foolfillment: the blog

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.

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…)

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…)

I had the great opportunity to observe an SQA markers’ meeting in Glasgow today.

It’s all very hush-hush, and I can’t say what was covered, but it was a really worthwhile thing to go to. There are of course lots of underlying issues about whether these assessment methods are appropriate, but for me as a teacher who is just about to start teaching courses that do get assessed like this, then being able to see how different questions get marked was incredibly useful.

I believe it was a very private process until quite recently which seems pretty funny, I don’t know what the reasons for it were but I think it is much better to make it open and accessible. One thing I wonder though is if being open about how different types of questions are marked might lead to teaching more to the exam than actually teaching the subject.

Another point that came up was that most Graphic Communication classes spend, perhaps, about 70% of their time on drawing boards, when only about one third of the marks comes from it, and more importantly after school the chances of the pupils seeing or using a board again are very slim. This is something I’ll come back to in another post. The spin-off from this point is the relevance and worth of the Graphic Communication courses in the first place.

So, I was in uni today, talking with my supervisor about my project (it’s going okay, thanks) and we got talking with the course leader, who shares the same office, about the future of subjects in CDT. More and more schools are going down the route of teaching only Craft and Design, and Graphic Communication. The point that came up was that these subjects are the ones that are (apologies if this hurts any of you) easy to teach and easy to learn. This is because essentially these courses only offer up skills, there is not really any academic aspect to them, they require pupils to learn how do perform some tasks but do not require much understanding or learning to occur.

This post is a bit of a ramble and there are no fully thought out ideas here, so feel free to chip in with your ideas of CDT, or to tell me that you disagree. It’s likely I will edit this if I get more of an idea of what I think should happen.
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So that was the first day back after the break. I was in a really grumpy mood at first, it seemed as though none of them could understand that only one person can drill at once. By the time it got to after lunch though I was feeling much better. I had my third year graphics class for the first of a series of lessons that I have put together completely myself from scratch - with a gradual build up towards my final crit next Wednesday. We had about half a period of discussion on colour theory and emotions associated with colour (a really abstract concept for most kids that age), for all it was very worthwhile it was a bit chaotic and there was far too much shouting out. I couldn’t quite find the right balance between open discussion and everyone shouting. The main disappointment though was when I was trying to get across the idea of receding colours one boy pipes up ‘is that like receding hairlines’ which on it’s own is fine but then the ‘orrible bunch chose to make it personal: ‘like yours sir!’ Little blighters, I’ll get them back for that.

I spent most of today putting together a short film I might use in school next week, I’ve been thinking about using something similar for my last ever crit in two weeks. I’ve said before but Camtasia is incredibly easy to use, the only barrier I faced was having to use a webcam to capture the video - it meant the quality isn’t great and setting up a way to hold the webcam on the scene was the nightmare in the photo here.

Anyway, go and watch it and let me know what you think, I’d really appreciate any feedback.

(Unfortunately the quality on this youtube version isn’t as good as the original but it gives a fair representation)

Graphic Communication, You Tube, Camtasia, Rendering