Ariana's Blog

Last day in Eastgate Systems

2005-07-29T18:33:00.000-04:00

This was my last day with Eastgate Systems. It was a great experience working with these tutorials both because I gained a lot of experience and because I now feel more confident about the future. Before coming to Eastgate I was confused about my education so far. I knew that I like working with children but what I really enjoy is building learning materials using technology. I was not sure if I had chosen the right path and I was thinking that I might be better off choosing a computer science degree rather than an educational science degree from the very beginning.

However, working with Eastgate these two months, I realized that what set me apart of all the other expert users of software such as iMovie and Final Cut Pro was my educational background. Furthermore, what I was really enjoying, it was not merely the use of the software that demands some technical knowledge but the actual process of building learning tools for other people using the software.

Starting the last movie

2005-07-28T20:32:00.000-04:00

I started today the last movie, "Linking to external files", which we planned to finish before I leave. It's a small movie and thus I hope that I should be able to finish it tomorrow.

Finishing the demo

2005-07-27T04:31:00.000-04:00

Building a demo was a good experience. It was definitely easier than building a tutorial. Firstly, the main purposes of a tutorial and that of a demo are totally different. Although you can not put a clear line between a demo and a tutorial, a very rough distinction according to my view would be that a tutorial should teach people and thus should be built according to educational and psychological theories and principles, while a demo aims to inform users of what is new and persuade them into trying it.

While building this demo I did not bother highlighting the important concepts or details that users should notice. I did not aim to make users learn how to build a blog with Tinderbox. I simply showed the process very quickly, even skipping many of its steps. The narration was focused mainly on highlighting the advantages and the new features that Flint offers to Tinderbox users.

However, building a demo was not as easy as it seemed. In our case, it was a little tricky since the product that we wanted to show was not completely finished yet, and we used a pre-release version for the demo. Some features were not functioning properly or sometimes they were not functioning at all. I can now see that a tutorial for this product was impossible. However, a demo was feasible even with these obstacles.

Bulding a demo

2005-07-25T19:20:00.000-04:00

The plans have changed a little. Eastgate is making a new product that they wish to attach to Tinderbox. The new product is called "Flint" and it is a weblog builder for Tinderbox. Since the product will be new they thought that a demo would be helpful in informing Tinderbox users about it. Thus, we decided to postpone the last of the four scripts that we had chosen for the two remaining weeks and to make the demo of Flint instead. I thought that this was a good opportunity to create something different from what I was doing until now and to see the differences between building a demo and building a tutorial.

This time Elin wrote the script of the demo since I was still working on the seventh movie. She showed me how Flint works, we recorded the voice-over and I started building the demo.

The power of editing

2005-07-22T13:22:00.000-04:00

This movie was surprisingly finished very quickly. Everything was falling into place. I was really surprised that in only one and a half day the movie was finished.

While making all these movies I felt the magic and the importance of editing. You can completely change what you have recorded. You can change the order and the pace, delete unwanted noise and create a perfect world. It's really fascinating. Initially I would try to get the video and voice to match by repeating the captures over and over. Over time, I have changed my strategy to capturing the video and audio just once or twice, and then perform lots of editing to achieve the same result. Editing saves one lots of time since it is almost impossible to get something perfectly right altogether. After all, this is exactly what the purpose of editing is.

Finish the 6th movie

2005-07-20T15:50:00.000-04:00

I finished the sixth movie, “Adornments”, and wrote and recorded the next two scripts.

Selecting and droping scripts

2005-07-18T19:43:00.000-04:00

Elin would take some days off, so we decided to write down three or four voice-overs and to record them before she would leave. Thus, I would have the voice-over and I would be able to work on the next movies.

There are only two weeks until my internship in Eastgate finishes and we decided to choose what movies are more urgent to do before I leave. We chose four movies: “Adornments”, “Making a link”, “Linking to external files” and “Linking to URLs”. So far the average work is three movies in two weeks but I think we can try for the fourth one too. Thus, I spent the day writing the two first voice-overs.

