Reflections on Week 7

This has been a rather stressful week in many regards. My wife and I had our 10 and 9 year old grandchildren with us for the week. (I realize once again why you have children when you are young!) As the end of the term nears, the size and scope of the assignments seems to grow accordingly. In particular, I had a number of technical challenges trying to get the Present Me program to work. I ended up spending two hours trying unsuccessfully to get the sound to record. I adjusted settings numerous times without appreciable improvement. Also, although I had my Powerpoint slides set to reveal one bullet point at a time for a couple of bulleted lists, in the transfer to the Present Me software, it changed those to bring up all the entire slide at once. I ended up having to switch to a different computer with an attached external camera/microphone unit to be able to complete the project.

The video by the presentation Zen master was extremely informative and quite helpful. I have sat through far too many of the type of presentations he describes where the speaker places their entire outline on the screen and then proceeds to read every word to you, as if you are unable to read it for yourself. In preparing my presentation I attempted to strike the balance of having important quotes and or information listed without having every slide loaded up with unnecessary text. I also think I was able to obtain picture illustrations that enhanced the points being made without being overbearing.

Dr. Mertler's videos were a good wrap up to his overall series. They helped drive home the point about what we are trying to accomplish with educational research as well as emphasizing the importance of communicating our results to other interested parties who may benefit from the work done in our studies. I am particularly intrigued by the online community he has set up and am interested to see how that might aid in educational endeavors going forward.

The video of Dr. Hodges was absolutely fascinating to me! His description of how music permeates virtually every part of the universe is amazing and really captured my attention. He refers to evolution several times and I have no idea if he is a man of faith. However, as a man of faith myself, this reminds me of the Psalms which state that "the heavens proclaim the glory of God. Day after day they pour forth his praise." I know it is risky injecting religious beliefs into a forum such as this, but that was my honest initial reaction at hearing Dr. Hodges' description. I thoroughly enjoyed that clip.

Now we turn to to the final home stretch... the end is in sight! It has been quite an eye opening experience!