Tag Archives: learning

Starting a new PolyWogg Guide…about astronomy

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

Over the last few years, I have been surfing and reading a LOT on astronomy, making notes here and there, etc. On a not infrequent basis, I find that the info I’m looking for is spread across multiple sites and books.

Take exit pupils for instance. I read the RASC Observer’s Guide section on exit pupils more than once, and didn’t get it. I also read several other websites and books, and didn’t get it. Then I read Michael Swanson’s Celestron NexStar User’s Guide II, and it clicked. All the little pieces suddenly meshed. And I immediately wanted to share that info with others in the way that made sense to me…partly as I found the other descriptions lacking.

Not that the other writers were wrong, or that they didn’t do a good job, it was just that it didn’t resonate with me. Which makes me wonder if others are in the same boat. And based on how many people read my post about good alignment with the Celestron NexStar 8SE, there are others who like my take on how to explain things.

So, just as I have done with my guide to government competitions, I started thinking about another guide in the same vein — A PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy (Completely Unofficial and Totally Unauthorized).

Except not the same. Instead of writing a series of posts that I would eventually cobble together into a book, I am more interested in “tear away” pieces in the form of downloadable documents. One- or two-pagers that condense all the info into a short digestible morsel. No need to read multiple chapters if all you care about is aligning your finder tool to the scope you’re using, for example. Of course, a reader’s mileage may vary, just as mine did with the other elements I read. And to be clear, I don’t want to make any money from these pages, or turn them into a book. I just want to share them with others…if they help someone, great. If not, easy to click elsewhere and move on.

If you have suggestions for topics, or comments on any page, feel free to send them my way!

Go to the Table of Contents -> Table of Contents

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AstroBlog 2019, outing #21 – Outing to the Fred P. Lossing Observatory

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On Monday, August 26th, Jacob and I headed out to the Fred P. Lossing Observatory (FLO) in Almonte. The land is owned by the Mill of Kintail Conservation Area, but they let RASC Ottawa put an observatory there in slightly darker skies than we have in Ottawa. There is a gate with a lock, a warming room, and a couple of buildings with larger scopes in them. If you get trained on them, and pay a small fee each year, you can use the scopes. Otherwise, as just RASC Ottawa members, you can use the grounds to set up your own scope.

While Jacob and I wanted to do some observing, my main reason for going was another member in the club. He and his son (J1 and J2) had bought a new scope, a Celestron Powerseeker 127EQ, and were struggling to see much through it other than the basics. They had not yet managed a polar alignment, nor figured out starhopping, and were looking for an intro night from someone in the club. My first option of a would-be mentor didn’t work out for them, so I agreed to do it myself.

My willingness to take on this extra role for someone is driven by two things. First, I know what it is like to have a new scope and struggle with the opening setup. I did that for five years. And each time I had a break-through, it was because someone helped me in person. Astronomy can be a lonely hobby at times and while links and webpages and online videos (oh my!) are helpful, they often pale in comparison to someone taking five minutes in person to walk you through a learning curve that they mastered years ago but you would spend hours trying to figure out yourself.

Second, Jacob needs to learn some of the basic things too, and I can teach him. But since I’m a blogger, I’m often caught by a desire to turn that “learning/teaching” into a post that anyone else can read if it helps. For example, my posts about solving my alignment issues with the Celestron NexStar 8SE are among the highest hit counts I have, next to the HR posts. People have had the same issues as me, and they wind up on the site, looking for tips and tricks, or hoping for solutions to a problem they have. Which has led me to an idea for a new “guide” — the PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy.

However, unlike my HR guide which I’ve seen as a series of posts all going into a big book at some point, I’ve moved more towards a series of hand-out sheets. Simple one- and two-pagers that summarize the info concisely which someone can just download and print, if they’re interested. So figuring out how to teach it to J1 and J2, and to Jacob, has led me to having to figure out how to explain it to someone else in an organized fashion — a pseudo-curriculum, if you will — and writing some quick guides to the various topics. Eventually, I’ll launch a new page on which I’ll post the various links, but for now, I was just trying to teach them three things — aligning your finder tool to your scope, learning to star hop, and aligning your scope to the sky.

The finder tools we had were a TelRad on my 8SE, a Rigel Quickfinder on Jacob’s 4SE, and a red-dot finder on the 127EQ. Except the dang red dot didn’t seem to be working at first, We just couldn’t see the dot. So I showed them on my scope. Jacob already knows how to align for the finder scope, and managed to do it mostly on his own. Later we got the red dot working too.

For navigation, I started with a planisphere, one for Jacob and one for J1 and J2. Explained how it worked, and gave them a paper copy of my guide. But the sky wasn’t dark yet, so you couldn’t see them yet. I also showed them my starmap (the Orion 600 folding paper map).

Last, we did an alignment to the sky. I showed them how my 8SE aligns to the sky, and then we did a linear scales alignment for their EQ mount. Later, my buddy S showed up with his daughter M and was able to give a LOT more guidance on working an EQ mount. Whew. And J1 and J2 were able to see much more using their extra EPs that they had bought (they bought one of the Celestron kits). I think the training was helpful for them, but time will tell. They have a couple of things to still tweak to get fully going.

