foolfillment: the blog

I’ve had a post brewing for a while, I wanted to gauge opinion before I posted it though.

First of all, I really liked the course when I sat it, I enjoy teaching all of the aspects of it. All of the time though I have a nagging question eating at me: what is the point of Graphic Communication?

I have a few reservations about the course’s relevance to the people who sit it. I’d love to get involved in a discussion about its future, its validity in today’s world, the appropriateness of its content.

If you have any opinions about the course please get in touch. I’m going away for a week on Saturday so there won’t be much noise from me until after that but I’d still really like to know if there are any strong opinions out there.

In between enjoying all the fabulous weather we’ve had this summer I’ve had a few ideas spinning through my mind about what I want to try doing next year along with all the emotions that come with starting a job like this one.

One of the things I’ve been trying to work out is how I can best use some online tools next year, much of this will all work itself out when I start and I find out just how much time I have and what services are available in school. What I’m looking at though is using Pownce a lot. If you’ve not had a look yet and want to know what it is that I’m banging on about then I’ve got an extra 6 invitations. Leave a comment if you want one.

What I’m quite excited about is the ability to create groups of people/friends - I want to use this to collect all my classes together then find a way to carry out their course. The ease in which you can send messages to groups means that I am certain that this is a really cool way of getting some peer assessment going, as well as simple sharing of files appropriate to that day/week’s lesson.

Another of the benefits I think it will have is that there is no need to post long messages, something I think will appeal to the pupils, and will make managing time more easy.

What I’m looking at doing is running my presentation class for Craft and Design with a little pownce work throughout. As they progress through the different stages of their folio they will be required to post various work online - thoughts, links, items of work - and also to spend time looking at the things that their classmates have done and replying to them. Peer assessment if you will, but more than that using other people’s opinions/preferences/ideas to refine their designs.

There’s so many possibilities, I’m pretty excited about it, much more so than I was about twitter. My enthusiasm has brought out a side of me I thought I’d managed to suppress for a while - my need to constantly redesign. Those of you who read this on the site itself and not in a browser will see I’ve added pownce to my sidebar, I think I’ll use this to add shorted posts that don’t warrant a whole post on the main blog, so if you want you can subscribe to the feed.

I’ve got a few other ideas I’m trying to work out in my head. Do you have anything to offer?

From here you can access the whole range of resources that I have for Higher Graphic Communication. Under each section there are AutoCad files for each of the drawings, these are supported by versions of the same object, modelled in AutoDesk Inventor. The AutoCad files were put together by Tom Bruce, the inventor parts and assemblies have been contributed by various people.

Feel free to use them however you like under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland licence. This means that you can use and edit the files, but you must give credit to the original creator. If you share your derived work it must be covered by the same licence. Read more about the licence here.

This is very much a work in progress, it will take a long time for me to do them all, I would love your contributions. Please get in touch if you can help.

Also, I am really pretty lazy - I haven’t tested the links, nor have I tested that the assembly files open properly. I would really appreciate it if you let me know if you find something that doesn’t work. I am certain that there will be some glitches here somewhere.

Finally, if you have any feedback (positive or negative) about this project then I would really appreciate it if you left a comment below.

Technical Graphics 1
- Section A Estimated Perspective*
- Section B Measured Perspective
- Section C Isometric Views
- Section D Oblique Views
- Section E Planometric Views*
- Section F Assemblies
- Section G Exploded Views*
- Section H Sectional Views*
- Section I Geometric Construction
- Section J Tangency and Ellipse Construction*
- Section K Illustration and Presentation*

Technical Graphics 2
- Section A Sectional Views*
- Section B Assembly Views*
- Section C Exploded Views*
- Section D Auxiliary Views*
- Section E Location Drawing*
- Section F Tolerances*
- Section G The Three Ps

*The sections marked with an asterisk are ones that have not yet been completed.

The images link to a large version on flickr, the Inventor files and AutoCad files are also available for you to open and edit as you wish. Please leave a comment below if you have any problems or spot any errors.

Go to the whole list of resources.

