Category: teaching experience

These are examples of my teaching experience. I find it one of the most rewarding parts of what I do.

Miro and VLC at BCUG Graphics Workshop, Monmouth, NJ

Post author By lemsy
Post date 2012-06-21
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Urban Empire by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #cc #design #stormtrooper #starwars

Select a livelihood that reflects your ethics by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org

Tonight, I returned to the BCUG Graphics focused sub-group, for maybe the 4th time. I always enjoy the professionalism, humor, and attentiveness of this very special group and its memorable members. In the past, I’ve talked about open source concepts, Picasa, Sketchup, Inkscape, and other technologies.

In this visit, I came to talk about two great open source video projects, VideoLan Client (VLC) and Miro Media Player. VLC is a swiss army knife of video tools. You can play almost any codec out of the box, transcode videos from one format to another, clip portions of videos to new files, create playlists, stream video to others on your network and elsewhere, and all in a simple, configurable interface. I described VLC as being for geeks and tweakers, but it would also be apropos to say that it is a video geek’s heaven. I demonstrated a few of its more useful features, and also introduced VLC’s side project, a video editor (VLC Movie Maker) which by their own admission is pre-alpha, and not highly usable yet, but the work that they’ve done so far is amazing and delicious. I can not wait until this tool is more well-developed, so I can stop using WIndows Media and Quicktime based tools. VideoLAN is an amazing project, and I love what they do.

I also demonstrated Miro. Miro is a video player too, but a whole lot more than that. Miro is based on VLC, and so it has all of those features and then some. With Miro, you have a built in torrenting client, podcatcher, RSS manager, auto-transcoder, music cataloging, video cataloging, and video search with configurable search engines. When you do a search, you have the ability to save the search as a podcast, e.g. auto-downloaded video set. Miro also has a side project that I showed called Miro Video Transcoder. This tool is a simple one window interface that allows you to drag a pile of files onto it, and have it save them all in a format that you choose. The list of available formats is long and it does quick work.

I hope that my sharing has helped the folks at BCUG Graphics workshop to enjoy their video half as much as I enjoyed myself tonight.

VLC App For Android Nearly Ready For Release (techfleece.com)
VideoLAN confirms VLC Media Player coming soon to Android (androidcommunity.com)
Converting your Videos – Miro (macstarter.com)

Tags Open source

affiliations professional activities professional experience references research interests teaching experience

Designing Presentations: Beyond the Basics (A 3-Part Series) at Princeton Public Library

Post author By lemsy
Post date 2012-06-11
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When in doubt, visit your library, by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org

I was given a great opportunity to teach people how to create great presentations.

TIMES: Jun 11 2012 – 6:30pm – 8:30pm Jun 18 2012 – 6:30pm – 8:30pm Jun 25 2012 – 6:30pm – 8:30pm

LOCATION: Technology Center

Part 1 – Monday, June 11, 6:30 – 8:30 PM – Design Elements. In this session, we discussed the elements of design, bringing together color, inspiration, fonts, message, and more to create interesting, eye-catching visuals. The presentation I used is here:

Part 2 – Monday, June 18, 6:30 – 8:30 PM – A Focus on PowerPoint

Part 3 – Monday, June 25, 6:30 – 8:30 PM -Exploring Prezi & Google Docs Presentations

Learn how to incorporate design elements to create captivating, memorable, and effective slide presentations. In this three-part series, technology instructor John LeMasney will cover a variety of presentation tools and techniques, including images, colors, fonts, readability, and movement. Skill Level: Intermediate.

Taken from Designing Presentations: Beyond the Basics (A 3-Part Series) | Princeton Public Library at

Tags John LeMasney, Princeton Public Library

affiliations professional activities professional experience references research interests teaching experience technology

LILRC: Workshop – Hands-on Inkscape

Post author By lemsy
Post date 2012-06-05
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On June 4th, 2012, I gave a long session on using Inkscape in-depth to the Long Island Library Regional Consortium. We discussed bitmap versus vector images, and introduced all of Inkscape’s main tools, then ran through recreating an illustration. Some feedback I got after the session included:

Speaker has extraordinary knowledge
Instructor was very open to answering questions and going over things multiple times
Overall, very well done
Very knowledgeable
Hands-on with excellent answers to our (millions) of questions
Very detailed instructor
Excellent intro to new capabilities
The instructional concept in using inkscape/graphic design (was a strength)

Tags GIMP, Google, Graphics, Inkscape, Vector Based, Vector graphics

affiliations professional activities professional experience references research interests teaching experience technology

Newark Academy: Day-long session on Inkscape and design skills

Post author By lemsy
Post date 2012-05-31
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On May 31st, 2012, I got the opportunity to teach high school students about Inkscape, open source software, and open standards. I went over basic functionality in Inkscape, demonstrated some design techniques, and helped students with portfolio based projects. Special thanks to Mike Harris and Debi Dixler.