For Jacob, his alignment worked well, and we did a joint sky tour for the night. Considering I didn’t have the exact setup info for the observatory, i.e., the right GPS coordinates, and so I improvised them a bit, my and J’s alignments worked pretty dang well. At the end of the night, J did an awesome job helping me clean everything up together. Much better than my experience at the cottage, and I was really grateful for the combined effort. It made things go so much better.

For the night, we saw both Jupiter and Saturn, a bunch of clusters, including the Hercules Keystone and cluster, and S showed me the teapot below Saturn. When we first got there, the sky wasn’t looking great, but it turned out pretty well overall for the night. And we were gone by about 10:45 p.m. Another guy, R, who runs part of the Observatory site, was there with some friends doing a sky tour with one of the bigger scopes, and they seemed to have a good night too.

And it gave me an appreciation for how to teach certain topics that I didn’t have before…I’m calling that a win. Jacob had a good night too, but I think he was equally enamoured of the name Fred P. Lossing Observatory, or as he renamed it, the FLOSSING Observatory. So he flossed before we left…

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Metaliteracy – Week 5 – Understanding How Information is Packaged and Shared

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Week 5 of Coursera’s Metaliteracy course is entitled “Understanding How Information is Packaged and Shared”. I was initially skeptical of the week, as format is rarely something I have thought much about outside of the mainstream. For example, a blog post vs. a news article, and the likely credibility of the two by default. Kind of like peer-reviewed vs. non-peer-reviewed articles. But as I worked through the readings, and the assignments, I actually found that I liked the content more than I expected.

For example, it talks about it from a creation stand-point. An academic wanting to advance learning in a specific area is likely to follow a traditional route and publish in a peer-reviewed journal using technical language appropriate to the field. By contrast, the same academic might want to make a presentation to students that would make the same information available but tied to more fundamental principles. And equally, the same academic might try to reach out through blogs or popular press articles with infographics to encapsulate similar information. But the same infographic wouldn’t work for the technical crowd. And while all that is obvious, another element hadn’t occurred to me.

That it’s the same process for me with my blog. I am not trying to be the academic talking to the peers, nor am I teaching students. My target for my HR guide and my blog in general is usually the Average Joe on the street. But I usually default to text. I rarely put much thought into infographics which are often a better vehicle for the Average Joe. While I consider many of the same elements, I rarely boil it down so starkly. In particular, one of the readings talked about various formats available for communicating:

A book
A journal article written for scholars in the field
A blog entry that is public
A Facebook message for only one’s friends
In-person communication
A text message
A chart with data
An infographic
A YouTube video montage
An online timeline containing text, video, and photos

It has started me thinking about my HR Guide in book form and whether that was ever the best format. I’ll likely still do it, but I have my eye on some other formats for subsequent versions.

The first assignment for the week was a simple worksheet that asked you to pick a topic that you could explain to someone else, choose three different formats you could use from the above list to communicate information about it, and then give some strengths and weaknesses for the format, how much the format lends itself to collaboration / feedback / sharing, and whether the format is important to the content.

The second assignment was to reflect on your own role both in critically examining online material (I chose the example of my frequently seeing so-called factual memes or infographics that seem one-sided or misleading and having to dig deeper to get to the truth), what triggers me (i.e. the one-sidedness that seems off), and if it affects you in your own role as producer of information.

And finally the third assignment was to expand on the producer role and how I as a producer use various formats, how I started, whether I considered those other factors, etc.

An interesting week, much better than I expected.

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Metaliteracy – Week 4 – Ethical Use of Information

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Week 4 of Coursera’s Metaliteracy course is entitled “Ethical Use of Information”. The main materials for the week are a great series of videos called “Everything is a Remix”. It shows, in a multitude of examples, how ideas and even content are remixed and re-used, built upon, edited, etc., all as part of new creations. And for me, it leads to a kind of intellectual conundrum. If, in many spheres of life like science, the goal is to build off of the efforts of others and to advance learning, how do you do that while respecting the intellectual rights of others in an ethical way?

The remix videos are great, and worth watching even if you aren’t taking the course. The remastered version is below:

The other readings and the assignment for the week are a bit more mechanical, and not very well done. For example, the first assignment question is about whether or not you can scan or take a pic of a calendar you have on your wall that has a cool astronomy photo on it, and then share it online. I don’t much care for the Q as there is no ethical gray area, it is not even legal. If they REALLY wanted to make it an ethical issue, the question would be if you could take a picture of it to include in a review of some sort (and thus triggering fair use for review purposes). Otherwise, the answer is relatively clear (no, you can’t).

The second question was to consider finding three things on the ‘net of different sources, and outline a proposal for how you could “remix” them together to create something new. And then run through some of the concerns (ethics or legal) in doing so, plus the intent behind the remix. I liked the idea of doing something astronomy-related, including as my first element a print from a Mikmaq artist (http://thomasclair.com/moon-new.php) that I received as a gift:

(linked from the Artist’s website).

