what I did this week (04 April 2015)

04 Apr 2015

This week was about a lot of

and not so much of

Anyway, Rachel - yes, that Rachel - is already back at it. I like the idea of making this a regular thing, so let's get to it:

• Finished David Mitchell's Black Swan Green; immediately downloaded and began his The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I'm not far in, but a lot about what I'm reading makes me think about the Dutch character (in just one episode?) that was in Samurai Champloo.
• Fulfilled my most recent whip list challenge: working the Wacom and Pencil2D. Here's what I wrote about it (and a not-yet-great sample of what can be accomplished with Krita). I don't know which whip list item I shold tackle next. Let me know?
• xAPI Design Cohort - week 9!
• Spent way, way, way too much time messing with the management settings for ADL's YouTube account(s). I'm beginning to understand why people are moving to Vessel or evening paying to use Vimeo.
• xAPI Thursday!
  • Regular xAPI Design Cohort 0700 meeting. Shout out to Andrew Downes for the company!
  • I spoke very, very quickly about the Experience API in front of a crowd of about 50 people for the Talent Development Requirements Development Working Group meeting at ADL Alexandria. The group asked me (and all of the speakers) a lot of good questions. I hope to have a Storify of the event up soon.
  • xAPI Design Cohort 1500 EDT meeting. The usual, though I don't have any videos to show for it this time around (sorry Rachel).
• Watched the Kirkpatrick Model Good or Bad? The Epic Mega Battle Continues... with Clark Quinn and Will Thalheimer about Kirkpatricks 4 Levels of Training Evaluation. Do yourself a favor and skip past the audio problems that the combatants were having and get to the good stuff. Thanks to Brent Schlenker for hosting/refereeing this tête-á-tête. I'm happy to see Brent push us into more video, especially in the form of Meerkat streams.
• Discussion with Rustici Software's Brian Miller about how we - those who evangelize the technology - are maybe putting the cart before the horse. Brian was kind enough to drop this gem (which deserved the kind of honor that only erasable-marker-on-window can bestow)
• This tweet. [drops mic]
• Passover!

reacquaintance

04 Apr 2015

So, a secret to most people who know me these days: I used to draw. Like, a lot. I never used to get tired of drawing.

In high school I would scribble and visually annotate journals. In college, I would sit in coffee joints and listen to Middle Eastern music and fill up books with...well mostly a lot of scribbling, but I was pretty consistent about it. After college, I would sit in a Richmond diner until the wee hours of the morning, drinking coffee and drawing illustrations for OSHA instructional manuals (seriously. I wasn't yet aware of it, but it was the instructional text part that amused me. Who would read these? Why? Did these even help? But I digress...).

I eventually stopped. Like, stopped entirely - no scribbling, no works, no illustrations. Once I moved to Washington DC, I had pretty much divested myself of all art materials, all sketchbooks. Later, as my girlfriend and I moved from apartment to apartment in Arlandria Chirilagua, I got rid of more and more of my stuff; suddenly, old works and tools were stuff (I was also on the path to becoming what I am today, and a lot of that journey included Linux sandboxes and elearning authoring tools). When we got married and moved into our own home, I took the opportunity to gt rid of even more things. The drawing table - the table to which I tacked paper in order to create small animations, or design logos - had to go. As I dropped it off at Goodwill, I remember that it smelled like clove cigarettes. I was glad to get it out of the car.

Anyway, I say all of this because in recent years - largely thanks to activities at events like Up to All of Us - I've been itching to do something again. Thanks to the whip list and an old Bamboo tablet and pen that was left over from an old instructional design job (long story for another day), I've been trying to get reacquainted with just drawing - this time, using digital tools.

It has been pretty hard. For one, I spent some time fiddling around with platforms and applications. After some trial and error over the last few weeks, I find myself most comfortable working with either Pencil 2Dor Krita plugged into my aging Acer Aspire One netbook (running the latest Ubuntu desktop). Secondly, I am finding out how tactile an artist I am. I am realizing that I relied a lot on the drag of a pencil or the crush of a charcoal stick to know when and where to make moves. With the Bamboo tablet, I don't get that visceral feedback. On top of that, I have to look up at the screen as my hand works the pen and tablet. I'm still not very good at it.

For example, arriving at the image above took me a long, long time - way longer than it would have with tols that I no longer have at my disposal. But I'll keep at it. I hope to move on to creating animations soon - that is, once I can make lines flow like they used to, and shades obey my commands. It's sort of like what I imagine learning to walk again to be - laborious, painful, frustrating. I don't even have the gut pleasing option of balling up an offensive image and tossing into a wire wastebasket when I haven't executed the way that I'd like to.

Anyway, mission (barely) accomplished. What should my next challenge be?

what I did this week (28 March 2015)

28 Mar 2015

Rachel Barnum - you know, that Rachel - had what I thought was a good idea: a weekly recap. I liked it so much that i'mma steal it (I told her so).

Here's what I've been up to:

• Twitter stalked the inaugural Connections Forum xAPI Camp
• After having started 2015 by watching Cloud Atlas, I have continued making my way through David Mitchell's novels. Currently on Black Swan Green
• Started spinning up the engines for the upcoming CMI-5 Working Group meeting
• Continued to work on the whip list. This week: working the Wacom and Pencil2D
• xAPI Design Cohort - week 8!
• Jealously followed #LSCon tweets
• Sat in on the Medbiquitous xAPI Interest Group meeting. This week's subject: inaction and xAPI
• Started planning ADL webinar series. (Hey, btw - what do you want to know about what ADL is up to?)
• Learning Circles Open Mic Friday with my co-hosts Brent Schlenker and Enzo Silva. (links from the show)

• Sorta kinda tried to clean up /r/elearning. Not really.
• Uploaded a few ADL xAPI videos, including this overview of the xAPI Dashboard

• Reviewed xAPI Remarks (shout out to ADL's Tyler Mulligan)