library

2006-08-12T00:47:00.000-07:00

Visual representation (assignment two)

The united nation has declared 2006 to be the international year of desert and desertification. It is not just important to the people living in deserts, but the earth gradually degradation is increasing at an alarming rate. Dry land covering up to 40% of the earth surface, and more than 110 countries are potentially at risk.

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The key idea of my design is based on four issues about desertification. My main theme focuses on how it effects and relates with us. In order to give students some understanding about what is desertification, I did some animation with a thermometer to represent temperature and a barrel of water to represent rainfall. The relation between temperature and rainfall affect the climate condition. By press the button, the temperature increase, at the same time the water in the barrel decrease and the photos change according to its process to show the real feature of desertification. I want to show the process where by productive land becomes so seriously eroded that any remaining soil loose fertility to plant growth. I use a short script at the top to explain and deliberately use color change the word, animation and photos to show the process.

My target student is lower form. For student live in urban know less geographic features about their environment. In my experience, it is difficult to understand complex geographical features only by languages or text. With the help of visual representation in education, student can easily understand what they see because “images are key to comprehending and communicate with the world around us”. According to Tufle (1983), picture can “convey the most knowledge” picture can pass the message instead of word of language and we also can expanded our thinking by vision is a process of constructive activity. Therefore, through visual to display a brief concept about desertification is my learning objective.

The natural cause of desertification present in the process page is easy grasped drought, high temperature, lower water and deforested land cause erosive of land. I want to emphasis human activity can play a considerable role in degrading land. Human activities cause desertification is a very important message I want to bring about. In the cause button, I give examples with pictures such as burn and slash and over logging and rearing show what is the feature about the activity that human practices poor farming and inappropriate method in our nature. Finally, a graph chart can give a concluded understanding for the various reason . The source from CMI teacher teaching centre can clearly show the relation between population, animals and their grassland. In such land and climate condition, if population increased, the demand for food must increase. Due to the improper using of land as show before, a consequence of animal and grassland decrease because of land degrading.

I want student to explore more, so I create the effects button. It appears four words with button to ask student to guess all the effect of desertification. I design in this way not just to present my work interactively with sound effect. I hope the guess process can lead student thinking on the world’s food production capacity if a global loss of biodiversity. By seeing the photos, I think they can imagine the massive suffering for those living in the desert, their means of survival.

In order to have fun and keep my students incentive to learn by themselves, I make it differently with the pervious way to present the consequence about desertification. In response to the comments, I have told about the difficulties in doing this maze, but it is worth to do if it can communicate information effectively by finished running the maze. In this page, I try to emphasis desertification exacerbates poverty and political instability. People suffer from water shortage and starve. Children cannot attend school. People have no where to live. Environmental refugees suffer under living difficulties...etc can result by ?? I think students already have their answers in mind.

Image and sound effects and animations :
http ://office.microsoft.com

program for graphics :
photoimpact

Sources of information :
http://pages.slc.edu/~ebj/minds/student_pages/adrian/index.html

http://www.teacherhome.cn/ResHtml/32/3272/1000100066000.html

http://www.cmi.hku.hk/material/dis.ppt#2

http://www.ciesin.org/docs/002-479/002-479.html

2006-08-05T23:33:00.000-07:00

Reflection of my learning:

In this module, Daniel has leaded us to a new direction to learn and he has taught us many useful skills. The most impressive and I can make most ability to it is to reforming textual information into visual representation and use digital resources to make a photo story. In using the tool of flash, I have become more understanding. Even though I am a bit slow in working, I think my skills have improved a bit. I think flash is a very good program and can be very useful if you know how to function it.

I want to be able to use flash well and to produce good animations, however, I am not very familiar with its setting and it is hard to learn everything very quickly. The problem is: although I can follow Daniel to make button and create a slider in class, but how to integrate it with my design information and apply this tool function in my work is difficult. I think if I want to improve my skills in using flash, I need to often practice with the program so that I can become familiar with it. It is like the saying “practice make perfect”. I believe that if I practice it and try hard to improve my skills with flash, I will be able to produce some good results with it.
Besides, by the task of our assignment, I also learn a lot not just knowing it how to do, but doing it. I have a little surprise I can do a maze by instructions from a form four student and my classmate appreciate the effort of my work. It’s a real learning. Therefore, I want to share my learning to do a maze with other classmate. It is not difficult to follow the steps to create a maze, but to make it more interactively ,I mean it is not one way to play, but have many obstacles and make it challenge may need other classmates advice.

Belows are some points to make a maze:

Firstly, to draw the maze use the rectangle tool to draw the border of the maze, and then use the line tool to draw out the path and the route in order to customize the line, right click the line and press Format Autoshape. (The line and arrow can choose color and style at this stage.)
I used the oval tool to draw out the red spots and use textbox to write the numbers.