My second idea was to include one of my own moon shots:

And then perhaps adding in info from the Maps of the Moon site (https://cseligman.com/text/moons/moonmap.htm) to label how some of the existing features are thought to look like the woman or the western tradition of a “man in the moon”.

Note of course that this is just a thought exercise, we weren’t actually doing it.

Overall, I thought the remix videos were good, but not sure the week really met its objectives. I feel they need to take the licensing, ethical and remixing pieces and revisit them as a single week, with the focus first on the ethical and remixing elements, with the licensing part as a specific sub-element. I felt we went backwards this week.

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FtU #02 – MOOC this, universe

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I completed a previous MOOC on video game analysis (#50by50 #32 – Complete a MOOC – Understanding Video Games) from the University of Alberta and I started one on Metaliteracy some time ago from the State University of New York (SUNY). But I’ve found the Metaliteracy course a bit challenging for its design.

There are ten weeks, with each week having a mix of videos and readings to consume, and then a couple of online assignments to fill out about what you learned. The previous one had an option for just auditing with little interaction, this one needs that interaction to really work. Which is generally fine, no problem.

Except each week’s “submission” then has to be graded by your peers. Which would work fine if you had any other peers doing the course at the same time, but it has continual intake. People can start and stop anytime, the deadlines can be reset with a click of a button, etc. Which means I finished weeks 1-4 and sat waiting for “grades” on the submitted postings/assignments until someone started the course, reached the same point, and reviewed them. As part of the community, you also have to review three other people’s materials. Which also doesn’t work if I go to review them, and there are no other people doing it at the same time — once or twice, I had NOTHING to review. 

Which means while I’m doing my part, there’s no cohort moving through the course with me. So I got to week 4 and stalled. Eventually, someone else will come along and review my stuff and I can review theirs, but until then, my submissions go into the temporary abyss of the internet waiting for “review”.

I also confess that the course, while okay, is not as interesting as I had hoped. It has some interesting readings related to curation of info, fact checking in a social media age, licensing, etc., and I’m getting what I wanted out of it, but it is definitely not at the top of my list of interesting presentations and presenters.

The “challenges”, however small, are not an unusual occurrence, nor any grand universe conspiracy, it’s just a really frustrating form of group work that holds back my somewhat boring learning while I’m waiting for others to engage and do their part.

Except it isn’t really holding me back, that is / has been my perception. MY part is just to do the assignments each week and mark other people. I can still do my part, and complete the majority of my learning. If I don’t get the checkmark for any given week because nobody marked my submission, who cares?

MOOC this, universe. I’m proceeding anyway. I’m designating Mondays as my MOOC day, either at lunch or at night. I’ve even downloaded the app for Coursera so I can view it on my tablet rather than at night on my laptop. Week 5 on formats as a consumer and producer is done, moving on to week 6.

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Metaliteracy – Week 3 – Intellectual property aka Creative Commons

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Week 3 of the Metaliteracy course is entitled “Becoming A Digital Citizen: Understanding Intellectual Property” and I confess I was disappointed in the week for two reasons. First and foremost, I was looking for a deeper dive into the issues around academic publishing and journals, and instead we were treated to a one-size-fits-all promotional video of how big academic journal publishers are pillaging the land of academic freedom. I learned far more from Michael Geist’s posts about the CRTC hearings back in December on potential reforms to the Copyright Act to address university usage of academic materials.

However, the second disappointment was more about the lack of nuancing of “free” vs. “open”. It is generally pushed by a group of online advocates that “free” is the wrong term, as it confuses free movement with free cost, and the much better term is open to everyone with no restrictions for access or cost. And for this week’s assignment, it was the topic we were assigned, but the expectation was clearly that we focus on how open was “better”.

I confess that I don’t think “open” is any better term than “free” for two reasons.

First, the classic quote is “information wants to be free”, but free in this quote means moving around without restriction. More like “free will” than “cheap”. But it gets corrupted by those who want to argue in favour of things like piracy, even for academic journals, that “information wants to be free” meaning $0 cost. Yet when people talk about “open”, it changes the dynamic. It focuses more on people “accessing the info” (a pull factor) rather than the original idea — information wants to move, it’s more dynamic than static. The latest research on prenatal screening results, the latest findings on cancer treatments, the best plugs to use for charging your iPhone…or, in my case, the best approach to preparing for an interview. People create information and they want to set it free into the wild. “Open” focuses on the recipient, not the creator, but it is the creator who decides on the license.

Second, open doesn’t have to be free cost. We tend to focus on “open” in this sense for things like texts that are written, or software. Information that can be in a digital form and transmitted digitally for “free”. Yet, if I use my example of a book I want to write, I have to pay for internet. I have to pay for a website. I had to pay for the courses I took to learn how to design a site, upload it, and cover ongoing hosting fees. If I worked out that it was $1000 a year to me to make something available, and 1000 people would access it, would “free” be $0 per copy or $1 per copy (which would be my break-even point)?

