Thursday, August 30, 2012

whiteboard comparison: Educreations vs. Doceri

Update (3/28/2015): This is still one of my most-read blog posts. Not that I mind the traffic, but I feel I should point out that this information is probably seriously out of date. I haven’t used either of the apps described here in over two years—not because I grew to dislike them both, but because the project for which I was using them got put on the back burner. And how much have iPads and iPad apps changed over the last two years? Which is to say, if you’re reading this in 2015 or later, you shouldn’t accept my take as definitive, but try these apps (or their other competitors) for yourself and decide what features you like.

Update (9/24): It seems that enough people are still finding their way to this post that I should correct some of the misconceptions I had when I wrote it. Where this happens, I’ll strikethrough the original text and add what I’ve learned. Two of the big ones are corrected in the comment left at the bottom by the Doceri team, but I figured no use making people work for information.

As soon as I got my iPad (as a gift) last spring, I wanted to see how I could use it for education—not just for classes, but also to help produce interesting materials for general consumption. One type of program I quickly came across was “whiteboard apps”, which can be used to produce videos that include both an audio component and a screencast of a faux-whiteboard. Thinking this was my chance to become just like C. G. P. Grey and Vi Hart, I downloaded a couple and started playing around. Recently I started using another one. Here I’m going to compare the two I’ve tried the most, the Educreations Interactive Whiteboard produced by Educreations, Inc., and Doceri, produced by SP Controls, Inc.

Let’s start with what they both have:
  • both have responsive marker tools, with a variety of colors;
  • both allow you to import outside images and incorporate them into presentations;
  • both allow you to set up slides before recording;
  • both allow you to pause during recording;
  • both allow you to email the results, or present them on the web.
In short, both are very useful for making short, expository videos for classroom or other use.

Here are the specific pros for Educreations:
  • The interface is very intuitive. There’s a minimum of buttons to accomplish the task at hand, and it’s clear basically from the start what every one does. (Doceri’s interface took me a while to sort out.)
  • The marker’s appearance is very polished; during writing, the app looks and responds to pressure as much like a real marker as one could imagine. (The marker in Doceri is a fixed width throughout every stroke; so, while the program follows the movements of handwriting to produce text, it doesn’t really emulate handwriting. I actually correct this below. There are lots of options with Doceri, including fixed-width and pen-like.)
  • Images, once imported, can be treated as objects—moved around, scaled, and even rotated during the course of a video. (Once an image is imported into Doceri, it becomes a fixed part of the background. This one I goofed because I tried to select images in Doceri with the lasso tool, the way other objects are selected. But press-and-hold on an image will select it for you.) There’s also support for adding typed text if handwritten isn’t the effect you want for parts of your video. (Doceri doesn’t have this feature.)
  • Once you save a video, it’s immediately available online for viewing on the Educreations website.
Here are the corresponding pros for Doceri:
  • Lots of flexibility. More on this shortly, but one has a lot of control over features such as when objects and writing appear on the slide and how quickly they appear.
  • The width of the marker can be specified, as can the level of opacity and the amount of spacing between individual dots in a stroke (in case you want to draw dotted lines without lifting between every dot). You can choose the color from a palette or a color wheel. There are also multiple options for the type of head, such as pen, felt-tip, paintbrush, and highlighter. (Actually, I just played around with this some more, and my above assessment of the marker as merely fixed-width wasn’t fair. Sorry about that.)
  • In addition to the variety of writing tools, there are several choices of background besides just plain white. It also has construction tools for producing straight lines, rectangles, ellipses, and arrows. Objects created inside the app—including writing—can be moved, scaled, rotated, and copied.
  • Videos can be uploaded to YouTube or Facebook from inside the app. (Educreations appears to have a proprietary format, so that videos can only be viewed on their website, although they can be embedded elsewhere on the web.)
But here is the biggest difference, the one that for my purposes is the make-or-break feature: in Doceri, slides and recordings are stored as separate projects. You can lay out all of the materials in order, set up every stroke of every slide, establish pause points, and then use them as the basis for your recording, or even multiple recordings. But you don’t actually have to make a recording at all. In fact, the slides can be used for PowerPoint-style presentations by connecting to a computer remotely. (I haven’t tried this feature, but I’ve seen a lot of reviewers say they like it.)

In Educreations, you can still set up slides ahead of time, but if you mess up during the recording, you have to start over completely and set it all up again. (This was the aspect that caused me to start looking for another resource.) The visual and audial components are intrinsically linked, and until you have made a completed recording, you cannot save the project and set it aside to work on another without trashing the whole thing.

