Author: Chris

Teacher. Blogger. Podcaster. Asks way too many questions.
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I am not a prostitute

In the past six days I’ve received six emails from various companies asking me if I’d please be so kind as to promote their services, talk about their products or otherwise just mention their wares in a blog post.  This is not a new thing – I’ve been getting more and more of these requests over the past 12 months – but the frequency of them has been increasing to the point where it now sometimes averages one a day.  In a weird sort of way, I guess this is an indication of some level of “success” in the blogosphere.

But to anyone considering asking me to be a schill for your wares, can I save you all some time?  The answer is no. This is a blog, not a brothel.

Look, I’m sure your products and services are fabulous, and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere may be interested in them.  I even kind of admire the fact that you “get” the power of new/social media enough to take the initiative of asking regular people like me to spruik the benefits of your products.  It’s nice that some of you couched it in terms of “take a look at what we do and if you think it’s a good thing, perhaps you can tell people about it”… that’s at least a respectful way of asking for promotional assistance.  But the answer is still no.  If I thought that a blogger was writing about something for any reasons other than their own, I would lose all faith in whatever they had to say, never being sure exactly where the line was between opinion and advertising. I’m used to being lied to in the traditional media, but I expect better from new media.

To that online university offering a 3 year degree program… it sounds like an ok idea, but no, I don’t want to include a link to your site on my site.  Actually, what is it with online universities? – I have had a ton of requests from quite a few of them, all asking me to include a “simple text-based link” to them, many even offering me reasonable cash payments to do so.  The answer is still no.

To that multimedia organisation that is “creating a portal into the soul of humanity by championing the selfless acts of others”… thanks for asking, but no.

To the flashcard company that wanted me to review their product on my blog, no, sorry.  Actually, after looking at what your product and educational philosophy is all about, it’s probably better I don’t write a review for you. Any tool that focuses on creating better ways to do rote learning is not something you want me to review, trust me.

To the other flashcard company who also wanted me to write about their “unique free services” in one of my upcoming posts, thanks but no thanks. Again, I’m less than impressed with services that help me learn better at the lowest end of Blooms taxonomy.

To the childrens’ book online website that was keen for me to write a review of their product in exchange for a 6 month premium subscription… nope.  Thanks for thinking of me, but asking me to blog about your product, and then telling me how much my readers would benefit from it is a less than subtle way of disguising how much you think you might benefit from it. Thanks, but again, no.

And to the commercial blog run by an online school that was interested in me reposting one of their recent posts, because it would “appeal to my readers”, thanks for thinking of us all, but no.  If the content is compelling enough, people will find it without my help.

Like I said, I appreciate being asked (although you can all stop asking! The answer is still no!) and I suppose it’s nice to think that other people might consider this blog to be worthy or influential enough to ask for a bit of free publicity.  If this happens to me, I can only imagine how many of these requests are made to other bloggers with some real influence!

The bottom line is that Betchablog is, and will remain, independent.  I’m not interested in writing about anything other than what I’m interested in writing about. I don’t take money in exchange for opinion. I won’t write about anyone’s product or service unless I want to do it for my own reasons.  I certainly won’t put links into my posts that I’ve been paid to put there.  I’m flattered to be asked, but even thinking about doing it makes me feel dirty.

Image: ‘Soho Street‘

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The more I know, the more I realise I don't know

Crossposted on the Adobe Education Leaders blog (http://blogs.adobe.com/educationleaders/)

I remember the first time I saw Photoshop.

I think it must have been about 1993 or so, when I got a free copy that came with a scanner purchased by my school. It must have been a “lite” version of Photoshop because I seem to recall that it didn’t support layers. Even so, I really enjoyed playing with it, and I ended up installing it on all the computers in the school computer lab (license? what license?) and I started teaching the kids how to create stuff with it. They just blew me away with what they could do with it, even without layers!

It was around the same time that I stumbled across an unused copy of Aldus Pagemaker in an out-of-the-way cupboard, and I convinced the school principal that we should use it to do the school yearbook; his agreement to my suggestion saw me suddenly escalated to head of the yearbook committee, a job that rolled on for many years and many issues beyond that. Of course, once you start working in Pagemaker (and now InDesign) there is a fairly fundamental expectation that Photoshop is a key part of that workflow.

From these accidental beginnings, I developed a long standing relationship with Photoshop. In the late 90s I was working with students to build collaborative websites, and of course all the graphics were done with Photoshop. We discovered all sorts of interesting features like batch processing, we learned to do decent colour corrections, to crop and manipulate images so that they fitted our needs. We discovered, often the hard way, about important concepts like pixel depth, image resolution, colour gamut, and of course the one that catches every self-taught Photoshop user out at some stage, RGB vs CMYK. We made images for the web and for print, we built graphics from scratch and we did weird things to existing photos. I’m just a teacher, not a graphic designer, but I’ve lost track of the hours and hours and hours I’ve spent inside Photoshop over the last 15+ years.

