How To/Show Me:

1. How To: Make Screen Shots (crop and resize graphics)
2. SHOW ME Tip! Clone Stamp Cindy's Mole
   • image of Cindy Crawford, if you want to do this yourself.

The Wall

Sooner or later, you're going to have to face "the wall." This is the mythological barrier separating those who plan from those who execute, those who serve their students from those who only stand and wait. In other words, those who make web pages from those who don't.

Susan Ko and Steve Rossen

By now, most of you have crawled right to the top of that wall, if you haven't actually crossed over it.

You've built and published Web pages. And from here on out, it is a matter of how much refinement you want/need to do. And honestly, most of those decisions are really up to you.

We like Ko and Rossen's Chapter Seven because it very effectively lays out the least you need to know to be an online instructor who executes instead of just plans.

• OTL 501 was mostly about planning
• OTL 502 is mostly about getting over that wall.
• OTL 503 will be mostly about executing

We want to continually remind everyone that what you produce in OTL 503 is the ultimate point, and the class you design in 503 will be done according to sound theory (501) and with appropriate technical skills (502).

One excellent point Ko and Rossen make is that you don't have to know everything about Web development. We aren't selling shoes or cars or creating Web entertainment. We want to create appropriate (to learners and to the technological environment) learning activities.

But as nice as Ko and Rossen's Teaching Online is, it was written in 2004--before the podcasting tsunami. You will notice no mention of podcasting in their discussion of multimedia. They do write about RealProducer and Narrated Slide shows.

I still have copies of RealProducer, RealPresenter, and RealSlideShow on my computer. In the late nineties and early 2000's, I must have created over a hundred "multimedia learning activities" using those tools. But no more. Now, it is a podcasting and vodcasting universe.

But if they were writing the book today, without question they would skip RealProducer and RealSlideShow and show you instead the basics of podcasting and vodcasting, which is what we will be doing in the next modules.

For now, let's get the graphics thing down.

We chose PhotoFiltre because it was free, and because the tools are incredibly similar to Fireworks, PhotoShop, PaintShopPro, and numerous others. If you can use one graphics program, you can almost certainly use another. They differ primarily in their advanced features--none of which we will be doing in this class.

Keep watching the Discussion Board. There may be one or two activities that show up which will ask you to experiment with using graphics; for instance--inserting a graphic into a Discussion Forum post by making an http:// reference to an image in your portfolio images folder.

Graphics are fun! :-)