- Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland
So, I had a bit of an "Ah-ha!" moment this morning. Bear with me for a moment while I set the stage...
As I mentioned before, in the past year or so, I have taken several free, online courses to learn how to use Adobe products to create visual learning experiences for my online students. One of the cool things about Adobe software is you learn about something in one product and it generally applies to others. That's usually a good thing.
Except for layers. Layers have been the bane of my existence. Now, layers sound like really cool things. Every shape you draw in Illustrator, every object you animate in After Effects, every track you add in Premiere, every mask you create in Photoshop resides on a separate layer. You can group layers and ungroup them, you can turn them on and off, you move them around, which is important since whatever is in the top layer is what you see...unless you change the layer's opacity or you turn it off. You can isolate an object to modify it by selecting its layer. You can duplicate an object by duplicating its layer. You can even nest layers within layers creating levels of sublayers.
Layers are pretty fundamental to the effective and efficient use of this software. In fact, they are so fundamental, that I never really learned about them in these courses. Or rather, I was never taught about layers. I was taught how to do things, and in that process, saw how layers aided that process, but at no point was there a lesson about layers and how they work. Most of what I know about layers involved a lot trial and error and fair amount of swearing.
I understand the rational behind this; my situation of having zero, zip, nada, niente, nichts experience with Adobe software as well as no graphic design background when I started taking these courses is pretty unique, something I quickly realized from the very start. There may be a bit of self-selection going on there though. Since these are free courses, and there is no penalty for not finishing (*cough*UX to UI *cough*)(*cough*twice*cough*)(*cough*3rd time's the charm*cough*), someone who feels they don't have the background knowledge may drop out early.
I know not everyone is as persistent as I am. Those of you who know me might say stubborn. Those of who know me really well might say pig-headed.
But I had a big problem I wanted to solve, and so I was willing to put up with a whole lot of discomfort to work on solving that. I would have liked to have a LITTLE more information to start with, but that's the challenge of teaching people with a variety of background skills, balancing teaching the lowest levels without boring the higher ones. It's also part of the expert-novice dichotomy; experts often forget all the little bits and pieces they had to learn to become experts (that's why newly-learned are sometimes better teachers for true novices than experts, which is the subject for another post...)OK, we're almost to the Ah-Ha! moment.
One of the first Adobe apps I learned to use was Illustrator, and I use it a lot. In fact, I probably use it more than anything else. I often use it to draw images like those to the right that show a process over a period of time...like the evolution of stars in a cluster over 10 billion years. These images are all the same except for two things; the time frame and the position of the stars. The way I created these was to do the first one, save it, save a copy, modify the time and the star pattern on that, save it, save a copy, modify the time and star pattern on that, and repeat three more times. That worked, but it left me with six versions of the same illustration...six versions which I had to fix when I realized I had a typo in the word Luminosity.
I used Illustrator for MONTHS before I realized it used layers. Then I decided to learn Character Animator, and I had to learn how to use layers in Illustrator. It was painful. Productive...but painful.
This morning, I was working on another project that involved making a change to something I created in one app (an animation in After Effects) which automatically updated in a project in which I used it in another app (a movie in Premiere Pro). As I was marvelling over that, I thought how cool it would be if I made a change in one version of an Illustrator project - like fixing a typo in Luminosity - it would automatically update in all versions.
And then I had my Ah-Ha! moment. Those of you who know me know it was more like a "Karen, you idiot" moment. Those of you know know me really well know it was more like a "Karen, you dumbf---" moment.
I realized I could have used layers. I could have created one project, grouped the time and star pattern, duplicated that group five times, changing the time span and star pattern in each group. Then when I export the image as a PNG to use it in my interactive lectures, I can hide each group in turn to get my sequence of main sequence turn-off images for a stellar cluster.
And then I realized I could have used it in this image where I created multiple versions of this one to teach the breakout of the four fundamental forces after the Big Bang.
And don't even get me started on this one. I must have a dozen different versions of this - which I will need to completely redo if they discover Planet 9, which would be a trans-Neptunian planet, of which there currently are none in the Solar System
That Ah-Ha! moment is when the light bulb goes off. Its when all those higher order thinking skills finally come together. You have analyzed your learning and evaluated its usefulness and created your own understanding of how something works or how it relates to your world. In the words of American Idol, you've made it your own.
This is important because it makes for deeper and more meaningful learning. Earlier in my Adobe journey someone could have made that suggestion, and I would have understood it, but I would not have internalized it as much. I would not have had that moment where suddenly it all came together and finally made sense - to me, not to someone else.That is hard to do in a classroom. As teachers, our first instinct is to explain, to direct, to guide to the correct path. Sometimes it's because it takes more time than we have to wait for that understanding to occur naturally in each student. Sometimes it's because we assume a student won't get to that point, and we want to help them. Sometimes it's just a natural instinct to fix a problem.
But maybe the next time you see a student struggling, take a moment to let them work it out on their own. If they ask for help, give them guidance on how to figure out the answer rather than guiding them to the answer. Work on their problem solving skills instead of solving the problem for them. It may take longer to get there, but in the end they will learn more and better.
I now have a grudging respect for layers. I may not actually love them, but I no longer loathe them...much. I have my Ah-Ha! understanding of them and how they can make what I do easier. That's the sort of learning moment we should want our students to experience at some point, rather than feel like we need to explain everything. It's a powerful moment.
I still hate Photoshop, though.
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