Finishing the 5th movie

2005-07-15T14:36:00.000-04:00

Finished and revised the 5th movie.

Conference:Mac World

2005-07-13T22:39:00.000-04:00

Today, Elin and I visited the Mac World conference in Boston. I noticed that there were not many women visiting the conference, but surprisingly there were many products targeting women such as beautiful bags in different colors and sizes with a case for a portable music player or fancy cases for laptops. However, I still did not see any product directly aiming women as buyers in software or hardware. They were just creating feminine outlook in their products but nothing else. And it is worth thinking that indeed the market in this area would benefit more with women rather than men. Men would not be as much interested in buying fancy cases in different colors for their products. A black leather case is enough for them.

In addition to the above I would like to add this little story: Elin and I were heading toward the conference entrance. In front of us were around 12 men. They passed and no one told them anything. Then was our turn, but the woman in the entrance stopped us and asked us: "Can I help you please?" Maybe she thought that we lost our way to the stores inside Prudential. We replied that we wanted to visit the Mac World conference and then she just replied: "Ah! Ok, I am sorry."

3rd Meeting with advisor

2005-07-12T10:37:00.000-04:00

3rd meeting with my academic advisor.

5th movie

2005-07-11T10:31:00.000-04:00

We recorded the voice-over for the fifth movie and I began making the movie. The process was now well-known and more efficient:

- Record the voice-over
- Capture the necessary screen shots
- Insert in iMovie and make a draft movie by putting everything into place
- Revise the movie until the result is satisfactory.

However, the whole process of making a movie is very time consuming, and demands much patience. No matter how expert you are, some time is always required to finish a movie to a satisfactory degree.

Seeing the forest instead of the tree

2005-07-08T15:13:00.000-04:00

I spent the day writing and revising the scripts and the voice-overs as well as revising all the movies we have finished until now. Watching them after almost one month I was more objective in criticizing them and I began seeing the big picture of the project. Now everything falls into place and the idea of an interface in Macromedia Flash seems more meaningful.

Movies or images

2005-07-07T16:34:00.000-04:00

When I exported the last movie, I was surprised from its size, which was relatively much bigger than that of the previous ones. However, this time I had avoided using any still images and I used only video clips. This resulted to a much better movie quality, but also to bigger movie size, something that we have been trying to avoid so far. I started wondering what one should do, choose good movie quality or prefer the small size of the final movie. There must be a line between these two, but where should one put the line? It probably depends on your goal. I thought that the most optimal would be good quality since the movie size was not too big. However, in our case we wanted both good quality and the smallest possible file size. Thus, the decision is again to the designer and what he/she thinks is more optimal each time, depending on the specific movie.

I can now understand what I had once read in an article, where the author was observing that most people today think of movies as the best medium in educational software. However, the author continues by saying that the space a movie takes can be used more effectively with other means of learning such as text. A picture is a thousand words but as he observes, in the new information society a picture takes up much more space than a thousand words do. The bottom line in my opinion is, before you use a movie or a picture or a text, think what is more suitable and better in your case and choose the more optimal one.

Revising movies

2005-07-06T16:38:00.000-04:00

I spent most of my time revising the movie. The amazing thing with editing movies is that as soon as you think that you have finished and that they are perfect, the next time you see them they are completely much farther from what you consider perfect. You can find many things that you don't like. The voice-over is not synchronized well, or there is noise that interferes with the audio, or a video clip is not long enough. However, the trickiest part is the transitions. Personally I was never satisfied with them. They were either too slow or not smooth enough. The more I worked with them the more confused I was getting.

4th movie

2005-07-05T12:08:00.000-04:00

We eventually decided to integrate in the tutorials some existing Tinderbox documents in order to show the capabilities of Tinderbox. This was a good solution that satisfied most of the expectations about these tutorials. Thus, I moved on to the next movie.