All Inventor files have been made by myself and are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland licence, this basically means you can use/edit them in any way you like as long as: you give attribution to me, you do not make money from them, and that if you make your edited versions available they must be covered by the same licence. All other files have been put together and altered by various people. I believe they were originally put together by Tom Bruce.

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The images link to a large version on flickr, the Inventor files and AutoCad files are also available for you to open and edit as you wish. Please leave a comment below if you have any problems or spot any errors.

Go to the whole list of resources.

All Inventor files have been made by myself and are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland licence, this basically means you can use/edit them in any way you like as long as: you give attribution to me, you do not make money from them, and that if you make your edited versions available they must be covered by the same licence. All other files have been put together and altered by various people. I believe they were originally put together by Tom Bruce.
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The images link to a large version on flickr, the Inventor files and AutoCad files are also available for you to open and edit as you wish. Please leave a comment below if you have any problems or spot any errors.

Go to the whole list of resources.

All Inventor files have been made by myself and are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland licence, this basically means you can use/edit them in any way you like as long as: you give attribution to me, you do not make money from them, and that if you make your edited versions available they must be covered by the same licence. All other files have been put together and altered by various people. I believe they were originally put together by Tom Bruce.
(more…)

The images link to a large version on flickr, the Inventor files and AutoCad files
are also available for you to open and edit as you wish. Please leave a comment
below if you have any problems or spot any errors.

Go to the whole list of resources.

Unless stated otherwise all Inventor
files have been made by myself and are protected under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland licence, this
basically means you can use/edit them in any way you like as long as: you do not
make money from them, and that if you make your edited versions available they
must be covered by the same licence, a little credit of my name would be nice
too. All other files have been put together and altered by various people. They
were originally put together by Tom Bruce.

(more…)

The images link to a large version on flickr, the Inventor files and AutoCad files
are also available for you to open and edit as you wish. Please leave a comment
below if you have any problems or spot any errors.

Go to the whole list of resources.

Unless stated otherwise all Inventor
files have been made by myself and are protected under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland licence, this
basically means you can use/edit them in any way you like as long as: you do not
make money from them, and that if you make your edited versions available they
must be covered by the same licence, a little credit of my name would be nice
too. All other files have been put together and altered by various people. They
were originally put together by Tom Bruce.

(more…)

Heard of twitter? Well pownce is quite a bit similar, but I think it’s a lot more useful. It’s a new venture by Kevin Rose (digg founder) and it lets you send short messages, links, events, and files to anybody (who uses pownce).

What makes it for me is the easy way to specify who you send things to - my gripe with twitter was the difficulty in sending messages to only certain people. Pownce lets you set up groups for you to put your friends in, so you can have your drinking buddies, your family, your colleagues, your 3rd year Craft and Design class, etc. And then you can send messages to only those groups and not worry about sending inappropriate messages to most of your contacts. (What I haven’t been able to find out yet is if you can have friends in multiple groups, would be useful).

Educational uses? Definitely, they seem far more obvious to me than twitter, which I didn’t really manage to get into. The ease of sending a short message to a class or a group of pupils creates loads of opportunities for teaching.

At the moment it’s invitation only, but there’s a way round that… over at mashable there’s a thread where if you comment with an email address you should get someone sending you an invite - this is how I got mine. I have none left to give out because the rule on mashable is once you’re in you go back and give your invites to people still waiting. Sharing at it’s best.

So, go over to mashable and comment, once you’re into pownce find me and add me as a friend - once I have people to talk to maybe I’ll start talking

Of course you don’t need to have an account, you still view all the public messages, and of course subscribe. This is the feed to my public messages.

The images link to a large version on flickr, the Inventor files and AutoCad files
are also available for you to open and edit as you wish. Please leave a comment
below if you have any problems or spot any errors.

Go to the whole list of resources.

Unless stated otherwise all Inventor
files have been made by myself and are protected under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 UK: Scotland licence, this
basically means you can use/edit them in any way you like as long as: you do not
make money from them, and that if you make your edited versions available they
must be covered by the same licence, a little credit of my name would be nice
too. All other files have been put together and altered by various people. They
were originally put together by Tom Bruce.

(more…)