15/5 - September 24, 2008

It's been a very busy week for me. I've had lots to do for my classes and for work. I'm really struggling for some reason this semester to manage my time. As a teacher, I don't have a lot of time during the day to do anything but teach! When I get home in the afternoon I'm exhausted, mentally and physically, but I still have work to do. This year at my job I'm really feeling the performance push more than in year's past. Luckily I have a wonderful group of students who don't mind being "pushed" as well.

Anyway, enough of the complaining. Last Thursday our client came to our group meeting to go over some of the content with us and to review the flow of the unit. We discussed a little about how the content would be presented. Our client has a plethora of video from her past visits to Russia, and she would like for us to include as much video as we can. Our group watched a few of the videos. Some are better than others but, as I said, there is a lot of footage, so our client told us that she would have someone who is familiar with the videos go through them and look for the best ones.

We received the full content on Sunday. We decided that instead of meeting on Sunday, our time would be better spent looking through the content individually and making some notes on how we thought it would be delivered best. When we meet again on Thursday we'll discuss our ideas and see if we can start figuring out how to design.

Things coming up: 1) meet with my group and start hashing out some ideas, 2) start working on some documents that are due in the upcoming weeks.

15/5 - September 17, 2008

Last week during our group meeting we took our goals and created tasks to go with them. Then we created a task analysis chart. It didn't take us much time to get it finished, but then we discovered that we were missing a performance objective. We decided to split up the 8 goals, 2 for each person, and each create a performance objective for our respective goals before our next meeting, which was on Sunday night. It took me a while to remember exactly how to correctly write performance objectives. When we got together on Sunday night we all shared what we had come up with. Then we updated the task analysis.

I'm really impressed with the way our group works together. We are all easy going but aren't afraid to speak up and express our opinions when we think something is not working. That's a really good group dynamic to have.

We're still awaiting some of the content from our client so Trudy suggested that we start taking a look at other websites to get some ideas for what we want our design to look like.

Coming up this week: 1) meet on Thursday with my group, 2) look at some sites and get some ideas, 3) start designing?

15/5 - September 10, 2008

This week has been very busy so far, and there are still things to do. I met our client for the first time when she joined our meeting last Thursday. She gave us a lot of material to use for the content. Our ideas started bubbling up, and we were all very excited. It's going to end up being a really fun project with an end result that I think our client will be very pleased with. We decided that with the amount of the material the client gave us we would have to narrow down our objectives in order to focus on a few main points. The content that is left over will be on the site but it won't be in as much detail.

After our client left the meeting we created a survey/questionnaire to give to one of the classes who would potentially become counselors on the Russia trip. The questionnaire contained questions about Russian culture, camp counselor norms, and personal questions on work ethics and interactions with children. The survey was given to the class and then the data was examined. From the data we decided on 6 objectives for our instruction. We also met online as a group to start getting together all of the documents we would need for our analysis phase.

I sort of feel like all of the data gathering and other preliminary stuff that we do is kind of boring (am I allowed to say that?). Maybe boring isn't the right word but I can't think of how to describe it accurately. I would compare it to the months of practicing the piano before the night of the big recital. I find the design and development phases much more enjoyable!

Coming up next week, we will beginning the design phase. We will be closely looking at our content and data and will begin to determine appropriate ways to relay the information to our users.

15/5 - September 3, 2008

I attended my first 6210 class last Thursday and met my group for the first time face-to-face. The first part of class was spent answering questions from and giving tips to the 6190 and 6200 students. I think the other 6210 members and I did a pretty good job of giving them the best tips we could. I remember exactly how overwhelmed I felt on that first day in 6190, which happened to be my first ever grad school class. I'm pretty sure I cried on the way home. Now I'm actually feeling okay about what lies ahead. Yes, it's still overwhelming but I know that it will all get done at the end. What's that old saying about eating an elephant one bite at a time?

Anyhow my group met for a few minutes after class was over and discussed all that we have to get done in the next few weeks. We looked over a website that our client gave us in order to get a better feel for what this Russian summer camp thing was all about. We decided that we needed a little more content from our client, and that we would be giving some of her students a survey/questionnaire in order to complete our analysis. I believe I'm going to be the one to create the actual survey once we get all of the information. I really love organizing information and being able to present it in a pleasant way. As a teacher, I've created many activities using Microsoft Word for my students! On this survey/questionnaire we will be trying to figure out what these students, who are prospective summer camp counselors, already know about Russian culture, history, and camps.

Coming up this next week I'll be meeting with my group again on Thursday in class and on Sunday online and we will be going through the content that our client is sending us and deciding exactly what will be going on the survey. Our original timeline has shifted slightly because we weren't able to get some of the content from the client right away. I think the next few weeks are going to be pretty busy for us. Did I say weeks? I think I meant months!

And, finally, since I talked about my upcoming camping trip in my last 15/5 I couldn't resist sharing some pictures. It was the perfect camping weekend! I promise not to do these off topic rants too much.