One shortcoming both apps share is that, although you can pause during recording, you basically have to make an entire video in one take. There’s no option to splice different recordings together, or to replace or remove a particular portion of a recording. But given that both apps are free, I’ll just take this as a sign that I should buckle down and learn how to use iMovie. Here Doceri wins again. Not only can you record multiple times using the same set of slides, you can merge recordings (by dragging the icon of one on top of the other), and so you can create your video in “scenes”—no more starting over on a whole five-minute video because the end went awry!

I could say more, but I’ll just finish by giving you a chance to compare the results of my (inexpert) fiddling with these apps. At the beginning of the summer, I made a video about a particular kind of dynamical system using Educreations: you can view it by clicking on the link. At the time I made this video, I didn't have a stylus, so please take that into account when considering the handwriting.

To get some practice with Doceri, I remade the same video today:

You’ll notice that Doceri adds a watermark to the corner of the video. An in-app purchase ($4.99) will remove the watermark—a clever way, I think, for the developers to advertise and get funding. (If you're reading this on August 31, then the purchase is on sale for $0.99.)

I will probably keep using both apps, but to continue my series on dynamical systems, I’m going to stick with Doceri.

Update: The Doceri team has left a comment below explaining some of the features I hadn't discovered!

Update: The Doceri team seems very happy to have received this feedback. On their blog yesterday, they featured a quote from this post. They also gave an explanation for why I didn’t try their app at the beginning of the summer: they just added recording screencasts with the latest update, in July.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

center-of-right

This year—or perhaps more accurately, this election cycle—I’m trying something new. During my most recent move, as I was going through all the various paperwork to live in a new place, I did something I’ve never done before. I registered as a Democrat.

For years, I’ve considered myself devoted to a nigh-Aristotelian mean-between-the-extremes way of doing ethics. Or, again more accurately, I have been devoted to the principle that I can learn from everyone in the world, and in particular that everyone in the world has valuable contributions to make to political discourse. I still believe everyone has wondrous things to teach me. But when I look at the social structures at play in our country, I do not see this principle extending to the political sphere.

More and more I find myself having to tune out far-right rhetoric as nonsense. I’m not talking about sound bites taken out of context and spun into jabs; I’m talking about going back to the sources, paying attention to the words that were said and the full setting in which they were said, and still not making any sense out of them. I’m talking about consistent distortion of facts and theories, twisting them beyond reasonable interpretation to fit them into specific schemas, which independently appear hopelessly parochial and short-sighted. I’m talking about the self-supporting structures of a community that considers itself besieged, and thus shutters itself in instead of reaching out, and retreats farther and farther into extremist positions that do more to uphold the particular community in its ill-informed convictions than benefit the nation as a whole.

On the other side, I see the left acting Christianly. I see them considering larger groups than just their immediate selves, or family, or church. I see them adopting those who have suffered in their lives, regardless of what positions such persons may have held previously (and more often than not, it seems that people who sat firmly on the right switch to leftist advocacy when they suddenly and unexpectedly find themselves in the place of those who formerly were “other”). From a non-religious perspective, I see them planning for the future, examining what is known and what may be guessed, not to be alarmist but to be prudent.

In addition, I see well-supported arguments, for example, that our current president holds positions that, up until ten years ago, would have placed him as a moderate Republican. Meanwhile the right demonizes him as an unprecedented “socialist” and “totalitarian” (without, I might add, commensurate support for their claims). Hard to take the claims of the right seriously in such a case.

In short, I became a Democrat because apparently that’s how one remains a centrist in the U.S. of A. these days. Many of you probably already assumed I was a Democrat. If so, then I guess I made the right choice. But I want you to know that it’s not because I’m an academic, or because I live in the Northeast, or because I’ve abandoned my Southern roots. It’s because I’ve weighed both sides, tried to stay in the middle, and determined that this is where I have to be.

Republican friends, you know I love you dearly. I know you’re thoughtful and good; I know you’re looking for what’s best for the people you care about. But I have trouble believing you look any farther than your immediate circle. Take a look at my political views on Facebook—as public a forum as I’ve ever stated them, apart from here—they read “the point is to get people to cooperate and to live well together.” Maybe you think that’s where my leftist roots started. But it’s still true; I still believe society exists for the benefit of the people in society. That means all people, and you haven’t convinced me that that’s where your interest lies. Please start basing your stances on the totality of what our nation must consider, and not just on what fits your personal worldview. Expand your world before you fear what is beyond it. And please, please stop nodding sagely when someone quotes philosophy almost directly from Ayn bloody Rand as though it were the height of political perspicacity.

