The Forums (You're Here)

[holland]

This thread is an open discussion about the forum itself, especially the educational side of it. It's where I'll lay out some of my plans and logic, and it's where any members can share their thoughts and debate about the direction we're going in.

Maybe you have strong opinions on how lighting is taught and want to make sure we do it right. This is the place to talk shop about how things might be best taught in a forum setting given our particular goals.

More general discussions of art teaching and learning go in the Study Group forum.

[holland]

On that note, I'll get into my philosophies and teaching style and goals surrounding this little side quest:

1. I realize that no single course or resource is capable of being all-encompassing when it comes to the arts, as every student will ultimately be pursuing slightly different things.

My goal instead is to work towards creating a structure with "jumping off points" or "exit points" where someone interested in a particular pursuit we don't fully cover can still find something useful and meaningful in earlier lessons.

While students whose pursuits clearly align with the perspective I'm teaching from (pursuing complex solo narrative projects that involve doing everything from rudimentary design and visual development to full-blown tech art, audio engineering, etc) can stick around through the full ride.

For example, by starting with mindset and composition, any student would be able to take something useful away. While for more complex topics, it partly depends on how we interleave them to ensure no one is learning too far ahead in topics that don't yet interest them etc.

There is also a clear bias towards visual art at the moment. I'd like to expand and adapt things to be phrased more inclusively in the future, but I do feel pretty strongly that illustration is a helpful baseline skill regardless of what other artforms someone pursues. Like a mind palace, it provides a conceptual structure other interests can be attached and recalled through.

2. I am trying to lay out the subtler aspects of art in more explicit terms for students they do not come naturally to.

Art classes and books generally expect a lot of self-teaching and "reading between the lines." There can even be a lot of shaming involved in putting down students who "just don't have it" -- that "it" being some very simple concept the teacher is either gatekeeping to "keep the arts pure" or simply unable to describe in words.

When explicit explanation is given, I often see artists getting aggressive towards the teacher in comment sections, reviews, or social media, complaining that they're "overcomplicating" for daring to put into words something that had come naturally without thought to them. (More likely, their own study difficulties and frustrations were simply forgotten in the interim.)

I don't want to be that person who shames others for not making the same assumptions as me or not coming to the same conclusions naturally through practice. It just scares off students with a lot of potential.

So even with topics I did learn through osmosis or forgot my early studies of -- such as storytelling and writing -- I've put a great deal of effort into reverse-engineering them and trying put them into words. There is serious benefit to taking the abstract and giving it a structure that can be acknowledged, reflected on, and adjusted, regardless.

And while there is no one objective truth to art, it can help to have some consistent perspective to lean on while you're figuring out your own understanding of things, including the concepts you might not have noticed or bothered putting into words on your own.

3. Vocabulary is the root of all learning, and I am trying to maintain and codify a consistent vocabulary system surrounding these concepts across the forum.

With every art tradition using the same words in different ways or different words altogether, we often end up talking around each other when we get together online, only to end up arguing about things we agree on, or agreeing on things we're actually arguing about.

Not only is this frustrating in the moment, but it means that from one resource to the next, students are getting conflicting and confusing information. So it's important to acknowledge these other uses but also clearly define what WE mean by our particular use of any term.

That's why I am starting with the glossary and concepts area. Establishing the language we're using also helps to expose prerequisites and dependencies between topics, so as we develop lessons and courses, they'll have a more logical order.

Right now, however, it's a bit difficult to understand most of the entries I'm working on without context. The vocabulary could be better controlled and cross-referenced, and we could use proper graphics to demonstrate things that may be too overwhelming in text etc.

It's something that will improve over time. If I'm too much of a perfectionist with the initial posts, they'll never get made. It's already too slow as I'm worried about the order I post them in lol But it's better to post roughly in any order just to get the baseline information down, I suppose.

4. I am primarily a text-based educator at this time.

I get that we live in the time of shortened attention spans, and a lot of younger folks are struggling to read at their level. But making decent videos is a massive time, money, and space sink that I'm not in a great place for right now.

