How to Answer a Technology How-to Question

Being known as the tech-guy, I get asked how-to questions. I think people ask me not only because I might know, but also they feel comfortable asking as well as the fact that they are going get an answer that makes senses to them. I don't speak some foreign language of acronyms at them. This is an important competency that instructional technologists must have in order to be successful. Here's a question from today:

Do you know of any software (the simpler the better) which you can use to extract a still image (photo) from video footage?

The short answer is "It depends." There are a bunch of ways. If you just want a picture to post to your website, then a quick and dirty way like Print Screen will work. If you need a still for publication, then you need to capture at a very high resolution.

I'm going to assume you want really easy, just for web-level purposes. Low resolution, decent quality.

• Just hook up the camcorder to the computer.
• Then open up your video editing software, Premiere or even Windows Movie Maker (free).
• Enter into the Capture tool.
• Cue up, or fast forward to the still you want.
• Then press Print Scr on your keyboard.
• Now open up a photoediting software like Photoshop, Fireworks or GIMP (free).
• Open a new file.
• Then paste the screenshot.
• Then crop out of the still.
• Save and export into a jpeg.

Here's the response.

Thanks John for your detailed instructions. I will have to try this method out and see how it works for me.

It would be better if the individual tried it out right now, as the question and the instructions are in short-term memory. The individual is visualizing the end product, but doesn't know how to get there. There will be a need to draw on long term memory to visualize this image. Of course, this is not pragmatic when working with busy professionals. Since the instructions are written, the individual can go back to them and attempt it when the timing is right.

Ones to Watch

The Etech conference is being held March 26-29, 2007 in San Diego. Though I can't go, I wanted to know a little more about what I'm missing. Looking through the Speaker's list, two programs caught my eye.

How to Innovate on Time by Scott Berkun (his blog). This talk sounds like an elaboration on what PaylPal founder, Max Levchin, said on NerdTV. "I actually think that a successful startup is 5 percent good idea and 95 percent execution." This idea that execution, implementation, and delivery are what success is about in the field of innovation seems to be a more shared view. I noted in a previous post on the Cox Review, which distinguished between creatively generating new ideas and using innovation process to exploit it's potential into real products and services.

Coder to Co-Founder: Entrepreneuring for Geeks by Marc Hedlund. This kind of training is necessary not only for programmers, but for all new media participants who are creating rich content. Also, in the session blurb he mentions intrapreneuring. This is what I do at George Mason. I don't have any contacts outside of the university. I just bounce between departments seeking to collaborate on different projects. I think this is a synergistic way of developing the next generation of doctoral students. They learn to work in a collaborative fashion, while professors get access to new technology skills and ideas.

When I went to his company's blog, Wheaties for your Wallet, to find out more about him, I noticed that he was attending SXSW. This seemed strange to me because I thought this was a music festival. Boy was I wrong.

The South by Southwest Interactive is kinda of a mashup of an O'Reilly conference and Sundance and Bonnaroo. Or at least that's what it seems like on first glance. Especially on the new media side, it might be a great place to interact with new people. Seems very cool and I plan to go sometime soon.

Dreamweaver Alternatives

Aptana is free and pretty robust, however it doesn't have one thing, wysiwyg editing. What I mean is you can't edit the page like a Word document, a very nice feature of DW. You can configure it to view your work in multiple browsers, but all editing is in code. The built-in FTP work very nice, maybe better than DW. The interface is confusing at first. I deleted most of the panels in the workspace. You can add them back as you get more comfortable.


SeaMonkey is an updated version of the old Netscape Suite. It offers wysiwyg editing, but the FTP features are very weak. It's upload only. Although you could use separate software for ftp'ing. It's not as nice a workflow. With every change to a page, means you have to upload a file in a separate program. The interface is easier than Aptana and it seems very stable.

KompoZer is the best of both worlds. It's built on the same codebase as SeaMonkey's web editor and the Nvu program, but it's much better than both. The Ftp features are faster and more stable than in Nvu. The KompoZer development group really just took over for Nvu community. It is for this reason that I would use this software for teaching any sort of basic web development.

An important selection criteria for me in evaluating free and open-source software (FOSS), is to read up on the development community's support of the project. Without their continual efforts, exposed bugs will never get fixed. In my field, I'm often evaluating the viability of software for students to learn in order to get work done. Taking this user-centered approach to product evaluation, I need to make sure that the interface is easy for a beginner to figure out, and that the necessary features are present. Buggy software is just not a good teaching situation, students get frustrated because they have not learned to discriminate errors of their own from errors of the software.

