: From: "howard" : Karl: that was very helpful and interesting. My cohort, as I said are 16-18 years old students, but my course is taught to rank beginners, on a time allocation of 4 hours / week in the first year and 5 hours / week in the second year...different playing fields obviously! yes (!) That's not a lot of time, and I take it the goal isn't to be a science photographer at the end ;) : Year 1 (a huge range of ability and attitude, and I have virtually no choice over whom I teach) oh attitude.. that's a good one, they're everywhere, huh? :-/ : 1.. camera technique : 2.. wet processing (because so many colleges in higher education expect a knowledge of it) : 3.. visual skills - in taking and looking : 4.. research skills and language skills : 5.. and hopefully creativity, though that's hard on the back of the current English education system looks like you and the students could have a lot of fun with this :) For a course that's arranged as above I can't see there would be much time for the stuff I wrote of, of course it strikes me that a film-based photo course that has an emphasis on the technologies as opposed to the aesthetic doesn't translate well to digital. The demand that seems to have been made by many administrators that digital just be simply included along with what frequently was a structurally full syllabus seems a bit (lot) optimistic and in fact some of these courses need to be expanded significantly! Dropping parts to squeeze in the new stuff can be a mistake - One course I knew of some time back dropped the fundamentals of flash altogether to accommodate scanning and introductory PS work. It became apparent a few years later when students begun screaming that they were incapable of using any flash that wasn't auto - that they didn't know what guide numbers were or how to use them! Seems an inquisitive student 'taught' the others about guide numbers and overcame a lot of the problems students were experiencing and they wanted to know how something they found so useful and so basic could have been omitted from the course (letters were written..) The argument by administrators put to staff who were struggling, was that the college had to remain competitive so jacking up fees and extending the course hours or running parallel course concentrating on digital would not work (from a $$ point of view). The fact that quite a number of students actually wanted this was a mute point. grumble.. yes, I'm being political .. Still, you could certainly accomplish quite a bit with the outline above, as I expect you do :-) : Year 2 (selected now by end of year 1 exams) : 1.. digital techniques - but because of lack of hours, much of this is on a need to know basis ah. THIS I understand. this also seems to be at the core of a lot of courses and is necessary for the preservation of the lecturers sanity! : 2.. understanding photographs, language and interpretative skills : 3.. creativity (can be very challenging!) gulp! : As for me I'm just a hobbyist snapshotter! :-) That's what I *like* to be :-) For many students entering photography the assumption has to be made that their knowledge is incomplete and you've got to start from scratch to cover all the bases. You can usually assume too that they actually want to learn this stuff - maybe not all of it, very few got excited or saw the point of IR photography beyond pictorial use. Mind you, one of our major state hospitals has just 'discovered' a use for IR for medical recording.. how they'd forgotten it I'll never know, but they're looking at getting into it big time :-) concentrate Karl, concentrate.. Ah yes, even though the learning environment of a course is designed to teach 'knowledge subset 'A', a lot of what is learned is gathered from within the community, among the students themselves sharing and seeing each others work - this alone is a truly valuable experience and makes a leap between studying books alone at home in a vacuum and attending a course. but a student can go a fair way studying non-media-specific photography at home alone.. much of it is well documented across the preceding 100 years and the fundamentals seem quite logical and follow a progression. Digital however is really new and VERY complex and stands aside from traditional photography - there's no logical progression (sorry guys) to stepping from a camera to a box hosting Linux, Mac, BeOS, MS whatever. Turn the box on and load the software (load? how? what software?) save and burn (??) Not everyone wants to become highly literate with computers, I can seriously understand this! - and how do we sift through the innumerable programs out there - every computer rag has a DVD with a hundred or so free programs aboard to confuse and startle the user.. some of them will take over your computer and wreak havoc. Do nothing? Stick with PS1 and MS paint? no. Upgrade furiously because the latest, DRM enriched software needs a gig to store it's monitoring elements - to make sure you don't scan a dollar note (for your own protection of course) and the latest version of Freecell needs a YUV colour space and a 300fps frame rate rendering, again no. Move forward blindly, or remain blindly locked with what you know.. try everything and hope to have time to effectively evaluate on the fly - it's too hard to know what to do. Fortunately the group situation created in a learning environment has the potential to allow an accumulation of evidence and experience to be examined, discussed and pointers to be shared. This is a really good thing Maybe the nature of the 'group' can be used in the context of learning more.. somehow :-) I really don't envy those asked to teach digital within existing courses at the moment. I'm sure it'll change in time as the body of knowledge grows and the frantic rate of change slows somewhat - at least, that's what I'm hoping! k
