iLike iLife

Contrary to popular believe, much of Mélaine's and my time in Las Vegas has been work centered.

A lot of what our focus on EDU 205 / 505 has been in experimenting with new technologies and techniques on accomplishing varying tasks. This class is as much of a learning experience for us as it for you.

As I mentioned to some of you in our in person session, I'm actually a new mac user. In November I decided that it was time for me to stop mac bashing and setup and give it a try. You'll never get better with technology unless you try.

That's the most important thing you can demonstrate to me in this class. Not your success, not your mastery, but your willingness to try and even fail if that is the case, but as we all know, if you don't try you will never learn.

Believe it or not, it's good for your brain to be faced with a situation where you don't already know the answers, a situation where you have a to click a few buttons and see what happens. Granted its nice to have someone give you a head start and at least point you in the right direction, however the things you discover for yourself are the the things that stick in your head.

So I bought a macbook, and just started playing. Anytime I would see someone do something cool, I said, "Hey, how'd you do that?" And they would open up a whole new area for me to explore. I shut off my PC and forced (yes forced) myself to do everything I did in Windows on the mac.

Quite honestly, its the best thing I've ever done technology wise. Apple is amazingly slick and easy to use and each time they roll something out it just gets better.

Case in point, this past week I bought a copy of iLife '08 (which probably means very little to the rest of you), but is a collection of tools for macs that make your life easier: iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD and GarageBand. It allows you store and edit your photos with little effort, share them online through a .mac account (which I finally broke down and bought), make and edit movies and post them directly to YouTube. It also always you to make web pages, DVDs and even your own music & podcasts.

Some of it is pretty scary, but look at Mélaine and I now, we're totally doing vodcasts all the time (I'll post the stand up at Red Rock Canyon here shortly) and it's not just that we're amazingly brilliant (I mean because we are), but that the right technologies can make life easy.

But you'll never know until you try.

So try.

Fail.

And try again. It's the only way you will learn.