StigmergicWeb

It is now all finished. The project is complete, even after some major setbacks. The paper that accompanies the project is done. And the presentation was this morning.

Done, done and done. I still have one more class before I can add more letters after my name, but the big hurdle is finished.

One of the tidbits of information I included in my paper and in the presentation was my list of lessons learned. I want to pass these along to anyone who might need them:

• Back up your data. Often. In multiple locations. If you are lucky, you will consider this to be a waste of time.
• Get out for a walk. Stretch. Taking breaks occasionally will actually save you time in the long run (as long as they are breaks from the work and not an end to the work).
• Have reasonable expectations. More than likely any one project or thesis will not revolutionize your field of study. Add a good solid contribution to the corpus of knowledge and you will be doing an important job.
• When designing instructional resources, think long and hard about your target learner group and your content/learning objectives before picking a medium of delivery. Its fun to work on something with a lot of techno-cool bells and whistles because, to be honest, we (instructional designers) tend to be somewhat of a geekish lot. But the bells and whistles might not be the best way to deliver the instruction to the learners. Make the method and medium of delivery as simple as possible and not one bit more complex than is absolutely necessary! I found that I ended up creating the resource in a much simpler and straight-forward manner than I originally planned because I was bedazzled by the delivery method (”ooooh - a cool and sexy looking website with lots of embedded Flash multimedia that show off what a slick designer I am“). Consequently I ended up spending a lot of time exploring quite a few paths that didn’t go where I needed them to.

I pass these words of wisdom on to you that you don’t need to repeat my mistakes. Find some original mistakes instead! ;^) Yet somehow, I don’t feel like everything is done. I’ve spent a lot of time putting this project together, and I’m not ready to let it die. One of the ideas that occurred to me as I was finishing up the editing was that this project would have made a dandy CD or podcast. An overwhelming amount of the video footage is me talking. If I’m going to be revising/tweaking the project, that’s how I’ll do it.

At the last minute, I also thought it would be a good idea to have some links to appropriate resource materials for anyone who is interested. To that end, I’ve set up a Digital Audio Guide wiki. It is quite sparse right now, but I will be adding to it quickly since I put the address for it in the credits of my DVD. If you are interested, you can find it at digitalaudioguide.wikispaces.com. If you can think of anything I should add, give me some comments right here or send me an e-mail at robwall@gmail.com

Despite earlier setbacks, I have almost completely finished the project! My wife found a couple of things to quickly fix up in one video segment and in the DVD menu. Once I get those finished up, I’ll be sending it in.

I can’t say I’m completely happy with the final product. When I watch it I find so many things that I could do better. Such is the nature of instructional design, I suppose - given an infinite budget and an infinite amount of time, we would tweak and fine tune until someone put copper coins over our eyes.

One major thing that I would change, if I had time or were starting it all over again. Instead of a DVD, I’d produce the guide (The Educator’s Guide to Using Digital Audio if you want to be formal, or just EGUDA for short) as a CD. As I was doing the editing I realized that most of the DVD was me talking, with very few parts that required visuals. It would only make sense to create a digital audio guide in audio format instead of video. As it was, I spent most of my time editing video. In fact, I edited it twice but the second time was much nicer and faster since I was using Final Cut Express instead of iMovie. Editing audio would have been a lot more fun, not to mention faster!

Hmmm - perhaps a podcast version of EGUDA? I’ll have to think about that.

But, enough navel gazing. Time to get back to the last edits!

I never thought it could happen to me. Sure, I’d heard stories about it happening to others, and some of the stories were pretty bad. And I knew all the risks, so I guess it was my own fault. Still, we tend to think “Oh, that’ll happen to the other guy, but not me”. Well, it happened to me and it could just as easily happen to you if you don’t take precautions.

My hard drive pooched last week!

It was an external drive (I’ll use the past tense because it’s about to become catapult fodder, or perhaps a trebuchet). I was going to transfer all the video files that I had so diligently edited from the external drive to the big hard drive on the shiny brand new PowerMac at the school. I attached the external drive and it would not mount. I tried restarting the drive and it would not mount. I tried restarting the computer and it would not mount. I tried restarting the computer then the drive and it would not mount. I tried … I guess by now you get the idea.

Suffice to say I tried everything and it would not mount. Many of the words that are not said in front of my children came out of my mouth.

The next day, I had one of the tech guys from the school division stop by to check things out. He tried all the things that I had tried, and a few more. Alas, his luck was no better than mine. More bad words.