Equally, back in university, I worked for a technology support office for students located at the university. It was pre-internet, and so if people wanted copies of free software like statistical programs, they had to come to us to get it or find an online Bulletin Board to access from home or the mainframe. Most didn’t know how to do that so they came to us to get copies. It was free to get the software, but our office had to buy disks, print the manuals (a few sheets of paper), burn the software onto the disks which cost both the original costs of the disk plus the staff time to create them physically, and then to put them in an envelope, handle the cash, deposit any revenues, fill out reports like any good little store employee, etc. It was not, in fact, $0 to distribute the materials. But it was “open” to everyone. By the definition espoused, reimbursement for costs incurred would not in fact count as “open”.

I accept there are barriers to users. I accept there are barriers to movements. But I don’t think “free” or “open” gets around those issues. Nor do I think the 5Rs of openness (the ability to retain, reuse, revise, remix or redistribute) are as simply dealt with as the week’s materials suggest. Open Access is not simply the “best alternative” in a “free world”, it just happens to be one alternative. It is descriptive, not normative to me.

If you’ve read my website, you know for example that I have written part of an HR guide for participating in federal government job processes. Government processes and interviews are fairly specialised HR beasts, with major differences from the private sector in what will be asked, how it will be graded, etc. and very little of it is public or written down. So employees or potential employees frequently walk in blind to the processes, make simple mistakes, and miss out on a job they were both suited for and wanted. I used to provide 1-on-1 coaching for people, and it grew to group presentations, and now an online book.

I’ve considered publishing it commercially, but some of what holds me back from that are the same constraints / issues at play here. I think the info should be both free in cost and open for access. I gained the knowledge from people who helped me along the way, and I want to pay it back for others. But at the same time, I don’t want people simply coming along, copying all of it, and publishing a book under their name. It is commercially viable in an online format. I don’t mind people sharing it but I’m not writing it so others can make money off it.

And yet another side of me is conflicted. Writers should get paid for their work, and far too many authors have been ripped off over the years by bad contracts. I am not yet finished the work, and on an irregular basis, I waffle between the options. I would love for it to be completely public domain, yet I would be incensed if someone made a profit off my hard work and writing. So, the compromise would seem to me to be almost simple — no commercial uses. And yet I also feel a bit of a twinge when I look at adaptation. Reworking my materials? Remixing it? Tweaking and editing it and then sharing as their own, even with citation? Hmm…

For now, I’m likely to be comfortable with no adaptation, no commercial — but then it would be Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, and definitely not a free culture license. I’m considering a cascade of materials, such as a shorter form that is fully open, a slightly more detailed version that is less open, and then the full version at this level.

As an added wrinkle, my employer also has a small say in the outcome. As an employee of the government, there are ethical obligations too, and the need to avoid a conflict of interest. Which means, in practical terms, I need to have them review it before I publish to ensure there are no conflicts with my day job, even though I’m publishing in my own personal life. And part of their considerations for “allowing” me to publish it (although technically it is more they identify if there are any potential conflicts, in the end it is still my decision) includes a lot of the same issues…will it be open access, will people have to pay, is it more factual in nature or is it a creative work, etc.? The more it looks like an open, free, factual document, the less conflict; the more it looks like a commercial, private, creative document, the more potential conflict (almost like I was charging people to know how to apply for jobs that are free to apply for by anyone, and even greater potential for appearance of conflict if I was running a competition while selling the book).

I might be too harsh on the week’s materials. I did learn some new stuff, and it got me working through the CCL options for the future, so maybe that’s all I can ask of the MOOC.

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Metaliteracy – Week 2 – Creating and sharing a social identity

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Week 2 of the Metaliteracy course is entitled “Creating and Sharing a Social Identity” and after the enjoyable first week’s materials, I was looking forward to seeing what nuances would crop up this week. The video for the week was a short animated feature showing a young woman interviewing for a job, and while the interview went well, the hiring manager googled her after the interview to see what her online presence looked like. The hiring manager found no LinkedIn account, found a recent tweet she posted saying she “nailed the interview”, and some old tweets complaining about her job, and about hating people and her boss. So the hiring manager moved on. The “lesson learned”, as intended, is that people should think about the persona they project online and the impact it can have on your professional life.

And as I went through the week’s readings, and other materials, I seriously hoped that there was going to be more to the week’s offerings than a 1970s-style guidance counselor advising young girls to watch their image (don’t worry, there is more than that!). A hiring manager who was more up to date in their thinking could just have easily seen her lack of a LinkedIn profile as innovative (not doing the same as everyone else, particularly if she’s active on another platform) and there are those who view LinkedIn as old and stodgy. Equally, the tweet saying “Nailed It” could just as easily be seen as a positive sign, projecting confidence and a strong desire to work there. And finally, the tweets about the old place she worked? Not ideal necessarily, but it explains why she’s looking for a new job that is better suited to what she wants to do. I might tend to agree that posting negative things about your work or boss aren’t the best idea on Twitter, but I wouldn’t feel the same about sharing thoughts on Facebook with a smaller circle of friends and coworkers with strong privacy settings. The whole video completely seemed too simplistic and one-dimensional. More like an “after school special” designed by my grandmother.