And here’s the thing about Photoshop. Heck, here’s the thing about pretty much all of Adobe’s products… the more I know, the more I realise I don’t know. Every time I learn some new technique or skill, the self-satisfied smug feeling of cleverness lasts about five seconds before I realise that there is just so much more I could know about it, that I could do with it. Whenever I taught kids a unit of work on Photoshop I used to conclude it with an in-class practical test, where I’d give them some images and a problem to solve – it might be to produce some CD cover artwork or a magazine cover, usually with a few constraints or requirements to make them have to think about it a little – and they’d just astound me at what they’d come up with. “Creative Suite” is a good name for these products, because they really do force you into creativity mode. Most of the time after one of these class tests, I’d spend the next few lessons getting the kids to deconstruct what they’d done, to teach me how they got certain effects. In my Photoshop classes I may have been the teacher, but we were all learners.

When I was offered a place in the Adobe Education Leaders program, I was thrilled to be part of it, and felt relatively well qualified to be part of it given that I’d spent over 15 years teaching Photoshop, Indesign, Dreamweaver and Flash to students. Of course, mixing with other AELs and seeing the fantastic things they do is a great way to reinforce just how little I do actually know, but it’s still been an incredibly valuable association for me.

I got thinking about this lately because I’ve been checking out the tutorials on the newly redesigned Adobe TV. It’s an awesome resource, with every application now having a Learn series, a set of basic tutorials that teach the essential skills required to get up to speed quickly… I wish this had been around when i started playing with Photoshop! As well as the Learn tutorials, there are a bunch of more advanced tutorials that delve into some of the trickier and more esoteric concepts.

And Adobe TV is not the only resource I turn to when I want to know more. There seems to be plenty of other places to learn the how-to stuff for Adobe’s products. Some of my favourites are the Layers TV podcast with Corey Barker and RC, the Creative Suite Podcast with Terry White, Creative Sweet TV with Mike McHugh, Instant Indesign with Gabriel Powell, The Russell Brown Show… the list goes on. I subscribe to all of these through iTunes and they just drop onto my iPhone for later watching. It’s a great way to learn. I’m sure there are many other fantastic resources for learning this stuff… perhaps you could leave a note in the comments about some of the resources you have found useful for learning.

Finally, I just wanted to mention a book I bought recently about Photoshop that is quite simply one of the most amazing Photoshop guides I’ve ever seen. It’s simply called Creative Photoshop CS4 by Derek Lea, and I’m just stunned at how incredible this guy is when it comes to Photoshop. I’ve been working my way through some of his exercises and have been discovering something new on almost every page. When you can use a product for over 15 years, and still constantly discover new things, it says a lot about the depth of the product and the open-ended nature of what it lets you do with it.

I realise more than ever that there is so much I don’t know about Photoshop (and most of the other Adobe products!) But I love that feeling of learning, of discovering, of digging deeper and just discovering that there really is no “bottom” to hit.

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Vote Early, Vote Often!

Yes, it’s that time of year again! The annual Edublog Awards are in full swing, and after a few weeks of people making nominations for various blogs, tweets, wikis and social networks across a really broad range of categories, I’m extremely honoured to have had not one, but two of my online projects – Betchablog and The Virtual Staffroom – mentioned for an “Eddie” this year.

These awards (which are great to be considered for, but hopefully not to be taken too seriously!) aim to highlight and recognise some of the great work taking place in the online educational sphere.  Education is certainly one sector that seems to have really embraced the use of blogging as a tool for reflection, sharing, helping others and generally assisting teachers and students to “find their voice”.  I know that I’ve personally found the act of blogging to be critical in helping me “think out loud”, processing ideas in a public space where they can be exposed to the scrutiny, support and suggestions of others.  Having a blog has certainly helped me find my own voice and given me a platform from which I can share easily and freely with the world, whether it’s some resource I’ve found, a tutorial I’ve made, or just some vague idea that’s been floating around in my head looking for a place to be expressed.  I blog for myself first and foremost, and the idea that someone else might also find some value in any of it is just the icing on the cake, although it is certainly very tasty icing! I really do value the sense of community that my blog has created for me and although I say that I write just for myself, I must admit that it would be quite a hollow experience without the wonderful support of those who read, comment and engage with me.

To those that nominated Betchablog or The Virtual Staffroom this year, thank you!  To those that might consider casting a vote for either of them, thank you to you too.  But mostly thank you to everyone who reads (and subscribes) to some of these things I’ve been doing online over the last few years… you are the ones who make it all worthwhile for me.