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.