Text-based formats are also much easier to backup, share, load, see at a glance, redline, quote... I'm sure we'll end up with some streams and videos, but opting for text with images is a very sensible place to start.

Still, I'm working on my presentation abilities and how to tutor things better live. I hope to gradually open up more options there.

[holland]

I added the first exercise to test what the post format might look like (and because I had a lot of fun doing it the other day and wanted to make sure it got shared here).

I've been reading more about the importance of modeling activities for students. It lets them actually see the process with added context, and it gives them the confidence to try it themselves in a way that unproven instructions don't. The human brain not only likes to mimic what it sees but is actively fearful of being the first one to try something new.

That's been one of my weak points with online tutoring over the years, as there's a lot of friction in recording the process or scanning it step-by-step. But I do need to incorporate a demonstration with each exercise when I have the opportunity to do so.

[holland]

This design post is really testing me. It will need a substantial rewrite or restructuring in the future.

I just wanted to do a quick post on using degrees of variance in design since I noticed it playing a big role in making models for the comic I'm working on, but when I tried to write it out, I realized design is whole 'nother rabbithole of Things I Learned Too Young To Remember How Complicated They Are To Explain To Beginners.

If you were to go through all the topics in the context of a specific project -- like making character sheets for a short story or something -- I think it'd be fairly comprehensible. But trying to explain it in the abstract without the reader losing sight of the purpose and how everything ties together is hard.

[holland]

Oh god, the deeper I go, the worse it gets.

This is like when I finally got around to deconstructing storytelling and realized everything is storytelling. Like it's one of those existential fundamentals of life related to how the human brain processes the world around it that we just have to grapple with.

But why is everything design too?? I'm offended by how deeply rooted this is into every system we try to teach in art.

There are so many times where I've been confused by students who are themselves confused about where to go from one step of construction to the next. It seems so logical that you'd work from simple umbrella features at low levels of complexity down to more specific features following that framework to develop a more detailed design.

Except it's not if you never got around to learning creative design skills at a fundamental level. It must feel like we're speaking in riddles.

[holland]

I need to add clarifications that any attempt to classify "types of x" is just a dissection of some examples of just one abstraction of the issue...

But even then, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the current feature constraint types in particular. Something feels off. Like they're all a little too interwoven to be distinct classifications.

Hopefully once I figure out how to phrase the progressions, that will give further insight into how to better classify them, if they need to be distinct from the progressions at all.

[holland]

I keep doubting and tweaking things in my mind when I should just put them in writing. Then I can see them in their full glory, go "ew," and have some foundation I can actually repair.

[holland]

Alright, so I went ahead and did a mindmap with all the concepts I've established, and it made the issues pretty obvious. There were nodes at random depth levels that had way too many connections into nodes on totally different branches.

Those nodes that affect many branches should generally be top-level ideas, so I adjusted the hierarchy accordingly, but it won't be reflected on the thread until I get around to a rewrite.

Roughly, design at the top level should be:

Target: What subject are you trying to design? What features could they have? (Breakdown of the multiple choice idea needs to come first imo.)

Palette: What options do you have to pick from when you are designing? How are they restricted or expanded?

Progression: What process are you following, and what order will you address design problems in?

Environment: What tools and resources do you have immediately available to you?

Context: What project is this design being used for, and how will it be applied in practice?

Identity: What knowledge, skills, and preferences are you bringing to this process as the designer?

These are top-level because they all heavily influence each other and therefore cannot be neatly nested.

Your preferences and needs and context and resources all influence your process. What subject you choose to target and the features you emphasize will be influenced by your needs and resources and preferences and procedures etc. etc.

For now, I'm going to continue writing it as it is to close up the first draft and make sure there aren't any sneaky hidden topics I'm missing.

[holland]

I tried to add a spoiler tag mod and broke the whole site ._. Couldn't even log in. Like it modified permissions or something and triggered a http 500 lockout.

Thankfully, the server was set to do backups. Because none of my attempts at manually fixing it via file manager shenanigans did anything.

Anyway, life got busy, and I accidentally ended up with a new student. But I've gotten a lot more practice with digitizing visual demonstrations, so it's not as scary now, but could still be better streamlined.

