It's strange. This is probably the most productive two consecutive days I've had all year as far as paperwork goes. And I did it with yet another bad case of the colds (and swollen tonsils).

Saturday was a busy one for my students... rushing their assignments to meet the 8AM deadline, and then take their exam online 12 hours later. Meanwhile, I was doing my own rushing with the LVM 202 course manual, and later on checking the MMS 173 assignments. I was so unusually psyched that I was still rearing to go past midnight, so I went ahead and checked their exam papers right away. I finished at around 5AM Sunday.

I wasn't gonna sleep long, though... there was still Game 3 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals to watch in less than four hours. The throat still hurt and I could barely get up, but it was worth it. I got up early enough to witness the dissection of the Magic by the Celtics.

After that, it was back to business and I went back to the exam papers. Good thing I did, as I was able to catch a few checking errors of mine. And one of the students wanted feedback, so I fixed that for everyone, too.


All that's left to wait for now are their final projects. Heck, I can probably give their grades on the spot on our last F2F session if I wanted to. I wonder how many times the BAMS students have experienced receiving their grades as expeditiously. I've never been as prepared to conclude a course as I am right now with MMS 173 and I feel good about it -- swollen tonsils notwithstanding.


In the meantime, all I can do now is keep the discussions going even if it no longer has a huge bearing on their grades. Perhaps it will still help them in their projects. It's better than me twiddling my thumbs while waiting for someone to ask for help.

I hope everything goes well this Saturday. It'll be a nice way to cap off this rough summer.

In the meantime, I've earned myself a day to not worry about anything...

I showed the MMS 173 the basic things they should know about image editing -- levels, color balance, cropping... that stuff. This was easy enough. Lately, I took it one step further by showing them a few of my favorite techniques complete with my own sample takes.

By the chapel at Corregidor

Orton Effect for a flower

Fake HDR - Ferris Wheel (Brisbane, QLD, Australia)

Well, that was fun...

As for their own tries, there doesn't seem to be much of a problem in following the tutorials I referred them to. However, this exercise has shown that the real challenge is for the students to develop a better sense of knowing when and where to apply these techniques. I'm afraid that will only come with enough practice. And at this rate, it's going to take much more than what remains in this summer class.

MMS 173: "Forcing" my students to blog

This was something I had planned since the beginning of the class. Ironically, I forgot to personally tell my students about it. Twice.

The "deadline" for their first course related blog entry is almost upon them as I write this. I'm glad to say that more than 3/4 of them complied. Then again, after I said that it's graded, it's not like they had much of a choice.

Of course, their thoughts on the course is important and will influence how MMS 173 will be handled in the future. But something else about these blogs are of greater interest to me at the moment.

Just by their first blogs, I have learned quite a number of things about these students of mine. The most obvious things would be the ones they wrote about. But the real interesting bits were how they wrote their entries -- the things they chose to emphasize, the things they left out, their choice of words, their overall tone... More on this later. Ah, BAMS students, you really are a very interesting lot.

Anyway, I had originally planned on giving a "perfect score" for just posting a blog. But now, seeing how some students worked harder than others, I realize that it wouldn't be fair. So, now I score in private...

MMS 173: April 24, 2010 Session

This is undoubtedly the most challenging face to face session I’ve handled to date. One or two hours is difficult enough. Three hours, even more difficult. But 12 hours?

While planning for this, I had thought that this could be overkill. I mean, what can I possibly do to keep the students occupied for that long?

I made it to Diliman at around 7:30AM. Unfortunately, we started much later than I had hoped for at La Mesa Eco Park. Luckily, the weather was relatively cooperative, despite the heat. More importantly, we were presented a lot of shooting opportunities. It’s not exactly the Makiling Botanic Garden, but the amount of people moving about was definitely a subject worth exploring.

We were done there by 11:30AM and there was barely enough time to drive back to Diliman, have some lunch and rest before I started the afternoon session…

Product photography was another good topic to tackle. I managed to let the class do a little hands on with little more than a bag of regular household items. It was a good exercise illustrating the importance of good lighting when shooting indoors. The class enjoyed this one… good.

Next on my list was a post processing demo — too little time to spare. I just did a quick unrehearsed demo of what I typically do with Photoshop or GIMP. It’s a good thing some of the students already have experience on this, so they can spearhead the post processing activity in their respective groups. This went well, too.

Group project discussions… all of them will be covering interesting topics… Gotta give props to the smallest group in the class — they had the balls to attempt to build three different multimedia projects. I’m impressed, but I had to make them choose their top priority. Damn the other two products if time won’t allow for their completion.

That afternoon session took nearly four hours. At this stage, it was clear that I had underestimated the time needed to adequately hold these activities

After an hour and a half of rest, off we go to the UP Diliman Oblation for some night photography. Only a small fraction of the class remained at this point. But even they were visibly tired. I had planned on a walkabout, but in the end, we never left the vicinity of the Oblation until we packed up and went our separate ways past 8PM. It’ll take a lot of time and practice for them to get the hang of taking pictures in the dark, but hopefully, I’ve helped nudge them towards a good direction.

Overall, there are parts I could’ve done differently and more effectively, which I will do next time. But receiving thanks from many of my students for means I did something right. This day will be a highlight for me as a UPOU faculty member for a long time.

Building MMS 173 on the fly

Multimedia Studies 173 has proven to be quite a challenging course to facilitate. Envisioned to be a required production course for UPOU BAMS students, MMS 173 was meant to be a full residential course, requiring students to attend regular classes. Yeah, like that was going to happen.

The obvious hurdle was the need to deal with students too far away to attend the face to face sessions. As for the ones based in Manila and neighboring areas, generally speaking, their schedule turned out to be just as inflexible during summer as they usually are in regular semesters. These problems forced me to totally re-think how I was going to handle the course to accommodate all the students and even the playing field. This is easier said than done.

My original course guide has already been overhauled at least twice now and continues to be modified along the way. As much as I didn’t want it to happen, this first have unwittingly become part of the course development process – guinea pigs so to speak. The least I could do was be upfront with them about the situation and encourage them to be proactive about the whole thing. I’m still not sure about them, but on my end, it has worked beautifully so far.

I think the students I’m able to meet personally have been generally doing well. Now, I worry for the ones I don’t.