In this movie I had to use many still screenshots of the different views. However, the compression we chose to export our movies was good for video clips but not for still screen shots. In the previous three tutorials we used more video clips than still images. Thus, the problem was not so obvious. However, this time the low quality of the images created confusion around what we were trying to show.

To solve this problem, instead of using still images, we captured the screenshots as video clips. However, this was a little more time-consuming because still images are manipulated more easily in iMovie than video clips.

Separating the second movie into two parts

2005-06-29T10:18:00.000-04:00

Watching the second movie again today, I realized how big and confusing it was. It was a three-minute movie but it introduced so many new concepts and features. We would definitely have to break it down. I watched the movie over and over and I figured out that the best point to break it down was after the narration about the container notes. After all, the part about extracting a note from a container was mostly about how to arrange notes into the outline view and not how to make a container note.

I did not have a script ready for the second part of the movie. I had the middle part but I was missing its beginning and its end. I therefore wrote the voiceover and figured out what to say at the beginning and at the end. Elin insisted that it was not so important, especially the end, because later we would probably change them depending on the order of the movies in the Flash interface. She was probably right, so I wrote a very quick end to this movie. I did the same with the first part of the movie. I left everything the same and just gave it a brief ending.

However, making this movie I realized one thing: How important it is to have a script before starting a movie, even though this script is probably going to change.

Finishing the second movie

2005-06-28T10:51:00.000-04:00

I spent the whole day revising the second movie and improving it. I managed to finish it and I exported into QuickTime. However, this time the movie was approximately three minutes long and I was not sure if we were going to leave it like this or break it down into smaller clips.

Voice over for the second movie

2005-06-27T10:26:00.000-04:00

I wrote down and recorded the voice-over after Elin revised it. The fact that Elin changed a lit of bit the order of the movie and added some extra things forced me to start taking new screen captures again and importing them in iMovie. Although I had to change almost the entire order of the captures and to add new ones, the revised movie took me less time to complete.

However, I decided to change my way of working for the third time. The first time, I first created the movie and then recorded and added the voice-over. Adjusting the voice-over on the movie was too difficult and time consuming. Thus, the next time I decided to create a very draft movie with extended screenshots at the beginning and at the end, something that would allow me to add the voice-over more quickly and easily. However, once again I had to change some of the captures since Elin would change them slightly while narrating. Even a small change in the voice-over such as reordering some parts of the script would result in time-consuming modifications to the movie. Thus, in the third movie, I will first record the voice-over and then capture the screenshots and compose the movie.

The second movie

2005-06-24T11:07:00.000-04:00

I decided to change some parts of the movie. This movie was about arranging notes in a hierarchy. Arranging notes in Tinderbox is a process very difficult to understand or discover. Personally, even though I discovered this in the huge manual, I did not manage to get it right from the beginning, since some parts of the process were very tricky. I needed Elin to show me and explain me those tricky parts of the process. I figured out that this should be difficult for other users as well, and I should therefore give more attention to it.

Initially I was simply describing the process showing the action on the screen at the same time. However, I thought that this process mostly involves psychomotor skills. It was a process that the users should learn and then automate such as what steps you should take to save a word processor document. Thus, it might be better if we broke that task into steps (a procedural analysis) and presented those steps clearly rather than simply describing the whole process. An example of this analysis is:
• Drag the note over the note you want to turn into a container
• Move the note over the right third of the container note
• The cursor will change into a right-pointing triangle
• When you see the right-pointing triangle drop the note.

Beggining the second movie

2005-06-23T10:23:00.000-04:00

I started the second movie. I have captured the necessary screenshots, imported them in iMovie and made the first draft with transitions. This movie seemed long, so we would probably break it down into two separate parts. However, I could not figure out at which point it should be broken down.

I have also slightly changed the script once again, something that is expected after making the first draft of a movie. I considered helpful at the end of this movie to have a short summary of the main points that users should learn. This would achieve two things: First, the users would have the opportunity to revise what they learned in this movie and review all the main points in a single screen. Second, this was also a good way to replace the parts of the script where the narrator would have appeared since we finally decided not to include a narrator.