Secondly is to make the maze function.
Right click the green line and choose custom animation. An extra column appear and you have to press add effect, choose entrance, then press wipe. According to the line, set the direction. (For example, if your line is going down, in the direction column, you choose form top, that means the line will start to go down from the top.)
To make the route move by itself, custom animation for each line.

Thirdly, to make the consequence page show up in between the maze:
i) Copy the maze in five different slides.
ii) Go to the original maze page, and then select every line that leads up to the first red spot, then cut and paste them on every page.
iii) Starting from the second page, group everything together (right click – grouping – group) , so all the pages (except the first maze page) is one object, then cut every line from the second to the third point, then paste them on every page.
iv) Do the same action at the third, the forth…until you reach the end.
v) At this stage, your page should appears like that:
first page – only the route to first red spot (NOT grouped) second page – route from start to second red spot (first red spot grouped) third page – route from start to third red spot (first and second red spot grouped) fourth page – route from start to fourth red spot (first to third red spot grouped) fifth page – route from start to fifth red spot (first to fourth red spot grouped) make sure the ungrouped routes are custom animated!

Grouping the 5 consequence page in one object, then take the first consequence page on top of the first maze page, then right click the consequence page and press custom animation, choose add effect, then press entrance, choose fade, after that choose speed and then go to start and choose after previous. This means that after the first maze has finished moving the consequence page will automatically fade.

vi) Repeat this for every consequence page.

2006-07-29T03:45:00.000-07:00

This is my final prototype
Please comment

http://iln.cite.hku.hk/com/1238/users/klchan6/finalprototype.ppt

2006-07-25T23:53:00.000-07:00

prototype under construction
Here is the Front Page to introduce the Process, the Cause, the Effects, and the Consequences of desertification. Four action buttons to choose which topic you want to see.

Process page
Two animations on the side with a slider to show the temperature and rainfall's correlation with the process of desertification

Cause page
Three pictures with three animations showing the cause by humans. And the arrows jump to a chart to show the conclusion.

Effects page
"Can you guess all the effects of desertification?" - people can click the four green buttons to see if their guesses are correct. A picture and a small annotation is written at the botton

Consequences page
Students can play a maze. They must go to all six points in order. Each time they reach a new point, a consequence with a picture will pop up.

2006-07-14T22:54:00.000-07:00

Last session Daneil give me advised to focus on the topic ‘ how desertification effects the world ’. I hope I can linking all the issue on dryland, degraded soil, wind erosion contributing to more intensive hurricanes, air pollution, global loss of biodiversity or growing problem. But I’m afraid if I just present part of the feature of desertification, student cannot have a complete clear picture about. If student do not have some base knowledge about the topic, it may not underline the importance of the issue. The concept about desertification and poverty are different from science or maths subjects, which can be learnt directly by clear elaborating steps.
How about if I follow my plan to used this front page to develop the topics about desertification by using graphic incorporated with photos to show the whole picture about it? Or I need to change? (I would try my best to use some technique of flash in my work and make it interactively.)

2006-07-14T02:47:00.000-07:00

My storyboard : desertification

I find in the clip art of desert, it can help a lot to show the features of a desert. I will place them onto a slide in PowerPoint to make my front page. Afterwards, I used some action bottoms to allow my student to choose what they want to read about the topic : desertification. The following topics will be presented by the used of photos and graphics.
For the time being, I find it difficult to explain the meaning of desertification. I plan to create a few graphics that show the process of how it happens and follow with real pictures to show how it look like at each stages. In case student cannot understand entirely, I will include a simple definition at the bottom, explaining what desertification means.
In order to have a complete concept about desertification, I also create the bottom about how human take the role of it, I plan to find some picture of forest being destroyed and areas that are draught etc.
Finally, the bottom how desertification effects the world, I would like to make it interactively, but I need to think about it later!

2006-06-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

The idea of my final assignment
In relation to my teaching, there are many interesting topics I want to develop a learning object ,such as the creation of Chinese words , the main events happened between 1919 to 1945 to show the cause of second world war, or the issue of globalization. All these topics are great issues with complicated backgrounds that students are not favorite to read. Therefore, create a learning object with visual and interactive material can engage student learning effectively.
Preliminary, I may use time line link to my design history photos to show the cause of second war world. As required, screen with animation and certain level of interaction are in my thinking of design. I need to explore the detail content of my work, the most important is what do I want my student to learn, or how can they learn more easily by my interactive learning design. Give me more time to develop my thinking of my work.

2006-06-14T22:52:00.000-07:00

Will this book draw you in reading it ?

Does I can convey the message I want to bring about ? Please comment!

Video:http://iln.cite.hku.hk/com/1238/users/klchan6/PhotoStory4.wmv

2006-06-08T01:33:00.000-07:00

Can the picture help you to remember all the content and know more about the structure of the outermost layer atmosphere.

