Week 4: Using Video to Convey Information

Evaluating a "found" video 

In keeping with my professional development series on programming (see week 2), the video I have selected is a 1 hour and 15-minute video of a professional development seminar giving by Microsoft in 2014.  Because I am typically providing professional development at the university or at a business the internet is generally unrestricted and I am able to do whatever I need to do.  The topic of my video has to do with software engineering best practices and is something I usually reference as a “further study” item so that those individuals who wish to learn more can engage the material.  Sometimes a group of engineers will watch this video together and then we will take the best practices and apply them to code written by a member of the team as a hands-on training exercise.

This video uses many of Mayer’s design principals.  It follows the redundancy principle in that the speaker is showing his source code on the screen while he talks. You get to see him code out the examples making it an effective way to learn the material (Example:  here).  It follows the voice principle in that an actual person is presenting the material and you hear his voice through the whole clip.

One area that could be improved upon is the Image Principle.  It would really enhance the experience if the presenter had a video feed of himself in the corner of the slides or while he isn’t showing his screen.  This could help the learning experience.

Found Video:

Created Video

Professional Development/Classroom

The video below is a tutorial on how to create a simple mobile application which gives you the temperature for a given zip code.  This video can be used by anyone with a basic web development skillset and a windows computer.

Blooms:

	Understand	Apply	Create
A. Factual	Student knows that Ionic is
B. Conceptual	Student Understands conceptually how it works
D. Metacognition			Student is able to create a simple mobile application which can check the temperature of a given zip code.

Ionic Framework - Beginner Tutorial By Eric Whitmore

Application

Like the “found video”, I am applying the redundancy principle in that I am showing slides and source code as I talk through them. I am also using the Coherence Principle in my video in that my slides are very clean and clear. There isn’t a lot of miscellaneous information on them. I also adhere to the Pre-training Principle by providing tutorial prerequisite software, which is free, and I list prerequisite skills which are required and how to learn them. I think tutorials like this help in the classroom and professional setting because it can be done with people with a minimum skillset and all the tools used are free.

Reflection

I don’t think that my thinking has changed but one area for improvement would be to accommodate the Image Principle more by including a video capture on my tutorials.  One technology that I have used in the past that does a good job of this is Panopto.  Panopto does a screen capture, audio capture and video capture via your computer’s webcam.  Then the software lets to change the size of the video, or screen capture based on your needs.  It is a really engaging way to present recorded material that has a screen capture component.  Something I enjoyed was watching my tutorial on creating a mobile app.  I believe it to be well done and I really enjoyed creating it.

Week 3: Digital Images

Lesson

I am using the same lesson from week 2.

Classroom/Application

The objective of my professional development is to help software engineers come to an understanding as well as the importance of Unit and Integration testing.  Like last week, I would utilize the digital images in a professional development setting.  Images help to engage the audience and can really help the student quality information.  For example, in my Infographic I show a doughnut chart which shows the savings, as a percentage, of development time saved over the life of a project.  The graphic conveys the information a lot better than just simply stating it.  The Coherence Principle states that “people learn more deeply from a multimedia message when extraneous material is excluded rather than included” (Mayer n.d., p.5).  I believe that the Infographic is a perfect expression of this principle and I believe my Infographic aligns with the principle.  See below.

Reflection

I haven’t had many opportunities to create Infographic in the past so it was nice to be able to do so for this assignment.  I used www.piktochart.com and really enjoyed the experience.  Piktochart makes the development of infographics so simple that anyone with even the slightest bit of computer skills can use it and create something that looks clean and professional.  I would recommend it for infographic creation.  I used Photoshop CS2 for my image creation as it was what I am familiar with and I used Open Broadcaster Software (https://obsproject.com/) to create a screen capture video, then I used http://ezgif.com/video-to-gif to convert the video screen capture to a gif.  All the tools were pretty easy to use and there is video tutorials available on YouTube for each of the items.

Image Collage

Gif

InfoGraphic

Loading...

Week 2

Presentation/Learning Objectives:

As a lead software engineer, I provide professional development to my colleagues on a regular basis.  I have a standard presentation that I use when presenting on software testing and design best practices which would benefit from an enhanced multimedia platform like Padlet.  At the end of this post is a Padlet that includes links to the external resources I use in my presentation.  My peers can use this both as an introduction to the material (Mayer’s Pre-training Principle) and as a reference after the training is over.  I can further incorporate Padlet by asking my colleagues to post relevant information on the topic for future presentations in a specific area which doesn’t clutter up the Padlet.

	2. Understanding	3. Apply	6. Create
A. Factual	- Engineer knows the difference between a Unit test and an Integration Test - Engineer can summarize the SoC design principle - Engineer can summarize the SRP design principle - Engineer can summarize the DRY design principle - Engineer can summarize the importance of an Inversion of Control container
B. Conceptual		- Engineer can identify the SRP design principle
D. Metacognition			- Engineer will use Test Driven Development to create a C# WebApi that can create, write, update and delete information which have associated unit test code

Copyright in software engineering:

Because software, and technology in general, are constantly changing the internet is usually the best place to find the most up to date information.  Copyright typically comes into play for software engineers when they use someone else’s source code.  There are a variety of difference licenses software engineers and companies use to distribute source code over the internet and some have very important implications.  For example, some software licenses state that you can use their code but only in a non-commercial way while others state that you can use their code any way you like.  Some give you permission to modify their code whereas others require that you use it as is.  The typical piece of software today uses tens, hundreds or even thousands of other people’s code snippets (called libraries).  The issue arises when you violate that libraries license and open yourself up to litigation.  This has become so much of an issue there are software packages which read through a company’s source code looking for license violations so that the company can either replace or purchase a valid license from the code’s author.

When giving my software testing and design best practices presentation, if I have new software engineers or it hasn’t been covered in a while, we have a discussion about copyright and which types of software engineering license help us to avoid copyright infringement to limit litigation. 

In creating my Padel, I attempted to adhere to Mayer’s Pre-training Principle, Spatial Contiguity Principle and Coherence Principle.  The Pre-training Principle should improve learning through a basic understanding of the material, the Spatial Contiguity Principle should draw attention to the most important materials and by not adding a bunch of ancillary resources to the main Padlet area I am accommodating the Coherence Principle. 

Reflection:

Being a software engineer and having to train other software engineers on best practices has forced me to become familiar with Copyright issues.  This week’s readings reinforced what I already knew on the subject.  I did enjoy using Padlet and hope to find other ways to use it in the workplace.  As stated above, I tried to be consistent with my good design principals and using a tool like Padlet made that pretty easy.
One way in which I grew was I happened upon a YouTube video where lawyers review what is and is not fair use.  It was highly informative and I would recommend it as supplemental material for this course. See below:

Created with Padlet