Today, I took the drive to the tech guys at the university. The starting price was $132, and that was just to hook it up and check if anything was salvageable. If there were any files, their software (Disk Warrior, I think) would chug away at it for sometime between a day and a week, with no guarantees about what would be recovered. I was financing this myself, so the thought of spending a few hundred bucks and possibly ending up with zilch was not appealing. As a last resort, I will try the freezer trick, but I’m not putting any money on it coming through for me.

So - apparently I will be spending the Easter break partly with my family, and partly with my computer re-editing a whole bunch of video The original video is intact in my super secure archiving facility (my desk drawer), so I don’t have to re-shoot everything. I have a brand new $250 GB external drive and a fresh copy of Final Cut Express (which I wished I had during the first edit since my needs had far surpassed the capabilities of iMovie).

I take comfort in these words of wisdom:

It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.

Hit it.

I am deep into must get project completed mode, since it is due in 2 weeks (although I am pretending that it is only one week until the deadline). As I work on this project I have noted a strange but deeply meaningful phenomenon, which I have dubbed Wall’s M.Ed. Project Principle (Wall’s Principle, if you want a shorter version).

The project will always be ready in 3 weeks.

This is true regardless of the amount of time spent working on the project, or the time until the deadline. When starting, one thinks This should only take me about 3 weeks. When in the midst of the project, one thinks I should have things wrapped up in another three weeks. When the deadline is 2 weeks away, one thinks Gosh, I wish I had another 3 weeks instead of only 2. Even when the project is complete, one thinks Hmmm - I could really make this a lot better with a few quick revisions; It would only take me about 3 weeks.

I’d like to refine this principle if I can. I should have it all worked out in about … well, check back in a while and we’ll see how things are going.

I’m working on a guide to digital audio for educators as part of my M.Ed. program, and part of the guide will include screencasts on things like recording/editing with Audacity, recording/editing with Garageband, etc. My question is which is the better format for screencasts - Quicktime or Flash video? (I had one suggestion that I could just use YouTube or Google Video, but I need to be able to run the guide off of a CD or DVD)

I’m producing the screencasts on a Mac, so using quicktime is easy with something like iShowU. iShowU records to quicktime, which I can edit in iMovie (also useful for recording voiceovers). I can export from iMovie straight into quicktime and I’m done. This sounds relatively easy, so it is definitely appealing.

I’m honestly not too familiar with Flash authoring, so I don’t know exactly how I could get a Mac screencast into a flash video format. I know there are some ways to convert a quicktime movie to flash, but I don’t know exactly how this works. I also know that there seem to be a lack of options for recording screencasts directly into the flash format on the Mac. Something like Camtasia would be great, but I don’t think there is a Mac equivalent.

So - quicktime or flash? What tools should I use? Anybody … anybody … anybody. (See Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to understand this obscure reference) Any suggestions are welcome.

As part of my M.Ed. project, I’ll be building a web site. Most sane people would do this using Dreamweaver or some similar product. I, however, am not one of those people - I prefer to create web pages by hand-coding the HTML and CSS files. I suppose if I wanted to be uber-geeky about it, I would write my own text editor (in assembler, if I wanted to be really hard core about it), but I’ll stick with ones that are currently available for the Mac.

My requirements are fairly simple. I need a text editor that I can use to write HTML and CSS files. Any text editor could do this. Heck, I could use vi if I really wanted to geek out. I’d like to have an editor that did some of the coding automagically. I like to hand code, but I don’t mind using some tools that help to automate the typing. I could use the code editor in Dreamweaver - I’ve used it before and its actually very comfortable to use. Using Dreamweaver just to do handcoding is like buying a Ferrari just for driving to the local grocery store - a waste of money and not using the functionality to its fullest. Besides, with Dreamweaver I might decide to use the WYSIWYG mode, and that is the way to the dark side.

I also like to use some open source software, if possible. The free (as in beer) part certainly appeals to me, but so does the speechiness type of freedom. In my experience, a strong user community around an open source project is usually a better source of application support than the support available for commercial software. Also, if I am really stuck on something or I have suggestions to improve the program, I can contact the developer(s) directly. Try that with most commercial software! I did a little bit of research into this, and thought I should share the results with others. Lest you think I am being overly concerned with this, a good text editor is to a coder what power tools are to a carpenter. We can get good results with mediocre tools but its an easier job to do, and more fun, with good tools. Admittedly, my needs as a coder, not to mention my skills, are minimal but I still like to work with proper tools. OK - here are my thoughts on the text editors I reviewed. I won’t claim that I’ve done a thorough job of testing each editor, so some of these descriptions are based on limited experience.

