Welcome.

Self-less endorsment…..

Apple – Downloads – Productivity Tools – Evernote.

Just another “Lifelogging” tool, totally awesome.

I think that the legal or copyright issues with my website would be part of everyday life. Contracts with schools, existing contracts with other photographers, privacy laws for students, the list goes on and on. I think the point of my company and website is to handle what I call the “legal swamp” and get through to the other side where actual advances could be make that improve the lives of the people involved. Anytime you deal with the public domain, and especially education, laws, copyrights, and privacy issues arise. Public schools almost always have contracts with a specific photography company for any given amount of time, it is them illegal for the school to support the selling of photographs from any other company or photographer for those same events. My company would have to carefully navigate the stormy seas of the law in order to be able to get the company out there and hired or “contracted out” by any public company or school.

The Human Lobotomy video, while a little difficult to follow was very interesting. I would love to have a Fab Lab at my school, or at the communities disposal. I think it goes hand in hand with Module five and the human centered design. This is really design problems and solutions by people who are having the problems, and in the area they exist. It’s definitely a different concept. When I ever saw the video of the 8 year old girl in Ghana making a processor chip I was cheering on the inside! It’s amazing what our tax dollars can do when they are used the right way, even if they people using them seem slightly pretentious.

The Big Brother video was very eye opening. When you count all of the different technologies we use and how they are being tracked by different companies, its amazing to think that anybody has any privacy anymore. It brings me back to the older Will Smith movie “Enemy of the State”, where Smith’s character is being tracked by different kinds of technology by the government. I believe he was framed for something he didn’t do (in good movie format of course..) Gene Hackman’s character was obsessed with being “off the grid” He stayed off of all different kinds of technology that could be tracked. What was once a Sci-Fi movie and blockbuster, is now a reality. It’s very scary to think about it, but on the other hand, if you live in the fear of your information being stolen you’d never leave the house, or use technology again. I guess the moral of the story is being careful, smart, and keep tabs on your personal information.

I found the unit on Interactive Production very interesting. I like the the TED video on human centered design. Although I connect everything to my teaching profession, this was exceptionally relevant. It seems that so many people have lots of creative ideas, and just no way to express them, or they don’t know how to manage all of those creative outbursts. The unit for Interactive Production seemed to make the wide-open field of creativity and put it to work. I especially liked how in the video the technologies they were discussing came out of human needs, and were driven by the design and input of others, instead of just making “anther cool gadget.”

I also liked the article by Tim Aidlin on “How we work (and sometimes skip steps..)”
I thought it was very comparable to what happens in the classroom when a group of students is brainstorming ideas. They go from 0 to 60 too quickly, then realized they have to go back and actually plot out steps and plan things out either in a storyboard, or on the whiteboard (as was mentioned in the article) and that planning out the wireframes int eh beginning of the project saves a lot of time later on because the clients have already seen how the navigation and links work. When my web design students start their first websites, we do strictly navigation because I feel its important for the flow and layout of their sites to be there before adding any creative content to make sure that it works with their ideas.

Overall, I really liked Module Five and thought it was very helpful in giving me some tips on how to help students streamline their brainstorming for big projects and websites.

Final Pitch for Photography Website

What is it you are offering? What are you contributing?

The photography website offers people a place that they can go to get almost any kind of photography done, and then also processed as documents in one place.  Companies sometimes have to hire a photographer to take images, and then send them to a graphic designer to make up documents for the company.  My website/company offers a “one stop shop” location for their photography, and design needs.
The site is contributing to the more cost effective way of doing business. Streamlining the  jobs they have to outsource to just one company, hopefully mine. The website allows possible customers to see examples of work so that they can decide whether my company is the one for them. The site would also be contributing to the artistic community by allowing outside photographer/designers to share their work and possibly get outsourced by a company. It would be both a resource for the hiring company and my company because we would have a directory of photographer/designers who could handle every job (optimally.)
What makes you think people are looking for that? What is your evidence?
People are always looking for ways to save money and streamline expenses do less work. My company would take the load of having to find a photographer, then a designer off of them and place it on my company. We also would know the best people for the job, as they would have gone though portfolio reviews and background and reference checks before they were hired out by us.
My evidence is that more and more companies are firing, laying off, or completely eliminating their graphics departments because of budget cuts. If an outside company could step in and do their jobs for less then it would fill a need without the company having to hire a long term employee, as it would be on a job to job basis.
How are you going to find and connect with those people? Why will they come to your site? Who are your direct competitors for their attention?
Finding and connecting with those people will obviously be a challenge, but if a design and marketing company can’t market itself thats probably not a good sign.  I would start with the website, and expand it to Facebook, Youtube, LinkIn, and ect, thereby starting an online presence first. Then appealing to individual companies that I think could use our services. Also, advertising in the education world. They rarely have graphics departments have have a ton of events that need to be photographed, and then documents need to be made from those photographs. They can run into issues with copyrights and be able to use the photos from one photographer on a certain public document.  My company would handle of that for the school or district.
They will come to the site because I have seen first hand an need for this in a lot of public schools, and companies that directly deal with them. I would hopefully keep their attention by providing an interactive and multimedia heavy website with a lot to look at, as well as all of the information they could need, and contact info.

