Lightning in a Bottle

I’ve just installed Photoshop Elements 3, and unfortunately, I’m really underwhelmed. I say this reluctantly, because I’m a big Adobe fan, and really loved Elements 1 and 2. Also, Adobe generously supports our training program here at Puget Sound ESD as a service to teachers in our region, so I feel pretty positive about the company as well.

Still, if you currently have Elements 2, don’t be in any hurry to upgrade to version 3. They have made some significant changes to the interface, and in my opinion made it a cluttered mess. For instance, the Palette Bin that used to sit unobtrusively in the upper right-hand corner is now a huge box that runs the whole length of the screen on the right side. You can hide it, of course, but I never had a reason to before.

There are many little issues like this, including moving items from one menu to another, adding new (more complicated, unnecessary) options, and removing useful ones, such as “Fill Flash” and “Adjust Backlighting.”

It feels like a bad case of Over-Engineering Disease. The focus was on adding more functionality without keeping in mind the target customers, who want something that’s fairly simple to use. It reminds me of Adobe’s first stab at photo software for consumers, called Photo Deluxe. It never did very well because it was a bad combination of limited functionality with an over-friendly, cluttered interface that actually made it more confusing (to me, anyway) than the full-powered Photoshop.

Adobe learns from their mistakes, though. I hope that version 4 takes a step back to a cleaner, neater interface. And “Revert” goes back under “File” where it belongs!

You know, there might be such as thing as too much access to information.

I just re-discovered The Internet Archive. This is yet another astounding online collection of documents, images, sounds, music, and films. There aren’t enough hours in my life to explore what’s in here. Not that I won’t try, of course. Life in the digital age is dangerous for an info junkie like me.

This is also home to the “Internet Wayback Machine.” On their main page, you can enter the address for any web page and look at archived versions of it from the past. For an agency like ours, it’s like looking at old high school photos. “What were we thinking when we designed that?”

ZDNet has a good online interview with Cornelia Brunner about the challenges of integrating technology into the classroom. (Free registration required.) She is associate director of the Center for Children and Technology at the non-profit Education Development Center, and has a real-world picture of what many of the barriers and issues are. No rose-colored glasses here!

I was surprised at the speed with which document cameras took off in classrooms over the last few years. One of the next quickly-adopted technologies seems to be Classroom Response Systems (CRS), or “clickers” as they are often called. The online GlobeandMail has an A.P. article that looks at their use in colleges. They are quite widespread in higher ed, but starting to quickly make the jump to K-12 classrooms with the increasing availability of computer projectors.

The biggest impact (at least when they’re used correctly) is the ability to for the teacher to keep track of the understanding of the whole classroom. In a typical situation, the teacher can ask a question but can only get the response from one or two students. With a CRS, the students all respond to the multiple-choice problem. Not only does that give a holistic view for the teacher, it prevents students from being able to coast along without participating. It does, as the article title says, change classroom dynamics. IF they’re used correctly!

It seems like every time I turn around I read another article bemoaning the lack of students going into technology or engineering careers. Then I read articles like this one that indicate a significant drop-off in job opportunities in these same areas.

I think the real message is further down the page in the article. Growth is in innovative technologies, not established ones. Established technologies become commodities, and sell at low prices and profits. Think of calculators. The skills to develop or maintain commodities don’t have much value, either. After all, if your calculator breaks, do you take it to a repair shop?

We don’t need to create more engineers and programmers. We need to encourage the growth of more flexible, innovative and creative individuals with strong math, science, and technology skills.

The amount of video material available online continues to increase at a remarkable clip (no pun intended). The BBC has established an online gallery of their archives that will eventually make 1,000,000 hours of video material available online. This will include over 70,000 hours of footage from CBS news as well. The focus of this material is for licensing, so it won’t be open for students to download clips without watermarks in them, but it’s a peek at how the Internet is changing the world of media. Up until now, the vast majority of this material has been sitting in a vault somewhere, probably never before available to the public. Now it will be available (at a cost) to anyone in the world with a web connection.

The Library of Congress has an extensive downloadable video collection, but it can be difficult to find. Their search system doesn’t let you select which kind of media you are looking for, so a search by the term “Puget Sound” will return every kind of document, sound recording, picture, film, or whatever they have in their archives. However, if you add the term “motion picture” to your search, it will help reduce the number of returned records. Once you’ve found clips that do match your general criteria, they usually also have links to similar files and collections.

They do have 15 film collections that can be found at at this part of their site if you just want to browse. I particularly like the Animated Films (1900-1921) myself!

This may just appeal to me because my grandfather was an entomologist, but the Christian Science Monitor has an article about online insect image and activity sites. I particularly liked the Living Jewels website, with spectacular pictures of some of the most colorful insects in the world. (Grandpa was an expert on longhorn beetles.)