A number of faculty are coming to us with digital video questions, which is great. I love digital video, the students love digital video, and damn if it doesn’t tap into the secret creative nooks and crannies of a faculty member’s heart! I think most of us crave some sort of creative outlet but we rarely get that need met. Anyway, I dipped a toe into the high definition world today and bought my faculty development lab a Canon HV20. It’s a nice little HD camera according to the reviews, and doesn’t try to force me to use a memory stick or DVDs or something else equally impractical (HD miniDV tapes are still the best choice in my humble opinion, both for archiving and for reusability). It has an advanced shoe which allowed me to purchase a directional microphone for it, which will be wonderful, but I was forced to stop short of a wide-angle or telephoto lens due to my limited budget. Sigh…maybe next year. I can’t wait! All my software supports HD now (CS3 Master Suite, Premier Elements 3, iMovie, Final Cut Express). Only trouble is, we don’t have any HD screens on which to watch this stuff!

We also bought a lovely DV playback machine, since I expect we’ll be swimming in student tapes for ePortfolios this fall. Faculty from the Faculty Development Workshop are quite eager to get going on this, which I think is just fantastic.  Some days, I remember why I wanted to come here – people want to succeed and move ahead, and that makes my job so much more gratifying.

This week, my educational media services colleagues and I have been touring as many of the classrooms on campus as we can to make sure they are up to snuff for fall classes. Some of them are beautifully set up, such as the language classes. They’ve all been richly decorated in a theme befitting various countries. Spain has tile floors and a gorgeous mural on all walls painted by our art professor, and clay tiles and objects lining the perimeter of the ceiling, blackboard and doorway. Germany has a carved wood and steel ceiling with recessed lights, and a matching trim. Japan has sliding window screens, mats and hanging kimonos – all truly wonderful. I’ve been here a year now and somehow never saw them, perhaps because I’ve focused on the larger teaching spaces and technology.

Later we toured some of the older, more dismal classrooms that had poor ventilation, ugly holes in poorly finished walls, ripped and stained screens, unworkable windows, and desk chairs that are unspeakably uncomfortable.  Who would want to spend five minutes in such a room, much less feel like a respected and cherished learner? I’d just want to get the hell out of there asap, no matter who the teacher was.

Aesthetics clearly matter a lot, and treating students like valuable investments in the classrooms makes a huge difference to a student in terms of attitude and enthusiasm. We made a long list of things to fix, threw away some ancient junk, and started planning for ways to improve the technology in each of these rooms. We’ve already begun installing good projectors and controls in many of the rooms. Now we’ll be able to find a wall-mounted Pixie control for projectors instead of fumbling around for a remote that may or may not have working batteries, and which may be similar to something I’ve used in the past or not. Of course, nowadays we have to begin by figuring out which remote works which device. I hope the faculty notice the difference, but more importantly, I hope it helps smooth the way for an improved learning environment.