New Media Strategies' 'Online Analysts' Scour the Web

In the Washington Post today is an article about the emergence of online marketing companies. Spending their whole day interacting with new media, on the web, playing games, IM'ing, these companies work in these channels in order to both manage the public image of Hollywood clients as well as find opportunities to market new brands.

To me this is really a land grab/arbitrage opportunity. As old line marketing companies have to protect investments, they are slower to jump into media that carry greater risk. The same thing has been happening with advertising in Second Life. In these early days it's good to just field a team, although each day the field gets more crowded. Eventually the predators start showing up, and then it's a more balanced ecosystem. (See what I did there? I went from sports metaphor to ecology metaphor.)

What other opportunities beyond Hollywood is out there for new media analysis? What role does education and learning play? Helping an organization employ new media in meaningful ways for all stakeholders, like customers, clients, employees, shareholders, students, teachers, etc., has got to be something. What's the business model? Consulting, operations, sales, training?

Quizlet is a tool for learning vocabulary

Quizlet provides a robust way for teachers and students to learn vocabulary. It an interesting approach coming from the instructional design field. In that Andrew Sutherland has turned what I would call a teacher test-making tool into a student studying tool. He adds some nice Ajax gui-ness and social networking sharing to the mix. Bringing this software code to the web unlocks a lot of untapped energy through the network. Imagine a student taking a quiz 5 times, rather than once. Okay, this ruins the validity of the assessment instrument, but they learned it nonetheless.

I would love the ability to embed a quizlet into my blog, similar to YouTube.

Breakthrough Ideas for 2007

In the February 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review, you can access the free article Breakthrough Ideas for 2007. One of the twenty authors, Eric von Hippel, discusses how User-Centered Innovation needs to be a national priority. Seems to be a trend today, the Cox Review shares this theme.

Also Clay Shirky discusses the nature of open-source projects and their ability to out-succeed and out-fail traditional projects. Failure leads to growth and learning, why can't schools and the education community understand this?

Cox Review of Creativity in Business

The UK's Design Council has published the Cox Review of Creativity in Business. One highlight of the review stresses the separation of creativity (generation of ideas) from innovation (exploitation of ideas into products and services). Among the recommendations:

• A national support programme, modelled on the Design Council's work with businesses, to help SMEs use design
• A review of whether strategic design work should be eligible for R&D tax credits
• Centres of excellence in higher education for multi-disciplinary courses combining management studies, engineering and technology and creative disciplines
• A new approach to public procurement to encourage suppliers to be more innovative
• Raising the profile of the creative industries through a national network of design centres.

What should schooling look like when we try to unleash the creative spirit for economic and social change? K-12 schools certainly are not ready, art programs are the first to go in a budget. Colleges and universities value science over design. The dissertation is an exercise in the scientific method, not design method. What about design education and design thinking? This is my core philosophy of my teaching in instructional technology courses. Students should walk away from class being able to think like a designer. This is one part of the equation, but not the answer to the question I raised.

Relying on large organizations to change is no path to breakthroughs.Maybe we should be teaching students how to start creative businesses. Upon graduation, they receive $20,000 in seed money to start a business. Let's treat every college graduate like a MacArthur fellow.

Also makes me think of Richard Florida's Creative class.

Also read Core77's discussion of the Competetiveness Summit on Businessweek.com

Davos--12 Power Shifts That Are Changing The World

Bruce Nussbaum reporting from the Davos conference on power shifts in four categories: geopolitics, economics, technology/society and business. Two in particular seem relevant to me in terms of learning and education: "Rise of The New Individual, empowered by networks" and "Shift to collective intelligence from individual intelligence and aggregators of information".

If individuals can become empowered by networks, it would seem to me that people have to learn how to do this and live this way. I know from my own experience, it took me quite some time to learn how to be effective with ubiquitous networking power. Even now I don't take full advantage, and I'm on the leading edge. What about everyone else, how or will they learn this? Kids are easy, this is the only world they have ever known. Adults have to unlearn before they can learn, and that's hard. If they don't then they lose out to those who can adapt. Technology learning establishes a selection force.

Technology Management Speaker Series: Robert Kahn

I just rsvp'd for this event on February 9, 2007 hosted by the GMU School of Management.

In the mid-70’s technology pioneers Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed the common computer language that gave birth to the Internet. Today, as chairman, CEO and president of the Corporation for Research Initiatives, Kahn continues to nurture the development of the medium he helped create. Join us as he shares his insights on the future of network-based technologies.