My third and final blog entry on this page is a summary and evaluation of the Educational Technology course which is part of the Master’s of Arts in Teaching program at Southern Oregon University. This course has been an enjoyable experience for me, and I feel that I’ve learned a lot. Upon conclusion of the course work, this being my final assignment, I can say with all certainty that I am now much more capable and comfortable using a wide array of computer programs, and the likelihood that I will use those programs in the classroom has gone up correspondingly.

I discussed our claymation project in my last blog, so I will not go into detail about that here, but that was certainly one of the most eye-opening highlights of the course. There are some others that are worthy of mention also.

Building a website using the Dreamweaver program was a very useful lesson for me, because I have never done anything like that before. It was very frustrating at first, when my page was in a minimalistic state, and I didn’t really understand what I was doing. Once I got the hang of it, however, it was quite simple, and ultimately I am very impressed with the end result.

The slideshow presentation that I made using Microsoft Powerpoint was another very engaging project. It was not my first Powerpoint presentation, and I knew that the program was intuitively easy to use, but I pushed the envelope personally on this slideshow by learning how to set the presentation to the tune of one song which played throughout the slideshow. When I finally smoothed out all the kinks and synchronized the timing of the music with the slides, I was elated at the quality of my finished product!

All too often, adapting to new forms of technology can be a frustrating ordeal. This is especially true for those of us who are not terribly tech-savvy. And all too often, reluctance to embrace new forms of technology which may be intimidating to use can be a limiting factor for teachers. But often the opposite is true as well. When one expands the array of technological tools which they are comfortable using, the result can be empowering, exponentially increasing the potential for productivity or creativity.

We in the MAT program at Southern Oregon University have had just such a technological success story in our experiments with claymation using digital cameras and Apple’s popular Quicktime software.

When I was in elementary school in the early 1980’s, we had a special lesson in stop motion animation, which was one of the most exciting and engaging things I’ve ever done in school. A visiting expert in animation conducted the lesson, guiding us through the process of making a large paper backdrop, then cutting out paper manipulatives which we would move around to create the animation. I think that this is the sort of thing which is naturally appealing to kids, and we were fascinated by the process, especially when we got to watch our own finished films on the big screen in the classroom.

The instructor also gave examples of how to do basic animation techniques like making flipbooks. This was something my friends and I did many times in the years to come, but as for the stop motion animation, we never got a chance to try it again. Why? Because the entire process was based on the use of equipment which was uncommon and expensive. Doing such projects in those times required a specialized camera which was prohibitively expensive, and involved old-fashioned film reels.

As we learned in our recent claymation experiment at SOU, those days are long gone. Now, any common digital camera can be used, so long as it is mounted on a tripod. The only other tool necessary is Apple’s Quicktime software, which is free and widely available. In the space of just over an hour, my group was able to conceptualize and shoot a short claymation film. With perhaps another hour of post-production work on quicktime, we had a very cute finished product which we were able to immediately upload to the internet. This advance in technology is a tremendous boon to teachers, who can use these techniques to wonderful effect, not only in teaching kids to use the tools, but also to expand their creative horizons.

The article “Playing With Our Minds” by Chris Suellentrop is an interesting and insightful analysis of the effects that video games have on our minds, our behavior, and our culture. No longer the exclusive province of the youth, video games have a more pronounced and pervasive presence in society today than ever before. Being a member of the original video game generation, weaned on arcade classics and Atari games, I have plenty of insights on this subject.

The obvious flashpoint of controversy with regard to video games centers around those games that feature overtly violent content. The games which have drawn the most attention in this sense are the Grand Theft Auto series, but they are hardly the first to push the envelope when it comes to extreme violence. I must say that it struck me as rather ridiculous when I read the section of Suellenthrop’s article in which he recalled the rabbi on the McNeil/Lehrer Newshour, complaining about the violence in Space Invaders during the early 1980’s. However, as early as 1988 games with truly graphic violent content were appearing on the scene, such as Mortal Kombat, in which every fighting sequence ends with a death blow in which a player might have his spine ripped out, or suffer some other similarly gruesome fate.

As for the Grand Theft Auto series, Suellentrop makes a great point when he says that the games “are popular not just because of their transgressive content, but also because they are designed to allow players to roam freely across a gigantic three-dimensional cityscape”. I have played these games a bit, and I can testify to the truth in this statement. Many classic adventure games such as Legend of Zelda or Metroid featured broad worlds in which the game player could explore at will, but these were presented in two dimensional space, and more importantly, one could only carry out certain functions which were intended by the game designers. For instance, in Legend of Zelda the protagonist could walk into a hut containing an old man who would give them a certain message which featured a clue to assist in solving the game. If one were to exit and then walk back into the same room, the old man would simply repeat the exact same message, ad infinitum.

At the same time, the transgressive content in the Grand Theft Auto series is certainly something to be concerned with. Having played the games, I can say that these particular titles have a heightened capacity for fueling sociopathic fantasies. A player who chooses not to follow the sequential missions and objectives which the game offers can simply wander the cyber-cityscape wreaking havoc at will. Among the possible actions are driving down the sidewalk killing all pedestrians, standing on an upper level parking lot with a sniper rifle picking off random pedestrians, or walking down the street with a baseball bat assaulting random pedestrians until they lie dead in a pool of their own blood. Most of us are confident in our abilities to draw the line between appropriate conduct in real life vs. video games, but it goes without saying that not everyone has the same capacity for making that distinction. Obviously people are going to range from one end of the continuum to the other in this sense.

Another point in Suellentrop’s article that I would like to briefly touch upon is the idea that video games can actually help develop certain faculties of intelligence. I believe this is especially true with puzzle games. The repetitious playing of such games can help to hone hand-eye coordination, and also increase one’s ability to intuitively recognize and react to spatial information.

I was once very fond of playing a solitaire version of Mahjong which I had loaded on my personal computer at home. The games were timed, and there was a top ten list of best times posted on the sidebar. At the time I had a very old and damaged mouse, so the cursor jerked around the screen wildly, making it incredibly difficult to quickly win a game of Mahjong. Nonetheless, I compiled a list of times which my roommates found impossible to beat and difficult to believe, even when I replaced my old mouse with a new one. Another good example is the classic puzzle game Tetris, in which various geometric shapes drop down from above, and the game player has the goal of filling in solid layers without leaving any open spaces. As the game progresses, the pieces drop faster and faster. At my best, during a period in which I played the game almost constantly, I would have moments in which I slipped into “the zone”, and my performance was absolutely staggering. Of course, any game would ultimately end at some point, but the speed at which I could successfully move the shapes into the correct places was mind-boggling at times.