Mindfulness

To notice things, we have to be mindfully engaged with a task. One of the things I noticed during the digital concepts activity was that a lot of times when someone wasn’t sure about something, they had heard of it or worked with it but had never inquired further. I think that might be human nature, or a tendency for non-technical people (I majored in English in college and “didn’t know” how to plug the monitor to the computer ten years ago) to think that more technical aspects of the computer are “hard.”

It’s not hard, but it does require understanding the language of computing and having the confidence to ask questions and ask for clarification when we don’t understand. One of our goals in this course is to foster that background knowledge so that we can focus on the bigger picture of educational technology, instructional design, art education, and digital media production.

In class, Bridget commented, and at the time I agreed, that the terms we covered would probably not be necessary for someone who just checks email and (I will add) browses the internet. Do you agree? Let me pose some scenarios:
-Someone is sending family pictures through email – 20 at a time, downloaded directly from the digital camera, shot at the highest resolution.
-Someone is looking up information on wikipedia.
-Someone receives a file in their email with an extension they have never seen before and clicks on it to open it.
-Someone is looking for information on the white house and looks at whitehouse.org (instead of .gov)
-Someone receives a forward with photos and forwards it to everyone they know to spread the “facts.”

This list could go on and on. When working with digital media, what do you think are the minimum technical details someone needs to know? What are the minimum planning skills? Artistic skills? How do you focus on the latter two without spending too much time in the details of the technical?