Finishing the first movie II

2005-06-22T10:19:00.000-04:00

I have eventually finished the first movie. The results were much better than the first draft. I thought that some things could be improved such as one screenshot would be better to be redone as well as a part of the voice-over due to some noise, but I thought that nothing could be perfect and each time I will find other things that I have to correct. Overall, this movie was good enough to achieve our purpose.

Exporting this movie into QuickTime was not as easy as I thought it would be. At the beginning the quality of the movie was too low. I found out that iMovie could accept only DV movies and thus, when I was importing the QuickTime screen captures, iMovie converted them from QuickTime to DV and when I exported them, it converted them from DV back to QuickTime. This was disastrous for the movie quality. However, exporting it to DV gave us a better image quality but a really huge file: 600 MB.

After searching in the Internet, we found out that what we should do was to export the movies to QuickTime using “Sorenson Video Compression”. By using expert settings in iMovie we managed to both export the movie with a very good quality and to reduce the output’s size. Since the size of the file depends on its resolution, we decided to create a 640*480 (30-40MB) movie for the CD-ROM tutorial and a 240*160 (5-8MB) movie for the website since most of the product’s users presumably have low-bandwidth Internet connections.

Finishing the first movie

2005-06-20T10:36:00.000-04:00

I started revising the scripts for the third time. I had to correct the mistakes that I had made with the Note tool, and I realized that I should reorganize the order of the short movie clips. The best order for the tutorial according to my opinion would be: “Make a note”, “Turn a note into a container”, “View windows”, “Make a Link” and finally “The note tool”. I realized that this was not the final script again, since I would need to add and revise them continuously as I would move on. However, I thought that this was natural and should be happening since each time I would be more familiar with Tinderbox, something that would allow me to improve the scripts.

Nevertheless, the more familiar I was becoming with the software, the more tempted I was of falling into the mistake of wanting to put everything I knew in the tutorial. Fortunately, I had realized that soon enough and I decided that a line should be drawn and that some features should be left out for the users to discover, after learning the basics of the Tinderbox.

After finishing the scripts, I wrote down the voice-over for the first movie and I recorded it with Elin, who was the narrator. I then imported it to iMovie and tried to adjust it according to the picture. This was definitely easier than adjusting the image to the voice but not as easy as it initially seemed. However, the fact that I left some scenes to be longer than they should be was very helpful since cutting something was easier than extending it.

Creating a draft movie II

2005-06-15T23:52:00.000-04:00

I have captured the screenshots today. Firstly, I tried to follow the narration and do the tasks the narrator described. However, this proved to be difficult since some times I had to wait without doing anything and sometimes I did not have enough time to perform an action. Thus, I decided that the voice-over should be placed after the movie was done. After taking the shots illustrating how one can make a note, I imported them in iMovie. However, although the quality of the image was very good, after importing it in iMovie it became low. In spite of this we decided to continue and fix it later. Thus, I began the editing. I put all the segments in the right order and used transitions.

The first movie was finished but its quality was very low. The screen shots were not clear, the narrator scenes were not well shot and some parts of the movie were without narration. Nevertheless, although the result were not so good, it was a good beginning and a good experience that showed us what the problems are, how the process would be for the rest of the movies and what we should be careful in our next efforts.

Creating a draft movie

2005-06-14T23:33:00.000-04:00

I continued writing the scripts about the basics of Tinderbox. Explaining the six views was more difficult than the previous tasks. Each view has its own features and also shares some common features with some of the other views. Thus, it was hard to classify them in order to explain them in a more effective and meaningful way that includes repetition and common features, something that makes learning easier.

