Carl's Rils

Carl Shuptrine's RILS on using a Garageband lesson to teach teamwork

My comments are here: http://www.educatorstudio.com/lessons/teaching-teamwork-through-garageband-photo-podcasting#comment-176

Check it out, an excellent project.

Jenna's Rils

Jen Hollern's Education Studio RILS

Check how her slick commercial encouraging collective information sourcing for non profits.


My comments are here

http://www.educatorstudio.com/lessons/social-bookmarking-professionals#comment-172

ETC RILS Video

Relevant and Innovative Learning Scenario video

Here is the video I prepared documenting my ongoing effort to form more perfect heterogeneous scene groups in my Film Production 2 course.

Amazing the bandwidth we are consuming with this. To embed the video in the Ed Studio site required up load to You Tube, then we are required to upload to Viddler. But thankfully Blogger rejected the upload so this is just a You Tube embed, as I'm not sure how to do a Viddler embed.

PE5_Survey Gizmo

Collecting Student Preference Information with Survey Gizmo

In our film program, with is 12 months long, The course they take in the 6th month is Film Production Two, for which I am the course director. It is commonly know as "midterms" and is essentially a practicum in which they put the skills they have learned in their sequence of core film making classes into practice. to students used to design their sets in the Art Direction class that precedes P2. Unfortunately, in the first year and a half of the program, the Art Direction teacher consistently resisted using the student groupings we made for P2 according to heterogeneous student centered distribution. She felt she needed to make her own distributions based purely on student selections.

This resulting in a number of problems such as the blind leading the blind scenario as discussed in a previous post along with multiple groups designing the same scenes resulting in a lack of diversity, as well as considerable confusion among the students.

This forced us to revise the program so that the design process was no longer integrated, so the students would not expect to build the sets they designed in Art Direction in P2. This is not at all optimal, as we do not have time in the production course for them to do adequate research and prep for their designs, so I have been trying to find a compromise that will allow the reintegration of the two courses.

What is most important for P2 organization is the diversity and balance of the skill sets in the groups. The selection of scenes is fundamentally a process designed to allow the students to feel ownership of the process and to insure that they have some passion for the material they work on. I decided I would allow the Art course to oversee the scene selection if they would respect my group selections, which they were happy to do since they were allowing student services to set the groups alphabetically to avoid the complexity of this sort of process. I am hoping they will look at this data set and not just allow the students to "pick", and this often involves what seem to me to be unjust social processes.

The process I have been using aggregates the preferences for the whole class to select the subset of top rated scenes, and then assign them to those crews based on their individual preferences. This has resulted in fairly consistent set of scenes each month, where the most well known and popular films always make the cut, with only a small variation among the last few scenes in the set. Using a sample from a smaller student set is likely to have more diversity.

So I will split the process to allow the formation of the groups based solely on rank, and then allow each group to select their scenes individually. This has the advantage of being likely to provide a wider variety of scenes as a small group is more likely to select what may be an outlying scenes as opposed to the whole class's valuation. The downside is that a democratic process may result in a scene being chosen that a minority of the members of the group dislike intensly. I tried adjusting the selections in various ways, and decided to weight the values for the grades so that minority opinion is better integrated. So I reset the return values to 4.5 for an A and -.5 for an F.

The student groups for Art this month were done in the usual way alphabetically by the studetn serv ices department, I augmented them based on GPA.

I plan to use the preference results from each set group, and aggregate them in this way. I've generated 15 test results from my original formula, and then generated fifteen more with the weighted values and compared them.

Here is the worksheet including the exported values for both sets of test data, with the weighted data highlighted in blue.

And here it is the weighted data inserted into my spreadsheet with the sum formulas and then sorted for preferences totals below. The top 12 highlighted in red, meaning that for this team, we would assign them to Some Like it Hot.

I need to get the results for my first round of surveys from the faculty as described in my last post, and then I can set the groups which I can then process with this data to arrive at the final scene groups.

PE4_SurveyGizmo

Using Survey Gizmo 3.0 to improve ranking input from fellow faculty members.