What will you get from them and how? What makes them keep coming back (if that is central to your model)?
The goal would be to get money from them for services provided, and because documents of public nature are always being updated, then hopefully the services of my company would also still be needed. They would come back because the photographers and designers that were matched up with the company or school, fit their profile perfectly and did the job that they wanted.

What are the informational resources (assets) you need to host on your site? Documents? Videos? Databases? Do these already exist, or will you need to build them?
The website would be heavy with photographs, downloadable, watermarked PDF’s of work, videos showcasing certain photographers/designers, and text documents for any forms they might need, or how to get in contact with us.  The server that the site is hosted on would definitely have to have enough room for a photo and video database.

How will your site be organized? How many pages will it have, and in what order? How do you move from one page to another? A sketch of a site map might be helpful here…
The site would have a main index page, then branch out to four different pages from there depending on where the customer wanted to do, and would also have pages for the portfolio to different types of photography.
What does your site look like visually? At this stage, a sketch on a back of a napkin is fine: just something to show the layout and some of the design elements. Are there sites from which you are drawing visual queues?
The template for all of the pages would be the same, with the information and layout changing on each page. It would have a black, gradient background, with information in white text within text-boxes that has bright different color borders. The logo of the company would be in the upper right hand corner at all times, and the contact info would be at the bottom of the page each time. I imagine it would look very classy and professional, yet artistic to showcase the companies professionalism in an artistic field.
If you know or have ideas about implementation at this stage, you can include them.
If I were to implement this website today I would start by hosting it, then spreading the word of the website through Facebook or any other social medium. I would also put a call out to designers and photographers to showcase their work on my site so that they could be hired out. I would have to have a fairly good base of photographers and designers readily available before I launched the site.

“Common Sense: A rarity in the law…” – Larry Lessig.

In watching the videos for Module Six, I slowly became more and more enraged with the thought of losing creative freedom and and freedom for others to see the media that we all have created. Sites like YouTube, and and Flickr, and even Facebook, would become a thing of the past, if cable and phone companies were allowed to charge us for downloading files, or restrict out access to only a certain number of sites.  I think that Larry Lessig’s quote from “How creativity is being strangled by the law” was dead on. Common sense tells us that if you take away peoples freedom, they get mad, in general it’s not a nice thing to do. The law should be there to protect the people from companies that want to take away our freedom, not encourage the development of technologies that will help them do so.

Even if this doesn’t happen in our lifetime, what about the generations to come? Has everything I’ve been telling my students about the wonders of creative freedom on the internet, and the magical free world of information that lies there, all going to become some distant fairytale in years to come? For the sake of innovation, I hope not.

Big companies and the laws that support them will do what they’ve always done… squash the little guy. In this day in age, its the little guys that are getting famous. From those annoying FRED videos on YouTube, to interview and quiz apps on Facebook, its become the generation of good ideas. People are inspired to create new and different applications and media because other people will get to use them, and see what they’ve done. People are creating just for the sake of innovation. They have become tech artists in the sense that anyone can create anything, and for the most part, there’s an equal chance for everyone to “make it.”

The art community has been doing this for years. Artists create just for the sake of creating art (media) because it’s what they do, they then can choose to have that put in a gallery (we’ll say Flickr/DeviantArt), or display them on the street, or open their own gallery (personal websites, image search engines.) All of these artists affect they way the community runs because they are the reason it exists in the first place. If laws are put in place that squash that creative spirit, people will no longer want to develop anything new or creative because their ideas aren’t going to be appreciated, or even seen. (I feel like an Arggg is in order, with a possible fist pump accompanying it)

“The culture that people are producing for the love of producing, not for the money” “This is how our kids speak, how our kids think…” – Larry Lessig

I could not agree more with the above quote from Larry Lessig. Being in a classroom everyday in a media heavy environment, has shown me things about kids that I never would’ve learned elsewhere. They have more original ideas about how to do the same old thing, twenty different ways, and they are excited about it! This is what the population should be concentrating on! Kids aren’t excited about anything these days, and the fact that they WANT to do something, and do CREATIVELY is a miracle! Teachers could harness they resources and make education so rich and so differentiated and everyone from the high end learner to slower paced learned would be engaged and learning.