I got cheap newsprint for it too. There was some great stuff mixed amidst the back to school sales.

[holland]

Current reflections on the design post?

1. This definitely needs to be a bunch of smaller posts with more narrow targets, for the sakes of both comprehension and cross-referencing.

2. One of those needs to be on the principles of design. It's very weird to discuss these ideas without having the principles to point back to.

I plan on doing an essay on it for the substack later, but for the forum, I want more digestible bits.

[holland]

Let's try to do a little writing sprint and see how many posts on the simpler topics we can get up in the next two hours. No graphics or edits for the sprint.

But going forward, let's say that every 25 threads will be the milemarker for when I have to go back to clean-up prior posts and add graphics. So it never gets to out-of-hand.

[holland]

We got 3, but that color one should probably be split into another 2.

I've re-written this stuff a million times on other platforms. It gets kind of boring, and I'd rather jump to the juicy stuff, but I also realize that all builds off of the little things.

At least it's in my own space now, and it feels like I can do something with it. I'm not restricted in how I organize or present it. I'm not going to get banned for spamming if I post too much too fast.

When I do the cleanup, some things to look for:

1. Is all jargon underlined, defined, and/or linked at first mention? These posts aren't part of a course, so you can't assume the reader knows the words you're using.

2. Is all jargon represented in the glossary thread? If you used a new term, it should be defined there, even if you have a definitions in the immediate discussion.

3. Is the thread broken down to a self-contained topic that is sufficiently narrow to reference elsewhere? Avoid any cognitive load associated with recalling tangential information.

4. Is the thread appropriately named for that purpose?

5. Is the thread linked from the glossary entries for all associated terms?

6. Do all the complex ideas have a visual representation to help them make sense?

[holland]

It was recently brought to my attention that most people would have generated a project like this with AI, and that's been on my mind as I'm working on each post. But I honestly can't figure out what kind of benefit it would bring. (Besides being able to call it "done" faster.)

When you're writing something, every minor change in your word choice and sentence structure implies something different, and it is dissected by the reader non-linearly over time. This makes it an incredibly information-dense medium compared to conversational speech. You can read a good book ten times and come away with new information from every pass.

I think that's the fundamental misunderstanding people are having. There is this growing culture of reading something once (if not just a summary), throwing it away, then claiming to be a master of its contents. As if you can get more than a third of what something is actually saying on the first read-through...

If you only ever engage with a text at the surface level, whether as the reader or writer, then sure -- there is not much to it. But why would you even use sentences at that point?

If the prose mattered so little that I could generate it with ChatGPT from a content map, why wouldn't I just provide the content map to the student? There's nothing substantive being added by the AI prose-ifying it, unless the AI is adding deeper context that I didn't provide it.

In which case, there is a great deal you'd need to dissect and compare to figure out if that added context is helping or harming. What if it's implying things between the lines that directly contradict what you're trying to communicate? You've just added a whole 'nother stage of the process for yourself.

(...and removed a stage that could have given you a deeper understanding of the topic and modified what those maps would have looked like. Everything I write teaches me something new.)

I get the temptation, but I don't think it would actually help me much here, even if it'd look prettier on the surface than my unfinished trails of breadcrumbs lol

[holland]

Testing if I can embed html as an administrator for quizzes, activities, and such...

edit: yessssss
It's all coming together ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[holland]

I've been diving deep into instructional design again lately, since that's basically what we're doing here, and it's been very inspiring to see other people doing similar work using all the sklils I already have. I feel much more confident about what I'm making now.

Rather than thinking of the graphic design and interactive stuff around the site as just some abstract idea of "adding visuals," I'm going to pivot to looking at it through the ID lens, with the forum and HTML as my format / platform.

I'm also sticking with a modular microlearning approach, like we've already been slowly establishing. This lets me then build curriculum that points to different resources around the site as its content, instead of each lesson or course being a monolith relevant to only one narrow context.

The interesting thing will be figuring out how to apply the project-based learning and gamification elements I like in courses to this more modular approach. But I think it might actually be easier, being able to have a project hub where you can see exactly what applications are involving which skills.

Anyway. Back to work.