However, despite the fact that I was still writing the scripts we spent half of the day to make a draft of the first movie. We began with shooting the narrator and the voice-over. We used a small digital camera for this purpose. We used one of the meeting rooms for the shooting, which proved to be efficient. The light was good and the noise was controllable. However, the problems started when we finished shooting and we tried uploading the movies to the computer. The machine did not recognize the digital camera and thus did not upload our short movie clips. We tried different computers but no one let us do this. Thus, what we did was to shoot for again, this time with a webcam. This time we managed to have movies into the computer. However, even though the sound quality was good, the quality of the picture was very low. Nevertheless, we decided to use this video initially to create a draft movie.

Scripts

2005-06-13T23:58:00.000-04:00

I have spent three days so far writing scripts about Tinderbox's tutorial movies. The plan is to finish all the scripts about the basics of Tinderbox and to then start making the short movies. Today I have just started writing about the six views that Tinderbox offers, which is the last part of the basics. So far I have written scripts about notes and how to make them, how to turn a note into a container note and how to make links to other notes, to external files and to URLs.

Making those scripts was not easy. Although it seemed easy at the beginning, it was tricky and sometimes time-consuming. First, we should decide what to include and what to exclude since making a note could be simple, but how far should we go? Should we just teach how to make a note in the simplest way or try to add a little more such as shortcut keys and context menus? Moreover, we should figure the most optimal way to explain them and sometimes the way that Tinderbox works is so complicated that explaining them only with sentences was not easy. However, the fact that with movies we could also show the action while we would be describing a step was very helpful.

Finally, today I tried to get familiar with the software that we will be using to capture the screen shots: Snapz Pro X. It was very simple and user-friendly software with great results. I loved it from the first time: no frustration, no questions, and no confusion.

First plans

2005-06-08T23:50:00.000-04:00

After two days working with the software and creating different Tinderbox documents, I decided that I could move to the next step. I began to gather my notes and to separate them into quick start features and advanced features. One of the difficulties with the software was the large number of new terms, many of them inconsistent with other applications. Users have to learn what a container note is, what children or sibling notes are, or even worse what a Nakakoji view is. Thus, I thought that one more category about the terminology would be helpful.

After arranging my notes, I made the first script. The script was very draft but enough to make a constructive conversation with Elin and Mark and to make clear what we wanted to do about the tutorial. The whole idea was to make short, one-minute movies that would be accessible for users with low bandwidth Internet connections. Finally, after making these movies, a user interface would be created using Macromedia Flash to provide a way to choose and view the movies. The final product will be a Flash object on the company’s website. To create these movies we will use Snapz Pro X to capture the screen shots and Apple iMovie.

Learning Tinderbox II

2005-06-07T15:14:00.000-04:00

Second day in Eastgate, and I continued learning Tinderbox, in an effort to learn the software so that I would be able to teach it to others. I thought that if I keep notes of what I did not understand from the tutorial, or what took me some time to figure out, it would be helpful later, since I suspected that I would not be the only one with the same problems. Thus, I started taking notes of what I would found difficult or not easy to understand.

I went through the whole manual again for the second time but this time more carefully and more intensively. However, as soon as I thought that I had learnt this software, I discovered things that I did not know. On the one hand, the opportunities that this program offers you were so many, but on the other hand in this vast number of features the consistency was lost and thus to learn them was more difficult and confusing.

Learning Tinderbox

2005-06-06T10:24:00.000-04:00

The first day was an introduction to Tinderbox. I began with a user's manual, a brief tutorial about Tinderbox and a book describing it. Tinderbox at the beginning was too confusing and complicated. I spent about half of the day to learn how to create a note and a note for a note. However, the most difficult and frustrating part was to understand the purpose of this software and the concepts behind it.

After spending some time with it, I understood the idea of this software, which sounded fascinating and promising. It is like Kidspiration or Inspiration, but more powerful and advanced, and with more features. Working with it the first day was fun, even if I did not understand too much what was going on. I managed to read the user's manual in the first day. However, I did not manage to learn all Tinderbox’s features. After 6 hours I just managed to learn some of the basics features of it. This was probably the reason why the company wishes to build a multimedia tutorial about this software, even though there were so many written manuals and tutorials.