In the readings, one of the first ones starts with seeing what you can find out about yourself online i.e. Go Google Yourself! The article is public, https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/how-to-google-yourself-effectivelywhat-to-do-about-it/23035, and quite interesting, albeit eight years old. I share the same name as an US politician, so almost all of Google is dominated by his stuff. If you append my city after my name, my twitter feed comes up as the first link. A couple of comments on FB pages and an old comment on a newspaper site show up too. But you are almost to the end of the first page before you see a link to this website, and even then it is just because I have a subarea devoted to an old HR conference that I helped host, and the pages include all the organizers’ names, including mine. My website domain is obviously NOT my personal name, just the PolyWogg nickname and I don’t list my name on it too widely, for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, it’s not really needed. I don’t hide it, but I don’t see any reason to shout out my full name either and attract spam. Second, I had a bad experience once where someone disagreed with something I said in a discussion forum online about the public service, and her way of trying to “shut me down” was to post my home phone number and address in the forum, along with my work info. It didn’t stop me from pointing out the fallacies in her approach and people laughing her out of the room so to speak, but I also don’t need crackpots looking me up in the phonebook either.

Third, sometimes when I’m blogging, I talk about thing related to being a public servant, and while I don’t think anything I say gets me in any dangerous areas for my duty of loyalty to the government (in fact, I’m more often defending something by explaining it, not attacking), some parts of the legal test are how identifiable the link is between you personally and your position within the government. Since I don’t actively advertise my name, just my PolyWogg nickname, it’s a partial link that is broken. Of course, anyone with a WHOIS capability can look up who the domain is registered to, so I’m not trying to be anonymous. But I’m not actively advertising either.

I found the second article (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/19/online-identity-authenticity-anonymity) debating anonymity and authenticity both off-base six years after it was written and eerily prescient in some of the quotes about the tension between those who want to stamp out anonymity to kill the trolls vs those who deny authenticity is even possible (i.e., that FB and Instagram feeds are NOT real life but rather a cross between a censored version that is usually more positive than reality or a wishful thinking world of what you want your life to be like now).

The third article from 2013 (https://gizmodo.com/how-to-erase-yourself-from-the-internet-1456270634) talks about killing your Google+, FB, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts to get rid of a large part of your online presence, but as I said, I have three of those, and my search didn’t even turn those ones up, other than Twitter. And the site that knows the most about me right now? Amazon, hands down.

The second half of the week is focused more on privacy and protecting one’s data, and the readings aren’t bad (a bit paranoid in some places, but not bad). https://www.privacyrights.org/consumer-guides/online-privacy-using-internet-safely has some online guides written for newbies.

For the assignment / discussion for the week, the focus was on:

Overall, not a bad week. But I don’t know that I feel any more “empowered” in my metaliteracy for considering whether your online persona is really, well, you?

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Metaliteracy – Week 1 – Introduction to the course

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I finished taking my first MOOC on Understanding Video Games (#50by50 #32 – Complete a MOOC – Understanding Video Games) and next on my list was one related to Metaliteracy – Empowering Yourself in a Connected World. The description was pretty good, talking about being a bit more reflective about our online work, and it was offered through Coursera. The downside to that is that I’m really only interested in “passive learning”, watching the videos, etc., not actively engaging online with fellow students. That might seem like a cop-out of sorts, but I like the idea of a curated course that pulls together interesting material in a professional manner. It would be nice to be able to afford all The Great Courses library and work my way through those, and I have managed to snag a photography course through them (still in progress) plus two new astronomy titles (they were having a sale!).

But, as I said, the Metaliteracy course looked interesting as a stepping stone, just as the video game was…I used the video game MOOC to get my feet wet in the world of gamification, and despite the fact that I timeshifted it over the course of a couple of years, I got a lot out of it and gained a foundation to understand gamification in a very different way than if I’d just started with gamification. For online engagement, I wanted to step back a bit and look at the online world through a more objective lens. The Metaliteracy course might do that, although I hate the term literacy being used that way. The course is offered as a collaboration between SUNY Empire State College and the SUNY University of Albany.

The Introduction for Week 1 started off bad for me…the hosts/leaders are a librarian and a vice-provost for academic programs. My fear is that often these types of approaches are about trying to do something “different” i.e. “we want to do a MOOC, what should it be about” as opposed to having a vision for a course and delivering it as a MOOC. Time will tell, right? And my initial reaction is part of the course itself — how I am evaluating the info without full context.

The course will involve this week’s intro, plus three sessions on digital citizenry (identity, IP, ethics), modes and formats of info sharing, creating info, participation in global community, curating and metacognitive awareness. And the end will focus on how students move on to being teachers. Okay, it’s got a decent structure.