In our 12 month film program, the course they take in the 7th month is Film Production Two, for which I am the course director. It is commonly know as "midterms" and is essentially a practicum in which they put the skills they have learned in their sequence of core film making classes that occupy the first 6 months into practice. It requires that I organize 12-70 students into crews to build, prep and shoot from 5 to 20 separate productions. They each serve on 5 crews on sets they build on our stages over the course of 4 weeks. We go from design to shoot in 4 days, requiring that they work 5-6 days a week for 10 -12 hours a day, doing everything from carpentry to costume making and then of course all the various on-set jobs. It is a crazy whirlwind in which they report that they they learn much more than in any of their other courses.

Part of the point of the course structure is to expose them to a simulation of realistic film production environment, where 14 hour workdays are common, if not standard. But to work such long hours requiring collaboration in in so many different skill areas, can be very taxing on them, and the failures or conflicts among a just a few can end up severely damaging the quality of the final product: their finished films. Since they take pride in these films and since screenings of them are the way we assess their progress (just as they assess each other's abilities), failures in collaboration can severely diminish their educational opportunities.

But since I have not yet met any of the students before they come to P2, I must rely on the evaluations of the teachers that precede me to give the the data I need to form appropriately heterogeneous and harmonious groupings.

So here are my efforts at using Google forms. I made a number of test forms to see how useful the results would be. This test form uses place holder names and categories to review how they are reported in the associated spreadsheets.

 But the data output here is not going to work as Google form will not allow me to set up the questions in ways that I get the right data formatted correctly.

But for my purposes I would like the data to be easily imported into my stage schedule and student preference worksheets as well as the new ranking data worksheet.

So I am going to use survey Gizmo. It seems to have has the most comprehensive formatting and export options of any of the free survey makers I have tried (Survey Monkey, Zoomerang) which have some serious limitations  in free mode.

First are the theme selections which are varied and attractive. I want something plain and simple to share with my colleagues and students.

Then adding questions and selecting the question type, and entering the various fields depending of that type. This is one of the pluses I find in Survey Gizmo, as I have many more complex choices than some of the others.

For this survey I need some fairly complex questions.

Here I am asking each instructor who receives the survey to grade each students' skill in each film department. This is using a table of drop down menus with the students as rows, the departments as columns and the grades as the drop down selection.
A result I will conflate with the student preferences from their surveys to assure that I have students with adequate competency in each department on each shoot.

I hate the way "--Please Select--" is repeated across this whole table. It is obvious and ugly. I have put in a help request ticket to see if i can find a way to edit this prompt.

To fine tune the survey, I have it generate test data, asking for 10 responses using the generate text data link.

  Then do an export of the data to a CSV excel file.

And then analyze the output to assure that it is useful and formatted properly. Here I have dicovered a few problems in this iteration of the process.

I edited my questions from a previous editing iteration where they were an A+ to F, 12 value table, to only a 5 value A-F, after I looked at the preview and found it that it looked a bit overwhelming. So I deleted the + and - columns, but left the reporting values for each entry the same, so that I get odd returns of 0, 2, 5, 8, and 11.

I also realized that I had not set reporting values at all for the department grades, so that they returned the raw letter grades, which will require a more complex "if" formula for excel to be able to aggregate, so I am going to go back and re-edit the survey to resolve these issues.

I edited this question so that the ranks were in number values in keeping with the other scores and the GPA data I get, and added an explanation, somewhat self evident, of what the numbers mean.
Now I will retest the survey myself and when i feel it is working as I want,  email it to the various instructors.

As the returns come in, I can will copy the appropriate data from the export excel worksheet into my own preference worksheets and run my formulas and sorts to get the output that I can use to form the groups.

I have not had a lot of luck getting cooperation from my fellow instructors in the past. I have over the past ouple of years been able to finally win over our program director by sharing research i have collected on the importance of heterogeneity in cooperative learning groups, and he stated that he will intercede on my behalf to get me ranking data. But, none has yet been forthcoming. I am hoping that using an online survey tool will I make delivering this data to me much easier for the other faculty. In this vein i also edited the survey so that it now has only two questions.

Their main objection has always been they think it better to just "keep it simple" pointing out that they form their groups in various simple ways that work fine. But in the P2 course, which requires so much more work, in so many  diverse areas, I had found empirically that more simple solutions were causing serious problems.

Here is the link of my published survey http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/642878/Nov-11-P2-Student-Ranking
I have distributed to 6 faculty members and the program director. I will report back once I start getting responses.

BP7_OneMinuteMovieOne

A One Minute Movie for Dfilm

BP6_CarlBroadcastingSystemComment

My comment on Carl's PE2_iMovie post