Democratic friends, if I bear the same name as you now, don’t think I want to toe any party lines. You still have work to do in listening to your political rivals and understanding what they have to share that is of value. You, also, have to stop knee-jerk reactions to positions that may seem foreign to your ideology. Unity is stronger than diversity. So how do we forge e pluribus unum? It is not enough to reject tradition, reject authority, or reject the homogeneity it seems our political opponents would offer. The society that I have insisted exists for the benefit of its citizens does not exist without continuity. It will not do to twist the hearts of George Washington or Thomas Aquinas until they bleed. We must respect the statements made by our political, intellectual, and theological forebears, and consider the follow-ups made by our contemporaries, to see what it is that matters to them and how that can be woven into our view of American society, which is not ours alone.

I don’t think I’ve switched my allegiance to the left. I think that, in this country, the left has been forced to encompass the center, because the right has abandoned it as the enemy. I am not the only one who thinks this way. But I am the only one who can decide how I will vote. Until I have cause to side with a Republican candidate, I will vote Democratic.

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

not what goes in, but what comes out

On my walk home today, I passed a storefront which had the following sign in it:
“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace…”
I’m sure some day I will investigate further what the purpose of the store was and why they put that sign up, but on this walk I just mused. The sign grabbed my attention not because those words seemed so comforting, but because the ellipsis seemed so jarring. I know that list; it tumbles out all at once in my head once it’s started:
… love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.*
And so I wondered why the sign stopped at peace. What is the message the storeowners wanted to share?

As I said, I did not find out what kind of store it is, and so, lacking any further context, I guessed that the sign was meant to encourage the reader to seek peace within him or herself. Live the spiritual life, it seemed to say, and you will find love and joy and peace. Do you live in turmoil? The Spirit will bring calm. Do you think the world about you is dreary? The Spirit will give you joy. Do you feel unloved? The Spirit will love you.

But the list when taken as a whole makes clear that the “fruit” being discussed is not internal, but external. That is even more clear when it is contrasted with the “works of the flesh” that immediately precedes it.** The love mentioned here is not love for oneself, but a love expressed toward others. The joy is fruitful; it is joy shared and spread about. The peace is the antithesis of the “enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy” just listed; it brings consolation and reconciliation to one’s whole community.

From there the description continues to encompass one’s behavior. Treat people patiently. Treat them well. Treat them faithfully. Treat them gently. Even the last item, self-control, which may appear to apply only to the individual, is seen in this context to circumscribe one’s actions towards others: if the behavior isn’t loving, patient, gentle, or any of the other fruitful adjectives that have gone before, then don’t do it. Self-control is pruning one’s comportment so that the other fruits may increase.

The Christian life is dynamic; it engages the self by engaging with others. It is a fine goal to seek inner calm, but it’s not a specifically Christian goal.*** The Christian reaches out, as Christ did—to the marginalized, to provide solace; to the privileged, to call them to account; to the wise, that wisdom may increase; to the perplexed, that wisdom may be sought; to everyone, in every way, displaying the fruit of the Spirit.

This leads to what may surprise some in the church (but few outside the church), that the Christian life is measured externally. The worth of the person does not change, but the value of faith is measured in actions and consequences. The lesson of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 is not that there is a hell, as some would have it; the lesson is that our obedience to Christ is measured by our care for others. When someone declares “I’m not perfect, just forgiven”, they’re only telling half of the Christian story. When they say it smugly, they fulfill James’ words that “faith without works is dead.”

So I will contemplate the fruit of the Spirit in my life; as should be clear by now, this does not mean what the Spirit has done for me, but what the Spirit is doing through me.
/ / / /

* Admittedly, the list usually tumbles out to the tune of the Sunday school song I learned long ago:
The fruit of the Spirit’s not a cantaloupe, nope!
The fruit of the Spirit’s not a cantaloupe, nope!
So if you want to be a cantaloupe, you might as well hear it:
You can’t be a fruit of the Spirit.
’Cause the Spirit is love-joy-peace-patience-kindness-goodness-faithfulness,
gentleness and self-contro-o-ol!
** The list of “works of the flesh” begins famously with (in the words of the KJV) adultery and fornication. Some prefer the translation used by the NIV and ESV, which lists them as sexual immorality and impurity, because this phrasing is malleable and therefore useful to preach against the sexual taboo du jour. My wife has been making the argument—which I find increasingly plausible—that at least one of these should be translated as “rape”. In fact, a lot of the condemnation of sexual immorality in the New Testament makes perfect sense when interpreted as rape.

*** Two points here. First, I do not mean to disparage the search for inner peace. God clearly wants us to have rest and not to be tossed about by inner conflict. Sometimes each of us needs retreat. That is good and healthy. Second, I imagine that all this rhetoric of reaching out could be interpreted as an argument against monasticism, that is, against persistent retreat from the world. I mean nothing of the kind. For one thing, although I do not think monasticism is any higher a calling than any other vocation a Christian might accept, it serves as a reminder of sacredness and a spiritual center of the church. For another, monks and nuns do, for the most part, reach out to their surrounding community in just the manner described by the fruit of the Spirit.