The Read/Write and ReadOnly culture depends heavily on the laws that get passed today and tomorrow, but I think that the kids of today, that grow up to be the adults of tomorrow will definitely not stand for their voices to be squashed for some large companies. They’ve seen the tremendous value of the internet and having it at their disposal, they’ve never known a life without it, if its taken away, I truly believe they will fight tooth and nail to keep the innovation going.

Every ten years, public schools need to be accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.  This year was our turn.  It took two years of preparation on the school’s part, we had to conduct a self-study, collect data, and write reports. During this entire process, the faculty asks itself one question: Why??

Why indeed!

The accreditation process is actually like a big huge self-assessment process with “the man” looking on to see if you’re doing correctly. Now the interesting part of the whole process is how its changed over the last 10 years. The last time our school was accredited, the committee that came didn’t want to see all of the teachers, didn’t care if there were computers in every room, and student work was limited to term papers of the highest quality by the best students. This year, they interviewed over 35 teachers, and saw student work from a large variety and scale of the student population. What impressed me the most was when they asked the faculty for additional examples of work, but they wanted to see “more creative projects with use of technology because its essential to the instruction of today’s youth.”

This got me thinking, could you really be as dynamic a teacher, or educate as many students, with different learning styles, without the use of technology. Sure you could educate the middle ground, the kids that are going to learn regardless, but what about the high end students that need to be challenged, or the low end students who need the information in different formats to understand? In the classes I teach, its impossible to do it without technology, because they revolve around it. Video production would be tedious and boring if all we did was make flipbooks.  I found the fact that the NEASC committee wanted to see these new forms of assessment and variations in teaching very refreshing. It’s not everyday you see a government agency that is supposed to be moderating and applying standards doing what they actually are supposed to do, and taking into account the changing world around them, especially for the better of the students.

“An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses service as the stage, the good are props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event. commodities are fungible, good tangible, service intangible, and experiences memorable.” – Pine/Gilmore Harvard Review

I believe that this statement sums up the new age of retail. It’s not enough anymore to just offer a great product you have to really know HOW to sell it, but not just that, you have to make people believe that they have to have the product because its going to improve and enrich their lives. When I worked at a little company known for their mostly white/silver computers with a fruit logo, this was their major selling point. Retail, was no longer retail.  They modeled their customer service model after the hotel industry. They didn’t want to sell their product, because that practically sells itself, they wanted to sell an experience.

Many companies are going this route, even traditionally “hard sell” companies like car salesman, are going the way of the “experience.” Companies like Volvo, or BMW sell a Shopping Experience, instead of just an really expensive car.  Retail is notorious for poor or awful, depending on the company, customer service. I”m sure we’ve all had the experience of needing to bring something back, or arguing with the sales person only to have them call their manager, or CS rep to have them tell you no, or say there’s nothing they can do.

The Tides are a changin’! With the recession and so many companies going out of business, they have to really compete to keep people coming back to their stores, or their service centers. People are more prudent with their money and will only spend if they feel its worth it. I think this feeling of worth is derived from how they “feel” when they purchase a product or service. If the company delivers poor customer service but a decent product, it may create buyer’s remorse, and the person would return it, or maybe not return for another item. If they company presents a lively experience and provides the customer with an experience they can feel good about, then they will want to buy more, and more often, without remorse.

Places that create experiences have existed for years before now, theme parks, restaurants, and other “service type” retailers have been using this ploy for a while. Disney is of course one of the biggest proponents of this “selling an experience.” They have offered that to people for years and years and have kept them coming back. Theme restaurants like The Hard Rock Cafe`, or Outback Steakhouse, have taken over the “mom and pop’s” of the restaurant world. People will go where they know they food, and they like the experience.

“Some companies will eventually be like trade shows, charging customers to sell to them.” -Pine/Gilmore Harvard Review

These type of experiences are becoming more and more popular, as customer loyalties decline, and they look for the best deal with the best experience. I think this is capitalism at its best.  Companies competing for people’s sales and interest.  Although the recession is making it hard for a lot of people, I think this change in customer service, by providing an experience will be a nice change for a lot of consumers.