Howdy!

(That title makes the topic you are about to learn about far more interesting than it likely is to you. I figured no one would willingly click on something entitleed “The Heat Pump Explained.” But more on that in a quick second…)

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I promise it hasn’t been cause I’ve been neglecting my project though! Other end of semester projects for various classes and finals studying have been eating up all my free time. It hasn’t been fun to say the least.

I have been working on my doodle project for some time now (check out my project work leading up to this grand finale here). The basic gist of this project has been to build off the work of Giulia Forsythe, which I was first introduced to in her video lecture that we watched in DS106. I really loved her work and her ideas behind them really struck a chord with me.

So for this project, I decided to use her doodle techniques and make doodle-note study guides for my historic preservation class, HISP305: Vernacular American Building.

I get that there probably aren’t a whole bunch of people who will find the topics I doodled about as interesting as I do (except maybe other people in my HISP class), but the best part of this project has been how useful the process of doodling the notes has been when studying. Since I am such a visual and hands on learner, it helped me immensely to have to read over my notes and then visualize the information. The topics I chose to doodle were those which I was having difficulty understanding in class. Drawing them helped me to interact with the information in a hands on way which would have otherwise been impossible for me.

For the grand finale of my study guide collection, I chose to make a video explaining how the basic heat pump works using my doodles. It kind of turned into an illustrated mini lecture. The lecture part of it came from a couple YouTube videos I came upon explaining the basic heat pump. Believe it or not, there are very few videos explaining this topic to choose from! Weird, I know. The first video I found was the “Introduction to How Heat Pump Works” by StageHandSpaceTV and the second was Dave Mar’s “Heat Pump Operation”. Although they were both quite informative and helpful in their own right, I thought that there were parts of each which were not useful to me (either because they were too complex or didn’t focus on the aspects of the cycle that I needed to know about for my class). Because of this, I chopped them both up and re-organized them.

This is what I came up with:

Simplifying the Heat Pump from Emily DelRoss on Vimeo.

Hope that was all you cold have wished for from a heat pump and more! Thanks again for reading and watching!

Also, I should mention that this will likely be on of my last posts on this blog. :’( I know there’s a crazy good offer from Hippie Hosting that would allow us to continue our blog for free, but I think mine is approaching the end of its life cycle with the end of my time in DS106. As the tagline of my past states, this blog was my ”… attempt to join the rest of the world in the 21st century, one technological lesson at a time” through the lessons I learned in DS106. I had never used any of the tools we learned about in class and certainly never had a blog before. I documented all that I learned (and unfortunately for readers, my many subsiquent freakouts) as well as organized my work for the class. It was a really great experience and I was able to learn so much through the guidance of Jim Groom and all the other DS106-ers, but now I feel like I’m probably not as ignorant as I was propr to the class. I don’t need this particular blog to track my journey and convince myself that I can learn something about technilogy, becuase not I know I can. And I know there are tons of resources availible out there for people just like me, who are learning to learn different technological tools and are a bit intimidated by them.

I would certainly not be against blogging in the future, but it wont be on this site. This needy -technophobic-girl identity is no longer!