Monday, November 27, 2006

ILife Book

As I was re-reading my posts I realized that I hadn't disscussed my experience with the ILife '06 lessons. Michael Rubin's book is a wonderful guide to learning IPhoto, IMovie, Garageband, and IWeb. I will definately hold onto it as a useful tool. However, I learn much better through hands-on experiences, and I found that the lessons Rubin sets up were more confusing, time-consuming, and frustrating. I don't believe my frustrations with the lessons had anything to do with Rubin's technique. Instead, I just think that I do not learn well from step-by-step guides. By the time the IMovie project came around, I was experimenting with it by myself and only refering to the ILife book if I was stuck.From this, I feel the three hours it takes to do a lesson is better spent on experimenting with your own ideas by using the program. It's much faster and I think you know how to use the program better if you fiddle with the buttons. Creating my IMovie... I did a lot of "what does this do, what does that do'es?" Reading and copying what someone else is doing seems mindless and less enjoyable. But maybe it's just me. Did anyone else rely more heavily on the ILife lessons they did?

2 comments:

Mrs. Brenneck said...

I had a hell of a time using the book. I think that for people who need those step-by-step instructions, it's great, but I agree that just playing around gets the job done faster. What also worked really well for me were the online tutorials on the apple website. They're really quick and easy to follow.

Sarah said...

I started out following the lessons step-by-step... and quickly moved to playing around. I didn't like that at the end of the lesson I had made a lovely podcast for some fictional pottery place. I did find that I could use the book as reference when I had a question in making my own projects.