After a request from my wife I started looking for teaching resources to help with drawing in perspective. I thought this type of subject which is not simple but does follow rules, would be ideal for internet and I was right. There is a lot of material.
Sources for slide presentations includes slideshare and slideboom, and of course there was some very useful material on YouTube. Strangely enough Wikipedia was not so useful on this occasion, which is unusual. The above picture is one of my own. The following is the shortest useful presentation I found on YouTube.
Creating a film - this turned into a very tricky task as I fumbled around between a Mac, a PC and several programs. I've done this before but this time the technical gods were not with me! This took me back to the earlier days of computing when you expected things not to work; it seems like it can be still be like that today! Anyway, here is a short film on using the macro function in your camera. I made it because I am involved with a study circle in digital photography and it seemed logical to create something I could use. Unfortunately this means it is in Swedish but there will be an English language version available soon, and hopefully a dot.sub English translation available late tomorrow (Monday).
This creation showed me just how frustrating the combination of creation and technique could be. This is always a useful reminder of how it often is for our less technically interested colleagues and students as we try to persuade them of the joys of Internet materials!
But in the end it was satisfying to get this (definitely less than perfect) material out there on Youtube.
There is a lot of interesting material around on Internet. Amongst the material are many conference presentations and lectures which are interesting to listen to but which really gain very little by being filmed because the camera (usually only one) and the speaker never actually move! This makes for boring viewing, especially if the lecture is long.
When we are physically present at a lecture we (like the single camera I mentioned) are usually stationary but we can let our attention move around the room. We can at least switch between the lecturer and the slides and if things get boring we can check out all the other things in the hall!
So a good presentation switches our attention back and forth. Of course it really does help if the speaker speaks in an interesting way too! Here is an example from Videolectures.net and in this presentation you get to see the speaker, the slides, and even both at once.
This is a Google lecture (copyright Google!) so we can be fairly sure there were plenty of resources available. In a similar way the embedded TED talk below also uses a lot of resources to make sure the talk is interesting.
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This talk has the added advantage that it is only 4 minutes long, and it's CC licenced!
Having written about a well filmed resource I am afraid my offering is not going to be of wonderfully high quality - but with practice I will improve, and my film is omly going to be around 4 minutes long, about the only thing it will share with the TED film!