One thing I liked in the intro was the idea of a metaliterate learner (meh) having different roles all woven together…communicator, translator, author, teacher, collaborator, producer, publisher, researcher, participant, etc. I would probably add curator in there too as a separate heading, but this week probably isn’t the week to quibble too much. As an active blogger, I experience all of those roles, so I’m curious to see where the course goes from here.

EDIT: Originally, I thought I was going to hold myself to just the videos, having downloaded them so I could timeshift more easily when I didn’t have a live internet connection. Instead, I realized that the readings are still available to me as I did “enrol” in the course, and thus still “live”. I went in to check something, saw the readings, and have now gone through the readings for the first week. The excellent chart mentioned above was included (i.e., not just in the video), and more importantly, they have a great article about what metaliteracy is compared to digital literacy, etc. Here is an excerpt from their paper:

Several competing concepts of literacy have emerged including digital literacy, media literacy, visual literacy, and information technology fluency, but there is a need for a comprehensive framework based on essential information proficiencies and knowledge. New media literacy and transliteracy have also responded to the rapid and ongoing changes in technology. As part of a metaliteracy reframing, we argue that producing and sharing information are critical activities in participatory Web 2.0 environments. Information literacy is central to this redefinition because information takes many forms online and is produced and communicated through multiple modalities. Information literacy is more significant now than it ever was, but it must be connected to related literacy types that address ongoing shifts in technology.

(Source: Mackey, T.P. & Jacobson, T.E. (2011). Reframing information literacy as a metaliteracy. College and Research Libraries, 72 (1), 62-78. doi: 10.5860/crl-76r1))

Over the course of the article, they compare it to information literacy (too research-y), media literacy (too narrowly focused on media writ large, not the digital and technological world), digital literacy (a little bit too narrowly within digital environments), visual literacy (heavy focus on visual design), cyberliteracy (participatory aspects only), and information fluency (like info literacy, but with extra techno bent). Metaliteracy, the topic of the course, tries to bring the best of all the perspectives together…participatory, collaborative, critical, more than info as a commodity, beyond skills-based definitions, engagement with the technology, transliterate (“the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media”, Thomas et al cited in the paper), blurring of information / entertainment / economics, and incorporating IP and privacy issues. A rather daunting list.

And yet, having read it, I’m left with two large questions. First, while they talk about the practical issues around doing research in a webbed-world, and how to deal with defining your search environment — are Amazon reviews in-scope? Youtube videos? music lyrics? — I don’t see anything about the time factor inherent in all of it. The more you engage with an everchanging “techno” world as your environment, the more your research is defined by a smaller and smaller snapshot in time. The minute you blink and take your “readings” for your research, not only does that act influence the subject but also the next minute it is gone, changed again by the new info available on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Second, while they talk about the “framework” as being less about “skills” and more about cognitive frameworks, as soon as they apply it to the practical worlds, it quickly becomes very skills-focused, as all applications do. If so, is a “skills-reduced” framework the way to go?

I don’t know the answers, but I like the questions. Let’s call it a promising intro.

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Henry’s Photo 101 course – Week 1 – Camera Fundamentals

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

I mentioned in one of my #50by50 posts (#50by50ish #37 – Take a photography course) that I was taking the Photo 101 course that Henry’s offers, and that I wanted to blog about the actual classes each week. Unfortunately, life intervened and I didn’t get to blogging each week, and the company has also altered their offerings to put more of it online or have one-day workshops than to offer in-person classes over several weeks. Nevertheless, I wanted to blog about it, so here I go.

Week 1 was about camera fundamentals, and if I called it “meet your camera week”, it would be a bit more direct. You learn all the basic controls, what they do, and because it is a generic photography class with everyone having different brands and models, a lot of it was hands-on instruction to walk various people through THEIR camera settings to get it into a relatively common set of options for everyone to start with in the class. Overall for the week, there were six basic areas to cover.

A. DIAL MODES

One of the first things we talked about was that the goal of the course was to give people a lot more confidence to get off of automatic mode and into more manual settings. As such, we started with the obvious — how do you get out of automatic mode?

For different cameras, the dial has slightly different words and letters, but generally you switch the dial from automatic mode (a green A usually) to one of four main manual modes — Program Mode (you change a couple of things, the rest is automatic), S or Tv is shutter priority mode (you set the shutter speed and it figures the rest out), A or Av is aperture priority mode (you set aperture, it figures the rest out) or M for manual mode where you set and control everything.

Nothing particularly surprising in there, but I have the Canon model so it has the Tv and Av labels. Why? Av stands for “aperture value”, which seems understandable. And so Tv is shutter priority…wait, what? The abbreviation is for “time value”, i.e. how long a shutter time you are using. I think Nikon uses A and S, but no biggie, we all adjusted. I was surprised no one asked why it was called Tv, but I figured I was the only one who didn’t know, so I didn’t ask either. I should mention in passing that I was in a group of 10 people as it becomes a bit relevant for week 3 and 4.

