Happy Sunday everyone,
I hope you are having a great weekend and enjoying the last days of summer. Minneapolis is gorgeous today — warm, sunny , and low humidity. It is perfect weather for a photowalk. I hope the weather is just as beautiful for you today. I am pleased to share Issue #15 of A Twenty Percent Creative.
Please enjoy!!
Warm regards,
Jeff
FROM MY PHONE’S CAMERA
Last night, my family and I went out for dinner together for the first time in quite a while. We have a few picky eaters in the family and so we went to a place with the largest menu ever created — the Cheesecake Factory. Everyone was able to find something on the menu — whew!! The food was unremarkable but it was fun to be together. My kids only called me out 3 times for trying to take candid silhouette photographs in the restaurant;) The restaurant is located at our local shopping mall. My wife and kids had a couple items to return at a few of the stores after dinner. While waiting for them, I found a few light and shadow scenes to explore with my iPhone camera. The color photos were taken last night. The black and white photograph (further down in the issue) was taken at the mall a couple year ago.
COURSE REFLECTIONS
A couple days ago, I turned in my course, The 10 C’s of Light & Shadow Street Photography, to the retreat organizers. Right now, my course is 76 pages long and includes 5 assignments to kickstart learners’ introduction to light and shadow street photography. If you are interested in taking the course, it is not too late to register for Call Me Artist 2022.
You can register via the event website. I am an affiliate for the event. Please use my promo code to get $10 Off Your Ticket — Promo Code: KARP10
While the process of producing the course is still fresh in my mind, I thought I would share some course reflections with you here:
Start early. I tend to procrastinate to the final hours when building lectures or other presentations for my day job. When I do so, the materials are fresh in my mind making recall of the learning points easier during a live lecture. For my photography course (a downloadable PDF), there was no reason to wait and plenty of ways the course can go sideways in the production phase. I am really glad that I started early as the course took much longer than expected — roughly 25 hours longer.
Collect & organize ideas. When I am preparing a lecture or a course, I alway try to create a list of topics that will be covered. Initially, I do a brain dump to get the ideas out of my head and onto paper. I then try to group the topics and order them in a way that will make sense for the learner. To promote collection of these ideas, I use post-it notes in dry conditions and Aquanotes waterproof notepads in wet conditions. A few years ago, I found this video by Pat Flynn — “How to Write a Book - The Secret to a Super Fast First Draft” to be informative in this regard.
Include relevant visual content. Courses should be rich, multimedia experiences - words, lists, photos, diagrams, audio, how-to guides, and videos. Over the last several years, I have tried to be reasonably intentional in making and collecting visual content while doing light and shadow street photography that would help me to make a course when the time was right. The course I just produced put my efforts to the test. I am pretty happy with the visual content I have been able to include in the course. That said, I did identify some gaps in my collection strategy that could have been prevented with a bit of awareness and planning.
I have put together the list pictured below as an infographic — “9 Things I’ve Learned While Producing My Photography Course” — in the hopes that it can give you a roadmap to follow in your content creation process. If you find it to be shareable, please feel free to do so. I do ask that you provide credit to me, tag me on social media @jeffreymkarp, and encourage your network to subscribe to my newsletter too.
Speak to the learner. When teaching in any context, instructors often default to explaining concepts from their personal perspective - saying things like “When I…” or “I will…”. This approach does not always connect with the learner as they try to understand how they will start to do the “thing” that the instructor already knows how to do. In my course, I tried to build the content to explain to the learners how “they will….” do something at their stage of skill development. While it is helpful to identify potential obstacles that the learner will face in the doing of a new skill, I haven’t found it helpful to teach learners how to avoid the obstacle completely but rather how to identify it, work through it effectively, and then recognize how to avoid it next time.
Encourage active participation, not passive consumption. Learners in a course will get more out of the instructional materials if they are engaged by questions posed by the instructor, are given time to read supplemental resources linked within the course, and can practice what they are learning in the course. For my course, I encouraged learners to review the photographs I included in the instructional materials and determine the rules of composition depicted in them. I also gave the learner questions to consider when considering law and ethics in street photography. Five photography assignments were added in to my course so that the learners can get outside and seek light and shadow street scenes with their cameras in hand.
Make the course user friendly. As a course or other instructional materials get longer, navigation of the subject matter by the learner gets harder. I try to make my courses more user friendly by adding links within the presentation that take the user to other necessary content areas in the course. For example, every page of the course I just produced has a backlink to the table of contents.
IN MY HEADPHONES
This week, I unintentionally found myself learning about Tiago Forte via podcast interviews and Youtube videos. Tiago’s build a second brain approach — buildingasecondbrain.com - is gaining a lot of interest in productivity circles. I listened to his 4 step framework — CODE (capture, organize, distill, express) with Pat Flynn on the Smart Passive Income podcast — SPI 607: Building Your Second Brain with Tiago Forte.
If you find the second brain approach interesting, you may want to check out Tiago’s Youtube channel. I found this video a bit overwhelming yet informative — “Breaking Down the Top Notes Apps to Help You Pick the Right One.” In July 2022, Tiago also did a Talks at Google presentation which is posted on their Youtube channel.
VIDEOS I’VE WATCHED THIS WEEK
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