Blogging and Social Media

AdobeGenPro Digital Creativity Workshop: Blogging

November 15, 2013 by kathi

This week, our challenge was to share our work online via a blog.

The blogging assignment

Creative Challenge – Blogging: Create a blog if you don’t have one, add a couple of posts reflecting on your experiences of this course.Then post the URL link to complete the assignment. If you already have a blog create a post about your experience in this course following the guidelines introduced this week. Then post the URL link to complete the assignment. Use your digital skills developed so far in the course and try to be economical and efficient with your time.

I’ve failed miserably at being economical and efficient with my time, as I’ve decided to repost and elaborate upon each one of the course assignments here in this blog. This is as much for myself as for the assignment; the review and reflection has been a valuable part of the whole experience.

I haven’t been a consistent blogger, but I’ve had a blog since 2002. When I started blogging, the software of choice for self-hosted bloggers was still Greymatter, with Movable Type also gaining popularity. My first self-hosted blog ran on Movable Type and was primarily about pet health. It is still online but has been dormant for many years. This blog is also self-hosted and runs on WordPress. It is primarily a personal blog created for NaBloPoMo in November 2008, and my main topics have been my dogs and other pets and technology. I’m fairly active on my Tumblr blog (and what I post there often contains profanity or is otherwise not suitable for work or my main blog), and less so on my LiveJournal, which in recent years has just served as a place to crosspost from this blog.

I don’t struggle with combining the personal and professional—I’ve rarely ever blogged about work. At my last job, we briefly discussed whether we should have a company blog and decided against it. At my current job, the discussion has never taken place, and it probably won’t for some time. Or at least not until I think of a strong reason as to why we should start blogging, and I’m not sure there is one right now. I don’t believe that every business niche benefits from blogging.

rottweilersatemylaptop_ss — The old version of the blog

So enough about the past, and on to the technical notes. Although the assignment allowed the use of an existing blog, I felt just a little bit bad about not having to actually create a new blog. So I took the opportunity to do a long overdue upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, installed the latest version of StudioPress’s Genesis framework, and changed to a new minimalist theme, Wintersong Pro. I did some minimal customizing of graphics and type size, and plan to change the fonts as soon as I pick some new favorites from Typekit.

I’m still unsure as to whether I’ll continue blogging regularly on this go-around. We’ll see what happens and if I still have more of interest to contribute to the glut of information on the ‘net.

Has it been a whole year already?

November 14, 2013 by kathi

Yes, it has. Did you miss me? Don’t worry—you don’t have to answer that.

I considered reviving the blog for NaBloPoMo but decided to participate in something on LiveJournal instead (and I’m woefully behind on that). Doing NaNoWriMo is completely insane, but I’m still giving it a shot. The story behind that spark of insanity is on Tumblr, if you’re curious.

What finally brought me back here was Adobe Generation Professional’s Digital Creativity in the Classroom (I’ll give you more specifics about the blogging project in another post). This is a course for educators, so you might be wondering why I’m taking it since I am not currently an educator, nor do I have any past teaching experience.

What I do have is a long and mostly positive history with Adobe software, thanks to the many years I spent in the graphic arts, specifically prepress production. Since my particular area was typography and page layout, my expertise is with InDesign. I’m also familiar with Dreamweaver, and I’ve been criminally underutilizing Photoshop and Illustrator for many years. Despite this, I’d only just discovered the depth of the educational resources that Adobe provides in the way of paid and free content. I was searching through some of the free content on the Adobe Education Exchange in an effort to help a friend who wanted to learn InDesign, and stumbled across the Digital Creativity course.

Encouraged by the fact that apparently no one was going to force me to prove that I was an educator before I could sign up, and also by the fact there was no class fee, I signed up. My rationale was that we are all called upon to educate others at some time, no matter our job description, and that is how I introduced myself:

But these days, aren’t we all educators in some way or another? Working for a very small business, there is often a need to present information clearly to co-workers or clients, and I’m hoping this class will help me to get better at it.

I am so glad I took this course. It helped to bring out a creative spark that had been obscured by years of executing other people’s designs, rather than creating something of my own. The course was set up perfectly for my own personal situation. It started with a Photoshop project. Being able to work in a program I was already pretty familiar with allowed me to concentrate on ideas, rather than worry about execution. I would need the feeling of success from the Photoshop project to carry me through the next two projects.

Sequence 01.Still001 — Book Trailer:
Premiere Pro project

My past experience with Flash was very minimal and not particularly positive, and I had no experience at all with Premiere Pro. I kept telling myself that the ideas were more important than the execution and I think I convinced myself by the time I completed these projects. I’m afraid I’m failing miserably at being “economical and efficient” with my time on this blogging projects, but those are the breaks!

So a few more observations on the course.

For the most part, the course structure was great. I was not able to attend all of the live classes, but the ones I attended were informative, made excellent use of guest speakers, and (very important) began and ended on time without shortchanging any of the topics that needed to be covered. One thing that would have been nice is a little more pre-course information and tutorials for the programs used. Photoshop, Flash, and Premiere all have pretty substantial learning curves, and I am sure it was not easy for first-time users of the programs. The Education Exchange, and other parts of Adobe’s site, have a ton of available resources, but a little nudge towards them would have been helpful.

Speaking of first-time users, I am so, so impressed with the participants who did not have any previous experience with the programs. Their first efforts were amazing, not only in creativity but in execution. That cannot have been easy.

As for me, I still hope to use what I’ve learned in this class to make any educational or informational presentations to co-workers and clients more interesting and more entertaining. I’m proficient at breaking down instructions into logical steps, but I haven’t utilized visuals often enough and I plan to change that.