B. DISABLE LIGHT STABILIZATION

One thing we did change early on to get everyone to the same spot was to turn off the auto light stabilizer — this stops the camera from overriding your settings and guessing how much light you want in your pics. After all, the whole point of going to manual modes was to have a lot more control. So we turned it off by going to Program Mode (P), pressing Menu, choosing CAMERA 2 as the tab, and turning off AUTO LIGHT STABILIZER.

C. HEY, LOOK, A VIEWFINDER!

Next on the list of things to learn more about was the viewfinder on the camera. Sure, lots of us have smartphones and we want to default to using the little digital display to line things up, but the viewfinder gives you a much better understanding of compositional elements (week 4), and it’s good to get into the habit of using it now. And if you can turn off the screen, your battery will last longer anyway. Just saying.

Anyway, there were two aspects of the viewfinder that were emphasized, and I confess I didn’t know either one. First, while I knew there were little numbers showing up in the viewfinder display, I didn’t know what they were. Across the bottom is usually exposure compensation (week 2) in the middle, key settings for aperture or shutter (bottom left), plus a few other handy things to know. Quite small print, but they’re there. If you press the shutter button down half-way, they appear.

The second thing is that while the camera does the autofocus thing for the actual image in the lens, you can also adjust the viewfinder for YOUR eyes. There is a small dial next to the viewfinder that is a diopter that allows you to adjust the viewfinder focus (not the camera lens, just the viewfinder) to your vision. Some people take their glasses off and adjust it to their prescription; others tweak it slightly to their viewing eye.

D. ISO SETTINGS

I’d love to tell you that it stands for something like “image sensitivity ordering” as that would seem to make some kind of sense, but it really goes back to the International Standards Organization. Yep, it has nothing to do with photography. It was the international way to measure and compare the light sensitivity of your camera’s sensor. In old film cameras, it often was referred to as film speed or the ASA rating. Generally, the higher the ISO number, the more sensitive the camera is to light. Why does it matter?

In photography, imaging, even just plain seeing, you only get a picture or see things by light reflecting off objects and coming into your eye or camera. In order for the camera to “capture” the image, it has to be able to see gradations of light and distinguish between light and dark. People often refer to it as “capturing the light”.

When you’re using your camera, you can tell it how much light you want to capture. If you set it to AUTO ISO, it is a general, all-purpose setting where the camera will figure out how much light that it is seeing coming in, and it will adjust higher if it isn’t getting that much light. In other words, if you have a lot of light, it will set it for ISO 100. If you have only a little light, it will make itself “more” sensitive to the little light there is by adjusting to ISO 6400, for example.

Outside in the daytime or even bright artificial light, and if you’re out of AUTO ISO mode, you will likely set it somewhere between 100-400 ISO. This works well if you’re just using your camera in hand-held mode, or if slightly lower light, with a tripod. But here’s the catch…the more sensitive your setting, the more sensitive the camera is to any change in light, including IF YOU MOVE THE CAMERA. So, generally, the more you up the ISO setting, the more you want to increase stabilization and use a tripod.

If you are in a low-light situation, you might want to go for 800-3200.

If you are in a REALLY low-light situation, you could go to 6400 (the limit on my camera) or more (some go up to 20K+).

Now you might think, “okay, you adjust it just for level of light”. And that’s a good rule of thumb. But that is too simplistic. Cameras always work at capturing light as a trade-off between three things — light sensitivity, how long your shutter is open, and how wide the opening is aka aperture. If you boost light sensitivity, you get more light; if you leave your shutter open longer, you get more light; if you have a really big opening (wide aperture), you get more light. If you do all three, you get a white image with no details.

So, suppose you are outside, it’s a bright sunny day, and you want to take a picture of your cousin out waterskiing. Now, because you know that it’s an object in motion, you need a really fast shutter speed — take a quick pic, freeze the motion, and move on. But the faster the shutter speed, the LESS light the camera is letting in. And if you open the aperture really wide, it’s going to take longer to snap the pic, likely resulting in blurring. So, to compensate for the fast shutter speed, the wise photographer can boost the light sensitivity. Basically saying, “Okay, I need a super fast shutter to open just wide enough to get the shot, and then close really quickly, which will allow me to ‘freeze’ motion, and since that won’t give me much light in that short of time, I’m going to boost the image sensitivity way up.”

I took the following photo a few years ago in a preset scene mode for sports, which at the time, I didn’t really know what the camera was doing, but now I can go back and figure out what it did (actually, this is one of the learning methods in the class — find a photo that we like that we took previously in auto mode, and go back to figure out what the settings were that worked and why). The camera had given me a fast shutter speed of 1/1600th of a second. It kept my aperture fairly open at F5.6, partly as I was zoomed in, and it changed my default bright day setting of about ISO 100 to ISO 400.

Now I was also taking high-res images, maximum pixels, and if it had been a cloudy day, the camera might have bumped me up to ISO 800 or more. Indoors, fast action sports like basketball, the camera would likely go up to ISO 1600 or maybe even 6400. But because the camera was adjusting on the fly to my “fast” settings, and greater light sensitivity, I was able to get this one.

