at it and realising that it wasn't a spam blog. Now that the little drama is over - I wanted to mention the premiers awards that I attended the other day. It was great to see four multimedia students, one from Warrandyte High, Forest Hill Secondary College and Wesley receiving top honours for multimedia.

The two hour ceremony ran like clockwork, with around 280 students receiving awards from a selection of (minor) celebrities. In fact, I hadn't heard of any of them but maybe I don't get out enough. The Premier and Govenor were there as well Lyn Kosky. One sour note that struck me though was the Premiers address. After acknowledging the special guests presenting the awards he singled out one person for a special mention. She was one of the swimmers who was in the gold relay team at the Commonwealth Games. Now, I didn't watch the games and I didn't know who she was but the Premier obviously thought she was great. He mentioned how she was studying at Deakin and also doing the gruelling training she undertakes in order to compete at an international level. He talked about perseverence and dediction etc.. However, the other special guests in the audience were composed of scientists, doctors, media personalities and assorted others who have also worked hard to get to somewhere. It made me sad that sport dominates all other acheivements. Personally, I couldn't care less about sport and I wait for the day when it takes a back seat to the more significant achievements in science and medicine and all the other dedicated professions where perseverance means saving lives rather than winning a useless gold medal in sport.

Other than that, I thought the awards were great as was the music and performances by primary and high school students. It was a thrill to have one of my students receive the award because I know how hard he worked last year - as did I. Gosh, I wish someone would give me a medal!

Hi everyone,
still waiting for our blog to be unblocked. Those pesky humans are taking longer than the promised business day to unblock the blog. Those pesky spam robots are sure out to cause trouble. Hope to be posting and having it read soon.

Hi all, just wanted to leave some info about the Machinima festival coming up. As you may of read, ACMI are holding Machinima workshops and having a Machinima festival on the 5th and 6th of May. Follow the links below to find out more.

Saturday 5th May, 2:30 pm, RED vs BLUE, Session 3
http://www.acmi.net.au/0BA2B04182AE41CA93170B42F2029473.jsp

Saturday 5th May, 5 pm, MACHINIMA 101
http://www.acmi.net.au/7F2025D8781E489D883DAD0DF4DF18D3.jsp

Sunday 6th May, 10 am, Machinima Film Festival Showcase
http://www.acmi.net.au/A601356E7B0842FFBA0D4A2B942D8A18.jsp

Workshops, PLAYING THE MOVIES, MOnday 20th March - Sunday 21st May
http://www.acmi.net.au/playingthemovies.jsp

If you want to find out more about Machinima check out http://www.machinima.com/
Warm Regards
Stuart

I got a message from blogger - their spam robots have been out in force and blocked anyone posting to this site because it sounds like it could be spam. How ridiculous. How could conversations about multimedia sound like spam. Anyway, a human has to unlock the blog apparently in order for us to keep blogging. This means they need to assess whether our blog is just spam. Perhaps the word multimedia sounds like spam to the ever vigilant spam bots. It all seems rather ridiculous and like something out of the matrix. What reality are we living in anyway. To cut a long story short, if you can read this post it means a human has unblocked our site and we can keep posting.

In regards the time that people are posting - no I'm not sitting up at 4.30 in the morning writing blogs or downloading music. The clock on the blog needs to be reset so that it shows the right time. At the moment it is about 8 hours out of whack.

glad to join the discussion, but wondering whether I'm eligible to comment since it's only 1.55 in the afternoon and the other posts have been late at night, 4:38 am even. who sits at their computer at that time? oh, downloading from kazaa, i see!

anyway, more seriously, i was taken by susan's comment in the post about "workshops", in the second paragraph -

"What we should be doing for high school students is giving them lots of practical work to do so that they can go and experiment with filmaking or multimedia and then make a decision whether they wish to pursue more theoretical based studies at a later date."

i couldn't agree more - here at Fitzroy the year 8 students are playing with lots of high-end programs, eg photoshop, dreamweaver and flash, making movies, making websites with flash etc etc, learning little bits of actionscript and some html, and a tiny bit of theory about web architecture and networks. they love what they do and many of them are producing excellent "work" which is satisfying largely because it's self generated.

it's also (on the other side of the ledger) a bit hard to assess rigorously, and leads to very messy timetabling issues. we have to be more flexible, which is not always easy.

at some point students need to come to grips with more theory, but i'd suggest that multimedia learning is not essentially different from most areas of learning. humans learn well when motivated, free to experiment, expect success, are given the tools, and have access to experts as and when they need their advice. i reckon we tend to rush our kids into theory and the boring stuff far too early - maths teaching is the worst example of that.

I've had quite a bit of interest from the teachers in ATOM in the workshops that are running over the next few months on interactive digital comics and creating Manga in Flash. There is a crossover between the two subjects of Media and Multimedia that could be beneficial for the teaching of both areas. Whereas Media focuses quite a bit on theory to the detriment of the subject at year 11 and 12 because I think they don't need to learn half that stuff till they go to University. Topics like Media Influence and Representations are really interesting but I found a lot of students struggled with any sort of intellecutal evaluation that was required. Whereas in Multimedia they tend to struggle with the topics like Components of Multimedia, not because its hard but because it is a bit boring and something they really don't need to know at this level. However, it will be interesting to see how much more crossover happens in these two subjects, particularly since many students also want to make comics as their final product in Media 3/4 and students in Multimedia do animation which could also be used in Media.

It does worry me though that because we all tend to have multiple degrees in subjects that we are more educated that teachers of previous generations and thus are expecting too much. By this I mean, students who are only 16 or 17 years old are required to have knowledge that really was the domain of Media courses at Uni when you were 19 or 20 and have more ability for conceptual and analytical thinking. What we should be doing for high school students is giving them lots of practical work to do so that they can go and experiment with filmaking or multimedia and then make a decision whether they wish to pursue more theoretical based studies at a later date. However, even VET, a practical subject has had more theoretical components snuck into it and kids have to cope with this stuff too soon. What do other people think?

Today in multimedia Cert II, I gave the students worksheets on the components of multimedia section. Of course there are always the inevitable groans of, "why do we have to do this. Isn't it IT stuff?" Which is true, is there a reason for them having to know the components of a computer at this stage of their lives? Surely they could do the course effectively by learning the theory behind programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, for example differences between Bimaps and Vectors, but does it make much difference if they don't know an analogue/digital peripheral device? Surely they could learn this later, at university for instance if they want to pursue multimedia. I think the Cert II should be about learning and playing around with the software and then get rid of the bits that are dry and boring and likely to turn students off.

We've set up this blog site to make it a more personal forum for members of the Pixeled Multimedia Teachers Association to communicate with each other as well as post up and coming events. Any member in pixeled is welcome to join. All you have to do is send me your email address and I can invite you into the blog. Then you can start posting whatever and whenever you want. If you don't want to enter a blog post you can also send comments about various posts.

Over the next few months we'll announce up and coming PD, tips and hints to run a VET Certificate II and Certificate III course and lots of helpful advice. Hope to read some comments from you all soon.