[Bf-education] Organizing / supporting education (2)

[Carlos Santana]

Hello there;


 Good to see this thread still in good shape:

For what I've seen, there seems to be a consensus on the main path to start
defining a plausible structure for Blender Education.

The intrinsic question that must be asked when preparing any body of
knowledge to be turned into learning units; mainly, what is this knowledge
made of? Has been answered like so:

1)-Skill Sets (SS):

A series of techniques and concepts that, as a group, define the profile of
an activity to be fulfilled in a job placement.

Examples:

-Modeler

-Rigger

-Animator

-Texture / Materials artist

-Lighting / Camera artist

-Compositor

-Programmer

The interesting thing about Skill Sets is that by themselves, one could see
them acting as the zodiac signs and the planets on the natal charts (Gemini
with ascendant Scorpio is akin to saying Texture / Material artist with a
specialization in compositing), In that sense a “lip sync” job position
would require a Modeler/Rigger with an Animation specialty.


 2)-Proficiency Levels (PL):

For every Skill Set, a relevant state of overall expertise is defined by
the Proficiency Level associated with it.

Although plenty debatable still, I would like to propose a basic three tier
approach to PL:

-Standard (notice how I didn't use wording like “basic” or “beginner” this
is pure PR).

-Advanced

-Specialist

The way that these would work is acting as enablers; to become certified as
a Specialist Animator the student *must* be Standard in Modeling and
Rigging, and *at least* advanced in one of them. This is just one enabling
scheme given as an example, any scheme can be applicable.

The Specialist course calendar would then be handled depending on where the
student stand in terms of PL for the given SS (so for those with no prior
PL but who still qualify for the Specialty, a SS bootcamp / crash course
can be required alongside the Specialty course).

These can be bundled or separate, which is still too far away a point to
discuss here.

Now, I didn't include the broader terms beginner, intermediate, expert,
master, godlike, etc because these are descriptions that pertain to the
person, and are the result of the accumulated knowledge which is in fact
the factor of how many SS at which PL the student has under her belt.

Thus, if we consider that Blender as a whole is an “area of knowledge” (I
am about to stretch on an analogy, please bear with me), we could then map
it out on a plane and chunk it into a matrix of “parcels of interest” using
PL and SS as the X,Y axles.

Job positions and titles could then be “graphed” as distributions of check
marks across this map.

This is an utterly important point for the commercial minded in this ML;
find jazzy names for these graphs, equate them with other software
offerings, flesh them out with descriptions of the performed tasks and how
they represent workflow solutions:

*Give Blender a solid ground in the employers' minds , who are ultimately
responsible for driving your demand.*


 The way this would end up working is plain simple to visualize if you have
ever built an RPG character (from dungeons and dragons to fallout3, else
you and your inner child need to have a long talk).

Outside of courses and certifications, in the land of the self-made and the
self-taught, what this matrix means is that we can work on creating a
tagging system for any given bit of knowledge available out there, and we
can plot this knowledge back onto the map, so that anyone from any
background can travel the knowledge landscape in any direction at their own
pace.

The good thing is that this doesn't need to be an all encompassing terabyte
cluster hosted site, rather, for starters, it could work as an aggregative
(indexing all available vimeo/ youtube clips in terms of blender
version/SS/PL would be a quantum leap compared to what is available now)
until bigger measures are merited.

What does need upfront agreement is the method that will be used to shape
the SS axle, and a working draft of the finner points in its list.

For this I strongly advocate a point that has already been brought forth in
this topic discussion;


 *Work on the blenderwiki. *


 This will help us get a clearer picture of the scope (what s more I truly
believe the wiki should be the central Standard SS documentation
repository).

The Wiki is another example of masterful community work that is regulated
with the help of IRC.

Give #blenderwiki a try whenever you pop around the servers.

As matters stand, all this will be pretty hard to achieve without a proper
regulatory body and a clearly defined task force/todo list, as such and to
close a circle, I think you have all done a great amount of valuable
contributions to the topic, and I am confident we will see great
initiatives and solid proposals being brought forward.

I' ll go play in traffic now.


On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:51 AM, Knapp <magick.crow at gmail.com> wrote:

> Creative spelling due to it being early morning before coffee. :-)
> now = know
> of = off
>
> Not that I have any real spelling skills. LOL
> --
> Douglas E Knapp
>
> Creative Commons Film Group, Helping people make open source movies
> with open source software!
> http://douglas.bespin.org/CommonsFilmGroup/phpBB3/index.php
>
> Massage in Gelsenkirchen-Buer:
> http://douglas.bespin.org/tcm/ztab1.htm
> Please link to me and trade links with me!
>
> Open Source Sci-Fi mmoRPG Game project.
> http://sf-journey-creations.wikispot.org/Front_Page
> http://code.google.com/p/perspectiveproject/
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