Other reasons to increase light sensitivity is if you MUST get a particular shot, i.e. if you miss it, it’s gone, as it increases likelihood of capturing something. Sports shots are often like that, get it now or it’s gone, but there are other times too.

E. AUTO-FOCUS

My Canon Rebel T5i / 700D was considered to be, at the time that I bought it, a high-value entry-level DSLR, and many newbies love it out of the box as the stock lenses all come with powered auto-focus. In fact, most users may never ever take the lens off auto-focus mode. However, we learned that auto-focus needs three factors to be at play:

  1. AT LEAST MINIMUM DISTANCE: Lenses all have different minimum focus distances. Macro lenses will let you get up close and personal with a flower or bug, but most lenses won’t. A standard lens wants to be back a few feet from your subject. So if you’re closer than that, it can’t auto-focus. You may struggle to get it to focus even manually, but that’s a somewhat separate issue.
  2. CONTRAST: If you are wearing light colours, like white, against a flat white wall, the camera is going to have trouble figuring out distances. There’s no contrast between you and the wall to tell it that you’re closer and to focus on you. The easiest contrast, most often, is that something is overlapping something else. Your eyes do the same thing. You see a telephone pole off in the distance and a car over to the side. You may not be able to visually tell which one is closer immediately but if you can see wires leading up to the pole, and roadway leading up to the car, you can intellectually guess which one is closer. However, if the car passes in front of the pole, you can immediately tell which is closer, both intellectually and visually. Cameras have limited reasoning ability…they want to see something darker/brighter in front of something lighter (and thus farther away), and if there is a strong contrast between the two, the sensors can pick up the difference almost “visually” rather than “computationally”. If it can’t, it’s going to struggle with any sort of auto-focus. You may even see it struggle as it focuses in and then out, in and then out.
  3. STILL OR SLOW-MOVING. If the object goes by like the Roadrunner, your camera is going to say, “Umm, what was that?” Because it was moving too fast to focus on it. It couldn’t keep up with focusing, kind of like where it is now, getting ready to take the shot, boom, it’s moved and the focus is off now, refocus, ready to snap, dammit, where did that roadrunner go?

However, while auto-focus is good generally, there is also a propensity to have multi-points of focus and semi-continuous auto-focus. If you instead set it to a single point of focus (a red dot in the middle, for example), you can focus on whatever you want at any distance with a half-press of the shutter and “lock in” that distance. Then, you can move your camera to wherever you want to centre it.

Why would this be useful? The example in the book is looking through some trees at someone who is on a dock to the left. If you focus in the centre, it will focus on the trees and leaves which are about half the distance to the person. Auto-focus will lock there by default, and the person will be blurred. Instead, if you turn your camera and point it at the person, get it in focus for them, pressing half-way down to “lock that distance”, you can then rotate the camera so the trees and leaves are back in the centre, and take the shot. The camera is still focusing on the person (locked to that distance) but the composition will be the trees in the foreground slightly out of focus and the person sharp. You often see this in wedding photos where people are walking through the woods and they are razor sharp at a medium distance but not necessarily centred in the shot. A much easier example to understand is using it focus on something in the distance if you’re at a zoo to “lock the distance” and then turning so you’re shooting through the fence. If you auto-focus normally, it will focus on the fence; if you focus on the distance, the fence more or less fades away.

F. MANUAL PICTURE BRIGHTNESS

But we learned that sometimes you don’t want to adjust ISO because it will mess up other things. How do you brighten a shot without a flash? There is something called manual picture brightness or EV for exposure value. It’s an extra setting that allows you to do +/- increments from 0.0 being neutral. Mine lets me go up and down in 0.3 increments, up to +5 and down to -5. My smartphone does +/- 2 in .5 increments, although most people using their apps have NO idea what the EV does. If you increase EV, your pic is brighter; decrease EV, it goes darker. It just gives you a little more control without messing with the other settings. It is apparently particularly good for difficult lighting like snow (DSLRs often dull it so boost an extra EV nudge) or in low light generally (DSLRs often over-brighten it so reduce it an extra EV nudge or two).

And that was the end of the first week’s class. If I had to say what I got out of the class, I would say:

  1. More comfort with manual and the dial modes;
  2. How to control the viewfinder, and even that there was a diopter control;
  3. The link between ISO and shutter speed for sports shots i.e. how I got the shot I did of the cousin water-skiing;
  4. How to “lock” focus at one distance and then compose; and,
  5. How to adjust picture brightness with the exposure value.

In class, we took some pics to practice, mostly playing with things at different distances to get things in focus and then with manually enhancing and reducing exposure values (or over-adjusting in these cases).

Close focus on teacher:

Farther focus on TV:

Boosted the EV:

Decreased the EV:

A good first week…and then we had homework. Yes, homework! Mostly just to replicate some of the practice in the classroom.

A relatively “normal setting” photo:

EV reduced:

EV enhanced:

Close focus, far object blurred:

Far focus, close subject:

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