Hi,
This is Paul Vanouse and Trebor.
THE BELOW ROUND TABLE DEMO IS SEEKING INTERESTED DEMOERS--
PLEASE READ AND ADD YOUR NAME ON THE WIKI IF INTERESTED:
http://www.molodiez.org/wiki/moin.cgi/SoftwareForPedagogy
or contact Paul Vanouse <vano-*at*buffalo.edu>;
The aim of this round table discussion is to provide an overview of
software options for digital media educators that solve some of the
problems of teaching with "Big" commercial software. Big-software is
headed in the wrong direction for students for several reasons that I?ll
group under the headings "exclusive" and "aggressive". Exclusive contains
trends toward higher costs, trends toward higher end processor needs,
trends toward proprietary output formats, while aggressive entails the
increasing amount of piracy-protection that frequently bogs down students
in labs even when they are using "legal" software. Furthermore, the
increasing scale of big-software programs is itself a problem in education
as it distracts students with the sprawl of widgets at the expense of their
understanding basic of principles of computational media--essentially,
big-software emphasizes procedural task learning (job-training) in
opposition to cognitive principle learning (education).
Within the open source movement, server and operating system work has for
several good reasons moved quickly and had enthusiastic support of sys
admins. Open-source, shareware and freeware software packages have been
slower to emerge as competition to that produced by big-software. This
panel seeks to demonstrate and promote interesting software programs that
could replace big-software programs in educational settings--simple tools
for image processing, web-design, sound processing and experimentation, 3-d
animation, graphical layout, etc. Expanding use and availability of simple
shareware/freeware tools will reduce skyrocketing software costs,
cumbersome installation and registration procedures, and the amount of time
teaching how to use software,
Most student labs are either Mac or PC based--seldom both. Thus the format
of the roundtable tech skill exchange should be back-to-back sessions for
each--probably one hour each. In each session, demonstrator/participants
should plan to give a 5-10 minute demonstration and discussion of a
specific program. This discussion should pragmatically address questions
such as "what does it do better and worse than its big-software rivals?"
"What are some known bugs?" "How intuitive is it to use?" "What i/o
formats does it include?" After each presentation a link will be added to
an online resource to facilitate post-conference use. Demonstrators will
be solicited prior to the conference from the list of attendees.
Non-demonstrators are of course also encouraged to attend and participate
in discussion.
Personal disclaimer: I am neither an expert nor an authority on many
non-exclusive, non-aggressive software programs. While I plan to demo one
Mac-based program, my primary role in this roundtable would be that of a
facilitator. I am hoping to reduce the dependency on big-software within
my department over the next year and I assume that other attendees are
seeking similar goals or perhaps even promoting their own independent
software productions.