Saturday, May 9

Ruzaimi's Free Drawing Lessons Inspires Me to Sketch!





WHO?
Ruzaimi Mat Rani is currently lecturing at the Faculty of Architecture and Environmental Design, International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). He has been interested in art and design ever since he was in primary school, and has over the years evolved into a master in pen and pencil sketching (especially landscapes) and has got his share of rewards and recognitions for it. Click here and here to know more about that.


WHAT?

Now, he has gone one step further and has created a blog to share his sketching knowledge and skills to people around the world. He has entitled the blog, "FREE DRAWING LESSON(S)". Here you will find pictures of many of his sketches (samples mashed-up above), and videos illustrating the drawing process, or how he goes about sketching these drawings. These short (1-2 minute) videos are juicy learning nuggets to get a quick idea on how you can sketch stuff such as gardens, buildings, rooms, furniture, and so on. But...


HOW?
How does he create such videos?
He uses the stop motion technique, whereby he combines the scan processed pictures into a motion picture. He basically scans every step of the sketching process and then saves the scanned pictures into JPEG format (100+ pictures). Then, he uses Windows Movie Maker to combine the pictures together into a stop motion picture.


REFLECTION

Oh man, that is a lot of tedious work for a short learning nugget (you need real patience and passion to do such things). Let me just say this,

"I respect Ruzaimi for his excellent art work, but I admire him for sharing it to the world for free."

I hope more educators in Malaysia and Asia come out of the copyright closet and join the Copyleft and Creative Commons revolution, and engross the OER (Open Educational Resources) movement. Let's face it, most educators are not going to make much money doing the copyrighted stuff. And we will not become irrelevant if we do share our knowledge or content on the Internet (Hoarding knowledge is the old school! Sharing knowledge is power and the way to go!).

Actually, it makes more sense to share our ideas and knowledge to the world using the Internet and all the excellent free learning tools available to us today. It requires our additional time, but the potential fruits are amazing if we really think about it.

For example, by sharing our ideas and knowledge online, we could trigger unexpected connections and feedback from professionals (and learners), which will trigger us to reflect back what we have shared, and refine and improve further. That point alone is exciting enough for me!

If you are really good, you might even be invited to speak, or conduct workshops in places you perhaps have never heard of. Yes, you might even make more money than going down the copyright road.

There are many more benefits for sharing our knowledge and contents online, but if you ask me:

Educators should share their knowledge and content to the world for free (unless their livelihood depends on it), because it is the right thing to do.

With the Internet and easy-to-learn/use authoring tools we can potentially educate people all over the world (through the internet, mirror sites, or downloaded content), and help those that are not so fortunate out there.

Yes, you don't need to spend millions on a commercial LMS, or additional millions on developing courseware that includes flying ducks and dogs with bells and whistles. Why not simply start with a blog, just like Ruzaimi did.

Finally, let's spread stories like Ruzaimi's one to the world using our twitters, blogs, wikis, etc. It would be nice to see educators attract hits and viewing numbers like the Britney Spears and Jungle Jims'.

Besides creating content, let's promote the excellent work of our fellow educators :)

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