MGG - 7.08 - Dead - CISSP online seminar
Gloria died and I died as well. I just didn't stop breathing.
I wasn't teaching. I wasn't facilitating the CISSP exam preparation seminars anymore. And I missed it. Particularly since I had moved to a town where neither the high school nor the local college had any computer courses aside from graphics.
So I decided to try and do something about it.
There wasn't any point in trying to organise a course on the CISSP here. Nobody would have been interested. Nobody was working in the field so no one would have been qualified to take the certification in any case.
And I have never been terribly interested in online course delivery. Yelling into the void has never held a particular appeal for me. So far it has not worked out too terribly well for education overall. Yes you can set up courses and hold them via Zoom, delivering the lecture via Zoom and with possibly other remote materials. Most people don't do an awful lot of work in putting in the extra effort for additional resources that you need or to try and deal with the fact that delivering a course virtually via video doesn't really allow too much in the way of interaction with the students. You tend to be looking at your own slide or your own set of slides and what slide comes next. The screen setups, while they may allow certain amounts of interaction, definitely have problems in that regard.
But I figured that there wasn't anything preventing me from holding my own course and presenting my own materials simply by putting them up on the Internet.
I already had the course in terms of the structure and content. I had been asked to do a course during the pandemic, and so I had taken the time to ensure that I had all the material up-to-date and comprehensively covering the entire field.
I figured that the course was simply going to be a lecture of the material. At that point I hadn't yet got to the point of dictating out materials covering the entire course content and additional resources that people attending a seminar, workshop or course would need.
I also figured that it was a bit of an experiment in social media. Using social media as a platform, how could I deliver a course without having people sign up for it, without requiring people to attend at specific times, and still provide the information to anyone who wanted to study it?
Since most of what was happening would simply be me doing lectures, audio recording would have been possible. However, as I thought about it I figured that given the applications available to me, the easiest way to deal with it was to simply do video. I could record the video on my phone as a kind of selfie video and save the file and then submit it to a social media platform.
Given that it was video, the platform that I was most familiar with in that regard was YouTube. However, here in Port Alberni, Facebook is the default, and pretty much the only platform that anybody in town pays any attention to or knows how to use.
Since I was dealing with a professional topic I figured that I would include LinkeDin. Because the girls had demanded that I create an Instagram account in order to show their mother their pictures and videos, I decided to put that into the mix as well. Finally there was Tik Tok, which had become the social media platform for young people and dealt with video although in rather short form.
Including TikTok turned out to have a pretty drastic effect on the project. TikTok is a short-form video platform and at that time the maximum length of a video segment was ten minutes. Therefore I decided to record all of the segments in ten-minute lengths. When I eventually got done, it turned out that most of the video clips were about eight minutes long, since I was concerned about running into the cut-off boundary and truncating what I was saying.
So I started recording mostly as I was walking around town. At that point I hadn't yet completely lost energy and I was walking about ten to fifteen kilometres per day as I was walking to various places. This gave me time to record the videos as I was walking. I tried initially facing the phone and camera, but I got feedback from some of those who watched it, saying that it looked very much like the "Blair Witch Project." Eventually I just recorded video of the paths and trees that I was walking past because the video wouldn't be terribly important.
There were a lot of learning experiences along those lines. How long could I talk? How much would I need in terms of content to cover in a seven to ten minute segment? What kind of video was appropriate? What kind of video was inappropriate? Making sure that I didn't film other people who were walking in the same area as I was. (Although given I was the only pedestrian in town, this was a very minor consideration.)
The entire project took about a year and a half to complete. I recorded a little over 450 videos, comprising what I estimate to be a total of roughly sixty hours of content for the normal forty hour one week course.
I had gotten used to the fact that pretty much nobody was going to reply to anything that I posted on the Internet. However, given that it was a course and given that CISSP exam preparation seminars are fairly expensive to attend, I did rather expect that I would get some feedback. The fact that there has been total silence throughout the course of the whole project has been somewhat disappointing.
As the project neared completion, and then was completed, I did appreciate the fact that various people in leadership positions in the security community did support the effort and promote it. It was very nice to see.
I have finished the course and run the race. I have completed recording the entire preparation seminar and it is available on five different social media platforms to anyone who wants it.
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
Next: TBA
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