One of the responsibilities of the MEWS consultant role this spring is to contribute content to this very site. Each week, each consultant should complete one post, and there are three options to choose from:
- A “how-to” post that walks the end user through the steps of completing a small task
- A video tutorial created by someone else (hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), with a summary of what the viewer will learn and why you found it valuable
- A summary of 2-3 technology news articles from the past month, with links to the articles and an explanation of their relevance to the Mount Holyoke community.
Creating a How-To Post
- Open the MEWS News site and create a new post.
- Decide on a small, readily articulable goal for the post. What will the reader learn? Know that the more specific you get, the easier it is going to be to create a finished project. (Note: this is similar to learning to craft an effective research question!)
Too big: "Intro to Photoshop" Just right: "How to remove all but one color in an image using Photoshop"
- Write out what you currently believe are the steps to completing the post’s goal. What should the reader do first, second, third, etc.?
- Once you have a first draft, test your instructions. Imagine you are a reader who has never tried to accomplish this before. Attempt to accomplish the goal of the how-to post using only the steps you have written out.
What steps did you forget? What steps need additional clarification?
- Revise the steps of your how-to based on your experience testing your draft.
- Add at least two explanatory images. (Human brains learn on multiple channels, and benefit greatly from having both visual and written modes of input!)
Some good options: visual examples of where the how-to starts and finishes screenshots of the trickiest steps images of key buttons to press or menus to leverage
- Once your revised post has several explanatory images included, review your written text one last time for clarity.
- Categorize the post under “tutorials.”
- Add a “featured image” to this post. Any large-sized image you feel is relevant to the goal of the post is the most appropriate.
- Click “publish.” Yay, you’re done!
Sharing a Video Tutorial
- What kind of tutorial do you think our community needs to see? Decide on a topic that has enough of a range that you might find multiple examples. If the topic is too broad, there will be too many results, but if it is too specific, you might not find a resource of sufficient quality — so seek a middle path.
Too broad: "Intro to Premiere Pro" Better: "Premiere Pro Smooth Zoom Blur Transition Effect"
- Search your preferred video archive (YouTube, Vimeo, etcetera) using keywords related to your topic.
- Narrow down the options further by date published (try to stick to materials created in the last 3 years) and duration of the tutorial (less than ten minutes).
Seriously. <10 min. No one will watch something much longer than that.
- Screen several videos, watching at least the first minute of each, to determine which resource is going to be of the highest quality or most applicable to our community’s needs.
- Once you have selected a video tutorial to share, watch it all the way through. While you are watching it, make a list of 3-5 highlights you can mention in a summary. Please also make note of any minor drawbacks or places you think the tutorial might be confusing for our community — and if that list is longer than 3 items, find a new tutorial.
- Open the MEWS News site in a new tab, and create a new post.
- Write an opening pair of sentences describing the video and its relevance.
This tutorial demonstrates how to create a smooth zoom blur transition effect in Adobe Premiere Pro. In addition to showing you how to achieve this style, Justin’s sample clips serve as good examples of why you might choose this transition effect for your own video.
- Embed the video into your post. Most often, simply pasting in the URL will make the video magically appear.
- Follow up with a summary paragraph. What will the viewer get out of this video? Why do you think it is valuable? What did you yourself learn while watching it?
One of the most useful aspects of this tutorial was the way Justin applied his effects onto separate adjustment layers, which allows for precise work that is easily cut-and-pasted onto multiple clips. Before watching this, I didn’t realize you could add multiple adjustment layers to the same clip! While he speaks quickly, following his cursor will allow you to see exactly where to navigate in the program to achieve this outcome — there’s no extraneous cursor movement, which helps make this a great tutorial. You can use this tutorial to make extra smooth montages, which will help articulate the relationships between different clips and set the overall mood of your piece.
- Categorize the post under “tutorials.”
- Add a “featured image” to this post. Any large-sized image you feel is relevant to the goal of the post is the most appropriate.
- Click “publish.” Yay, you’re done!
Reviewing Technology News
- Scan the headlines on two or more of the following sites:
- Choose a topic that you believe will be of interest to the Mount Holyoke community, has been in the news within the last month, and shows up on at least two of these sites. It could be a specific topic, or a general one:
Specific: Apple lays off workers in its autonomous vehicle division General: autonomous vehicles
- Read a total of two to three articles on your topic. Be sure to read articles from more than one web site.
- Open the MEWS News site in a new tab, and create a new post.
- Write 2 paragraphs summarizing the topic. Be sure to answer the following questions:
- What is it?
- Why is it of importance to the Mount Holyoke community?
- What did you learn from each article?
- Together, what do these articles teach us about possible trends in this topic or area?
- What entities or organizations would an interested reader research, if they wanted to grow their understanding of this topic?
Autonomous cars for individuals and families have long been a sci-fi dream idea inching closer and closer to a twenty-first century reality. But recent news articles suggest that some of the most progress on automated driving is not happening on the consumer market, but in the business of transportation and delivery — the logistics of getting goods to people. Think about how much materiel is shipped or driven to Mount Holyoke daily — from food to paper products. How would that change if the goods we need arrived via driverless vehicles? Would we be able to improve our efficiency as an institution? In Arizona, Wal-mart is testing out the delivery of consumer goods via driverless van. One of the most interesting things about this particular project to me is that the company that made the car, Udelv, is using an open-source self-driving platform developed by a Chinese search engine. Interested readers might wish to delve into the details of Baidu’s platform and dig into what other companies are making use of Apollo to develop autonomous driving and delivery services. At the same time, across the world in Germany, Daimler is starting to roll out semi-autonomous semi trucks. Other companies have announced their intent to build driverless long-haul trucks, or have begun to build prototypes, but some of the first players in the market have dialed back expectations and Daimler has taken up the cause, refining their initial prototype and getting a step closer to coming to market. Could a completely driverless logistics chain - from warehouse to consumer - soon be a global phenomenon? One thing that’s really interesting to me is just how widespread this effort is. I bet our roads will look a little different in ten years.
- Add links to each article in the body of your text, as seen above.
- Categorize the post under “news.”
- Add a “featured image” to this post. Any large-sized image you feel is relevant to the goal of the post is the most appropriate.
- Click “publish.” Yay, you’re done!