I’m sitting here, masquerading as a Notre Dame student for an hour and I’m impressed by the following: These students are really sharp at keying on things that sound like they should be important, even if they really aren’t all that important. I think they’re doing it by listening (probably instinctively after 13+ years of formal education) to the voice inflection of the professor.

What i mean by this is that every time the professor makes what sounds like a verbal queue that “something important is coming,” a long pause for example, it’s like the whole room takes a collective deep breath.

“A div tag.” Says the professor, to the sound of 50 keyboard simultaneously clacking out the last spoken sentence.

With a roomful of loud Dell keyboards the effect is even more pronounced.

I was asked to teach a weekly, one credit CS3 tutorial class last semester for the Department of Art, Art History and Design here at Notre Dame. It’s not a design class. It’s more like a lab component of the Graphic Design courses, the intention of which is to help my students work more efficiently in Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator.

It was the first time I’d ever taken on such a task and, as I’ve noticed with other brand new things that I’ve attempted, I learned a lot simply by doing it. This semester I am teaching the course again with whole-sale changes based on what worked and what didn’t. Here are three things I learned:

1. Retention is directly correlated to practical application of the concept.

You like that? I was trying to sound pretentious. I digress…

I found that it didn’t really matter how clearly I explained, or how in-depth was my explanation of a concept in any of the applications if it didn’t immediately relate back to what my students where actually producing at that point in time. In hindsight, I should have seen this coming because I am the same way. I soak up CS3 tricks if I can use them immediately. Things like (for example) color-correction, which I never have any need to do, I am far less proficient or interested in learning about.

Resulting Changes: I changed the entire structure of the class. Last semester the class was a sequential introduction to Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign in that order and based on the concepts that I felt where the most foundational. This time around I am working much closer with the professor and grad students that are teaching the Graphic Design 1 class of which my tutorial is a co-requisite. I will be teaching generally the same concepts as last semester, but this time around I will be doing it based on the GD1 projects that my students are working on in their other class.

Hopefully this will help them not only learn that something is possible in a CS3 app (comprehension), they’ll also get an immediate practical use for it so they can hold on to the concept down the road (retention).

2. It’s better to watch a demo, interact with the professor and try to understand then it is to take copious notes.

At least that’s the way I learn. Consider for a moment how complicated it is to explain to someone without any visual aids whatsoever something as relatively basic as…say…duplicating a Photoshop layer. It’s just easier to show someone how it’s done. If they’re put in a position where you’re showing them and they feel they have to take copious notes, they’re almost guaranteed to miss something. Perhaps in a more abstract subject, you can get away with this, but CS3 processes are so necessarily sequential, that if you don’t write down every single step exactly, you won’t be able to replicate the effect later from your notes alone.

Basically, I was putting a pretty steep burden on the students in the class who don’t absorb information the same way I do. I was forcing them into distraction by taking notes, which was making it harder for them to retain the information I was presenting.

Resulting Changes: Immediately after the mid-semester break, I started writing up 4-5 page documents the night before each class that explained all of the major concepts that I would be teaching the next day. I’m not really big into printing out stacks of paper, most of which will be generally ignored and therefor wasted. What I ended up doing was burning a PDF of the document out of InDesign and releasing it on Concourse, our academic file sharing application. Students could grab the document if they wanted to and print it out if they felt it necessary. Simply knowing that the document was available meant they could concentrate less on trying desperately to record what I was teaching them, and more on just absorbing it.

New for this semester: Long time readers of ATCO (both of you) might remember that at launch, this blog had a “Lessons” tab in the global navigation. My intention was always to post each class’s content as a separate page under that Global Nav item, but I never found time to do it. This semester I will be bringing that nav item back and posting under it more regularly, because it will allow me to update the content in the PDF after the class has ended with any spontaneous concepts or questions that are raised during the class period.

3. No one uses Twitter. Everyone uses Facebook.

I found this really hard to believe considering that basically everyone that I know tweets and tweets regularly, but out of my whole class, not one of them used Twitter. Facebook, on the other hand, is used by everyone.

Resulting Changes: I gave out my twitter username again this semester as part of my contact information. We’ll see if this Twitter thing catches on. A Facebook group for the class seems like an intelligent idea though.

New graphic for a survey initiative on campus. Built in illustrator. The font is Myriad Pro Bold Italic with a slight off-set path applied to increase thickness.

I used to hate the Mighty Mouse until I started using one regularly. (Don’t laugh…I questioned the relevance of Twitter at first too). I have a hard time using a computer without one now, and Expose document switching within an application is a big reason why.

If you use a Mighty Mouse regularly, consider setting the center button to invoke Expose’s application controls. You can get to this by:

• Going to the System Preferences and clicking on Keyboard & Mouse.
• Click on the Mouse Tab.
• Select “Expose - App Windows” from the pull down menu on whatever button you want to set it to. (I use the center button a.k.a.: “clicking the scroll wheel”).

Once Expose is enabled, clicking the center button will make all of the active windows in your application fly out across the screen enabling quick selection of the file that you want. I’ve found this extraordinarily convenient when using Photoshop with multiple images open.

It’s also really handy when copying and pasting elements between different active InDesign documents: Cmd+C to Copy, click the center button to switch documents and then Cmd+V to Paste.

After much consternation, hand-wringing, meticulous (and potentially unnecessary) fussiness, and a whole Saturday of image creation…my Gallery page is finally live.

Muchas Gracias to Chas Grundy for coding everything for me. Also thank you to Steve Smith for his help straightening out a few kinks at the end of the process.