8-14 October 2012

                This week, we continued the advertising project.  The project (entitled “Peano Advertising Wants You”) involves three portions: a digital “interview”, or essay, a visual ad and an audio ad.  The blog for last week already describes some of my misgivings about the project, so I won’t repeat them.  Instead I’ll say that, in the end, Photoshop is fun, and the project as a whole appears quite creative.

                Besides working on the project, we studied copyright this week.  It seems copyright, like heliocentrism, is going to be a topic that pops up in various classes this year.   Certainly, though, the  perspective of a Computer Science teacher on copyright is going to be different from a Fine Arts teacher!  Personally, my view on copyright is that it should be there, but significantly weaker (or at least shorter-term); perhaps then there would be less need for semi-copyright licenses like Creative Commons.  At the very least, it needs to be fair- say, copyright can’t go to anyone but the creator.

                We also looked at audio quality.  I have to say, a 250 Hz sampling rate sounds much better than I expected.  It sounds nothing like the original music, but that can be for the best.   Anyhow, there’s certainly quality lost when you compress music, but there’s a definite boundary between “bad quality” and “indecipherable quality”.