I think this picture can “convey the most knowledge” about the outermost layer atmosphere“ in the shortest time in the small space”? (Tefle, 1983)
Visual can present data, information, knowledge, ideas such as the examples in session 2’ ppts. I can aware the different countries political attitudes of Europe in 1870 just by a glance of Hadol’s Satiric Map. Pictures can pass the message instead of words or language, basically, vision is our ability to understand and communicate with the world around us. I am much agreeing that our cultural are much relies on languages communication. Other than language, visual imagery also can use for the communication of complex ideas. If our education are learned in decoding and creating imagery, that means we are not just seeing in eyes, but to reflect or analyze on it with thought and insight.
In http://pages sol.edu/~edi/minds/student pages/Adrian/index.html the process of seeing inspired me to think more careful and detail in structural relations in the abstract data in vision. Vision itself is complex, but how we have expanded our thinking by vision is a process of constructive activity. As we scan the immediate environment from a context for the detail, we rely not only on “wired-in perceptual mechanisms” to categorize what we see, but that our process of seeing, and understanding what we see. “The perceiver may see the world before we knows it”(Ibid) therefore, a single glances of vision is interpreting what is seen based on what we have seen in past, first images becomes part of our general knowledge.

By the way, to understand the concept between information and knowledge in visualization, according to wikipedis: Information visualization is the use of interactive, sensory representations, typically visual, of abstract data to reinforce cognitive. It is a complex research area includes theory in information design, computer graphics and human-computer interaction in cognitive thinking. Practical application of information visualization in computer programs involves selecting, transforming and representing abstract data in a form that facilitates human interaction for exploration and understanding. Important aspects of information visualization are the interactivity and dynamics of the visual representation to structural relations in the abstract data in pictures.

Knowledge visualization - "the use of visual representations to transfer knowledge between at least two persons" (Burkhard and Meier, 2004), aims to improve the transfer of knowledge by using visualization methods. Examples of such visual formats are sketches, diagrams, images, objects, interactive visualizations, information visualization applications, imaginary visualizations, and stories. While information visualization concentrates on the use of computer-supported tools to derive new insights, knowledge visualization focuses to transfer insights and to create new knowledge in groups. Other than facts to make knowledge visible, knowledge visualization aims to further transfer “ insights, experience, attitudes, values, expectations, eventually with the capacity to share or manage.

response to comments:

Compared with text representation, the purpose of visual representation is easier and quicker for audience to understand. Therefore, the power to use the main elements for visual display such as graphics, text, symbols or colour (Lester 2000) is important. Although I do not use animation to make my work more attractive, but I think my picture can illustrates the main points from the text clearly.
In beginning my task, I do not make a planning process such as in session 3 you taught us about in making a digital story, we need to consider the process from selecting a topic to the end stage of delivery. But actually, I had thoughtfully to think about how to present my layout in a picture. As I went through my task, I go to http://images.google.com to find a picture of the earth, Select desired picture with a right click and copy it. I Using Photo Impact, crop out the top part of the earth. I Copy that part, and paste it into the power-point document.

In understanding your provided text, I felt a little difficult and boring. I browsing in the Internet about the earth, I found this page (http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/space/atmosphere.html) could give me clearer and detail information about the earth’s atmosphere. From the ground up, I think the four layers temperature changes and its height are important information to know about the functioning of our atmosphere, as you climb higher, the most dense, the temperature drops. Therefore, I put in the scale of temperature and height.

I create a scale using the "Drawing lines" tool and adjust the settings in "Format AutoShape"
When the scale is done, mark out each point. Using Photo Impact, I draw out the borders of the atmosphere and Put everything together into the power-point document. Finally, I Using the "Text box” labels each atmosphere and adds on any other information about it.

You asked me how is the different in my representation from the others. I think I am not he most good, but I had done my best. In viewing Daphne Chan Kit Fun’s presentation, she is doing the best with clear layout and attractive animation. Many of our classmates are using attractive animation display, but some of it I cannot understand, even it is not very complicated, but not everyone has the ability to understand what they see, especially difficult concept with many data and facts. Therefore, proper text with graphic explanation can directly build up the knowledge in our mind.

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2006-06-07T23:50:00.000-07:00

Reflection on session I Mite-6323

As I saw some interesting examples in interactive visual representation in session one, I feel a little stress in the newly technologies and techniques, animation, multimedia, interactivity. With only fewer skills in computer knowledge, it is a great challenge for me to create visual explanation in the beginning. It stunned me! Actually, it gives me a new insight in planning my teaching and learning. On the other hand, the desire to use visual tool to attract reader is a new and interesting direction to learn. To use of visualization to discover relationships, using interactive graphics to widen our thinking is a new way for me to learn in the module.

Visualization the term is not new because we can see many example of visualization art such as cave painting, hieroglyphs in history. According to the wikipedia, It is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas, but I need to know how do I can do it.
Visualization today has ever-expanding applications in science and all forms of education, interactive multimedia, medicine etc. Typical of most applications of visualization these days are the extensive use of computer graphics. The development of animation also helped advance the field of visualization. With the growth and goal of representation of visual display, I hope I can develop animation visual explanation skills and find it useful in my career.