I'm so completely torn about Sophie.
On the one hand, I completed a project about a year and a half ago where I needed to use video snippets as block quotations, so I had to do all sorts of acrobatics with iframes to create a web document that could work for the professor. Sophie would have made that project a lot easier on me (and would have saved me having to go to a friend to learn how to make my website auto-run when the prof inserted a CD-- such a pain to insure that thing was going to work!).
But on the other hand, I cannot imagine using the version of Sophie we played with yesterday with my students. *I* can accept bugs and quirks and multi-saving and the like. I've been tinkering with computers-- as many of us have-- for as long as I can remember. I know what it means to play with something open source that is essentially in beta.
I also know how frustrating it can be for students to learn a new technology, and I know how quickly the technology can overpower the instruction if something doesn't go just right. Having taught with what would be considered very stable technologies (Photoshop, Dreamweaver... dare I call iMovie and MS MovieMaker "stable?"), and less stable tech (GIMP, Second Life, NVU, Audacity), I have come to realize that if there are more than one or two little hiccups in the early going it ruins student confidence.
I can just imagine my students from the spring semester of last year with Sophie. They were a good group, but they looooooved to jump ahead of me. When Cormac told us that trying to do things while the software was loading would result in bad things, I saw that class locking up multiple machines.
I just couldn't subject my students to that.
So while I like the idea, and might use Sophie myself, I think it's going to have to get to at least version 1.5 before I feel at all comfortable putting it in front of first-year comp students. It's not that I don't think they could learn it; I'm positive they could. It's that I am pretty certain it would drive us well away from the work of composition and into tech support. :(
Not to be the ray of sunshine at 7:30 in the morning, mind you. :)
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7 comments:
hmmm... I'm going to tentatively disagree. :)
I don't think I would intro Sophie at the very beginning of a class. I also don't think all of the freshmen comp classes I've taught could effectively use Sophie.
BUT, I DO think they could "use" Sophie and there is some really cool stuff that could happen with Sophie, especially in the realm of e-portfolio work. I mean, how cool. Students could really work with the software to build portfolios which are interactive and personalized. Works of art--framed by students about their compositions.
So, I'm going to plug away at Sophie. I'm going to work with it on a PC and on a Mac. And, I'm going to figure out how to present about it to my department. Because, I think it could work. ^_^
Yez are both right! No, I mean, what Phill wrote was, for me, a valuable caution. I too -- based on yesterday, and that's a legitimate basis because it more or less replicated the classroom situation with Cormac playing our parts and us playing our students -- think Sophie is too fancy for my 1st-year students. On the other hand, I'd have to acknowledge the commenter's remark about how Sophie might transform portfolios, because my 1st-year writing student do portfolios (at this moment, all text, all on paper) and our Writing majors (whom I advise) have a junior-year portfolio requirement (also, at this moment, all text, all on paper).
One way I am thinking of using Sophie is to use it as a way for students to showcase the work they have done for my class. In the fall, I'll be teaching Intro to Folklore, and I'll have the students work in groups throughout the quarter on fieldwork projects that involve audio-recording narratives and oral histories, taking photographs, doing library research to create an annotated bibliography, and writing an analytical paper. At the end of the quarter, I'll ask each group to put together a Sophie page for their project. Then I'll compile all the pages together into a class book. Rather than present it as a composition assignment, I'll present it to the students as an opportunity to share their work with people outside the class. I only have time to dedicate one full class day to Sophie training, so we'll see how that goes!
My experience has been similar to Phil's. Students get frustrated when technology fails. I've had some fairly good students become all but hostile because early versions of software have crashed. (We're talking Word 1.01, here, as well as more complicated programs like Flash.) I'm also not sure what Sophie actually does--other than look like a book--that ordinary web authoring programs don't do. You can set up a website where links act as page turners fairly easily--and post movies, images, and documents without having to know any kind of code whatsoever. I know that you have to have a server to post web pages--but you have to have one for Sophie, too. If I want something more "mobile," I have to go to Flash.
I haven't given up yet, nor have I reached the conclusion that Sophie is not worth the effort...but I need the program to be faster and less quirky before I give it to my students.
PS: It needs to be prettier, too!
Buuuuut,
Although you can do some of the things on, say, Wordpress, that you can do on Sophie--maybe even all of them--there's no way you could play with the format the way you can in Sophie. Blog formats are inherently linear. Of course, you could screw with this, but I'm not sure that would be less complicated than screwing around with Sophie. Now, yes, you can link up, but you can't embed, and then embed in the embedding, and then embed in the embedding which is embedded. ^_~ At least not with an easy access open source program. Sophie was the first HARD hurdle at DMAC, but we're smart! And, so are our students.
Then again, I think I'm becoming a convert of Sophie. So, I could just be praising from the choir. :D
I wouldn't be so sure that Sophie can do anything Wordpress can't (just to be the devil's advocate). Wordpress allows for use of CSS, and CSS allows for all sorts of interesting representations of data.
My problem with Sophie isn't that you can do that with other software (you can-- I've made something that is almost exactly like a Sophie book in html, using iframes and some javascript). My problem with Sophie is that I don't think it's ready for first-year (and maybe undergrad in general) students. It's promising, but I wouldn't have taught the first beta of Audacity, either, and I use it all the time with students now.
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