Apple Technology Review, Fall 1997: Digital Photography Course

Digital Photography Course, page 2

There is a national debate about computers in school, many arguing against computers, as Todd Oppenheimer did in a recent issue of Atlantic Monthly. We think that all students deserve to learn to use computers constructively. For students who do not have computers at home--two-thirds of the population nationally--exposure at school is critical. But computers need to be effectively integrated into the curriculum to be interesting and useful to students. At Lincoln the digital photography, class was an art class that happened to use computers. The students were taught about composition, color, lighting, and so forth. They also learned skills peculiar to digital photography such as manipulating and blending images, but the focus was always on the art. We think such a class is an excellent model of how to use computers at school, and our online course will help teachers to get started.

The development of the course was a natural extension of our research model of working intensively with Apple customers. After we had learned so much about digital photography and recognized the need for education for high school teachers, the CD-ROM became a tool in the next phase of the research. We built the online course on the scaffolding of our in-depth experience in a school as documented in our CD-ROM.

Course Design

The course ran for eight weeks and involved six assignments, which we had adapted from the classroom digital photography course previously taught by the instructor. Students met each Wednesday for an hour-long online chat to discuss technical problems and issues, the assignments, and, to a lesser extent, issues related to the use of digital photography in their classrooms. The chat time (4:00 p.m. PST) influenced our choice of participants, as we could accommodate teachers on the East Coast of the United States and Canada who either were willing to stay late at school or could connect from home, along with teachers on the West Coast who had just completed the school day.

Many online courses use the distance learning model of instruction, in which content is delivered to students and they use the Internet to discuss their work and meet with an instructor and other students (Collis, 1996). We took a somewhat different approach. Rather than focus on the instructional aspects of the course and attempt to recreate the classroom experience, we decided to emphasize the differences that an online course brings to the learning experience. Initially, we hoped that the online discussions about each student's work would be the key feature that would help form a learning community among the participants. We were skeptical of the online chats based on personal experiences and even considered using chat on only a limited basis. Much to our surprise, the chat became the central event each week. By the third or fourth week of the course, students had developed a great enthusiasm for the chat, arriving early and staying past the allotted time. By the end of the course, many of the students were so attached to the chats that they asked to use the chat room on their own and continued to meet for several weeks, at which point they wrote a proposal to continue their online course experience by creating their own Web pages on the ACOTNet server.

While the chats were a surprising success, the online discussions were a little more hit and miss. Students posted their images to a discussion board and commented on each other's work. At the beginning of the course, posting an image to the server was a complex technical issue that involved using FTP software and adding HTML commands to start the discussion about the image. After the first week, the process was streamlined, much to the relief of the participants.

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Samples of course work | Digital Photography Extravaganza