1. TextEdit Free with Mac OS (equivalent to NotePad in Windows). Nothing fancy for editing tools, just straightforward text editing. Free with all Macs, and apparently the source code is open and distributed with Xcode. TextEdit also has some nice word processing features, but I don’t need those. Rating: 1/5 (as an editor; for other uses it would rate 3.5/5)

2. JEdit Nice editor, many good plugins available including an XML plugin that does automagic tag closing for HTML tags, and makes tag suggestions when creating tags (similar to Dreamweaver code editor). No built in auto XHTML file templating, but a macro was easily written to do the job. Macro recording (or writing, if you aren’t afraid of a little coding). Feels very Emacs-ish. Open source.

Rating: 4/5

1. Smultron Open source, Mac OS only. It has a very Mac-ish look and feel to it, with the toolbar at the top. Multiple windows can be open simultaneously, with a pane showing a list of currently open documents. Keyboard shortcuts to move between open documents. There is a built including XHTML template. Full screen edit mode for distraction free writing/coding. Includes a command line tool - this editor has many command line connections, including ability to run shell commands, or run the file or selected text. It can auto-close tags, and can make text suggestions for partially completed word. This would make a really nice HTML editor. There is a lot of well-thought out functionality in this editor and may end up being my choice.

Rating: 4.5/5

1. TextWrangler Proprietary, but free, from the good folks at Bare Bones Software. This is essentially a limited version of BBEdit. It excels at using regular expressions to transfrom text, but as an HTML editor it isn’t as fully featured for coding HTML as Smultron or JEdit. Has an Emacs-ish feel to it.

Rating: 3/5

1. BBEdit The 500 pound gorilla of Macintosh text editors. I remember using BBEdit on my old (OS 8 era) Mac, and it was a joy to use as an HTML editor (I didn’t do much coding back then). I’m not sure if my memories of BBEdit are correct or if my expectations of an HTML editor have increased, but I find that BBEdit, like Text Wrangler, is an adequate HTML editor but not a particularly great one. The functionality in BBEdit is perhaps too much for my meagre needs, and it is verging on becoming bloatware (IMHO). It is also the priciest of the Mac text editors at US $125, which works out to $145 Canadian, quite a bit considering the availability of free editors like JEdit and Smultron, and the availability of lower price editors like TextMate. Rating: 4/5

2. TextMate This is an newer text editor but unlike Smultron, TextMate costs 39 euros, which works out to about $60 Canadian. As an HTML editor, it is as sweet as candy. New (X)HTML documents can be created from a template, which is editable. Keyboard shortcuts are available for almost all standard functions such as moving word by word or to the end of the current line.

An interesting variation on keyboard shortcuts are tab triggers. These are short strings (such as ‘div’ to insert a new div tag) that activate an action when followed by a tab. I typed in ‘div’ followed by a tab, and a pair of div tags were created including a placeholder for an id property; if I want to use it, I tab then type in the id for the div, and if I don’t want it, I hit the delete key then a down arrow and I’m ready to add content inside the div tag. It took me about 30 seconds to create a snippet (piece of text that is used frequently) for a paragraph tag (which suprisingly is not included with the program, or at least I couldn’t find it), then another 10 seconds to assign a tab trigger for it. Sweet!

TextMate was the winner of the Apple Design Award for best developer tool in 2006.

Rating: 5/5

Final thoughts I’d narrow my choices down to JEdit, Smultron and TextMate. TextEdit has no pretense of being a programmer’s editor, even for something as simple as HTML, and would only be suitable if you liked to type everything out one character at a time. I need something with a little bit more HTML programming finesse. Text Wrangler and BBEdit have great text processing capabilities, but feel a little too emacs-ish for me (not to start a series of comment flaming, but I’m more of a vi guy), and aren’t especially welcoming for someone who just wants to do some productive HTML coding. I like JEdit. It is free software/open source. Its extensibility by plugins is terrific, and there seems to be a strong community (always a good thing for an open source project). I have used it in Linux and Windows environments, and will continue to do so. The Mac-ishness of Smultron and TextMate, as well as their design as coding tools, make them my clear choices. Given my preference to use free (as in both beer and speech) software, Smultron will be my first choice. I may still be lured to TextMate, definitely my favourite of the entire bunch.

I came across this terrific little tool thanks to Wes Fryer - an online audio test tool that checks your speakers and microphone. It requires the flash plugin to work its magic. This is a great tool if you need to do a quick audio check for using Skype, recording from the microphone on software like GarageBand or Audacity.

Link: AudioHelp for your computer