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This week was all about getting started in class. Because of my late enrollment in the class, I actually missed the first class so the 2nd class begins my journey with the studio experience. Two papers plus most of the handbook were read prior to class.
We spent most of the class learning how to motivate ourselves, but many of the points offered simply didn't seem to jive with me. Much of the discussion seemed to be centered around getting motivated to do the work. However, I question this point of view as most of us in this program are graduate students who are spending hard-earned dollars to obtain this particular education and degree. As such, most of us are coming into the program with very real goals and desires to get something very specific out of the program that will further along our respective careers.
I believe its not so much a matter of motivation as it is a matter of work ethic. An entrepreneur once said, "the hardest step is just getting started." I believe this statement applies extremely well to the graduate program and the key is simply finding time to think about your studies every single day, including weekends. I typically spend my lunch breaks reviewing emails from the class or purusing the required readings online over a cup of coffee. Usually such an idle time spent on the study materials is all it takes to spur my brain into gear and I am thinking about what I have read over much of the afternoon and eventually come home from the office and sit right down at the computer and hash out on the computer whatever thoughts are on my mind, whether its responding to an article or writing up some reflection of that material and sticking it in my portfolio.
Simply by starting the process, however idle it seems, I find that things take a life of their own and I am quickly deep into the subject matter and thinking things through or working on the class project.
Week 2 begins the workshops. One is on Flash and the other is on Dreamweaver. However, I am tackling neither tool as I have chosen Photoshop and Zope. Since I prefer to focus on content and context over the multimedia aspects of things, I am limiting my time in Photoshop in order to focus more on learning some of the more fundamental programming aspects of Zope.
This week I discover that Zope 2.6 is out and proceeded to learn a bit more about the release and decided to upgrade the various components of my Linux server in order to upgrade from Zope 2.5 to 2.6.
Having run into some problems with upgrading my Linux server, I was forced to put the upgrade of Zope to 2.6 on hold in order to fix the problems I created with the IMAP mail services that also run on the Linux server hosting Zope.
I just so happened to be building a house and also have a hobby of making stained glass windows, so I decided a cool project to learn more about Photoshop would be to design my own pattern in Photoshop. I started playing with what I thought was Photoshop, but was actually Adobe Illustrator. I put a whole weekend's worth into learning a lot of nifty new tricks (probably about 25 hrs), but unfortunately, I got the wrong tool for my contract, so realizing that the tool I've been using for all my graphics work is not Photoshop, I head out to the stores to pick up a copy of a Photoshop how-to book and the software itself.
This program definitely goes against the grains of how I am used to working with graphics files. As a former graphics designer and sign maker, it was very important to work with vector based designs so as to size and resize images at will and tweak them ever so slightly, especially with logo design work, so I am finding it a very difficult paradigm shift to pick up this new tool.
How interesting that they post a call for IT logo designs right when I am in the throes of learning Photoshop. This fortuious event definitely gives me something concrete to focus on as I attempt to learn Photoshop. I have drawn a few designs out on paper and now am flipping through my book and trying to learn how to do some of the tricks I'm so used to in Illustrator (as well as some I still haven't learned to do in Illustrator, like punchouts and drop-shadows).
I started looking at the Zope upgrade again, but decided I need to get started on learning some more basics of Zope. This week, I learned a little bit more about the Zope folderish objects and figured out how to iterate through them to get them so that I don't have to write HTML code to list all the items on a web-site. My first "lesson" to be authored will be about this new technique and I'll construct the page to dynamically grow as I add new lessons as a practical hands-on application of this technique.
We also began to exchange reflections on our readings with others in the class and this is proving a challenging task with only two or three people participating. It shall be interesting to see what comes down the pipeline as the deadline for completing the discourse approaches.
Having raalized I am basically starting from ground zero with Photoshop, made a trip out to Barnes and Noble to pick up a Photoshop book and begin working through some of the chapters while designing some actual logos for the college's contest.
Also got the latest Plone product up and running and playing with Template pages and stylesheets in Zope. I was amazed at the fact that you could imbed DTML code even in cascading stylesheets! I fired up "The Gimp" an open-source Photoshop clone to compare and contrast the two now that I have a little more exposure to Photoshop. The Gimp has a lot of interesting manipulation engines and I was able to produce the nifty logo for www.gibberishcode.net with it.
We had a mandatory meeting this week where we saw the first of three Interactive Museums. This first IM was delivered by Patty Cincotta and covered "Fizz and Martina Math Adventures." It was a very interesting showcase of a gameshow like interactive tool designed to engage students with rich graphics and ever challenging problems that wree presented in a game-show like fashion. I am curious as to how successful the tool actually is in building retainable knowledge. That is, are the kids sufficiently focused on the problems being presented to work through them and solve them, or does the design of the game actually distract the students from learning (even though it appears to be quite an engaging interface). That is, do they have the knowledge going into the game and whoever's fastest at recalling that knowledge wins the game?
A totally new idea for a project struck me while at work today. I have been busy encoding animal species and breeds into a standard medical format and have noticed that it is often difficult to find reliable and complete information on a species' rank in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom. A lot of the new skills I've been learning with Zope could be leveraged with building a taxonomical database for these ill-documented species on the web.
This weekend, was a most productive weekend as I checked a digital camera out from Media Services and managed to crank out a little multimedia experiment called Circles. I also dove into Zope security and got my hands quite dirty with the Python scripting language and think I may have a new, more elegant way of handling forms processing with python scripts over the usual DTML-tags processing that's usually embedded directly in the forms. I have a new site set up just for playing around with various products and scripts at play.gibberishcode.net.
This week, I got the new login forms working exclusively with Python scripts. Yeah! Also, downloaded and played with a couple new Zope products, ZWiki, and Calendar.
The biggest challenge for me this weekend was attempting to "connect" my forms based login with the Zope HTTP based authentication themes. After many hours of frustration, I can't really say I made all that much progress in actually implementing such a beast, but I have definitely learned a good deal more about Zope's architecture and security model as well as Python scripting and some of the essential components of the plug-in products.
This week's reading cover Kapor's Software Design Manifesto and it was quite an interesting discussion amoungst the group. Initially, I wasn't sure he was really calling for all that much of a change from what's currently going on in the industry today, but after further reflection, I believe I now understand more fully Kapor's call to introduce the "Software Designer" as a peer to the usual software developer and project manager. This is not exactly the same as the Software Architect as I was originally confusing the terminology with as the architect is more concerned with properly implementing the internals of the system whereas the designer would be less focused on that (just as the architect may not be so focused on a properly installed plumbing system in a building) and more focused on the overall asthetics of the deesign and implementation.
Next week is the face-to-face with the instructor to discuss progress to-date on self-paced studies. A good bit of time was spent gathering everything together for the meeting.
More time was spent on playing with Zope Python scripts for forms processing as well as the CookieCrumbler and SimpleUserFolder products in yet another attempt to effect logins via web-forms rather than HTTP authentications.
Also, worked on a couple new logo designs to explore Photoshop's layering and blending capabilities further.
Dr. Lloyd Rieber gave an Interactive Museum this week covering The Oregon Trail, a software package by Broderbund. It was very interesting to contrast between state of the art software packages with software written for the Apple IIe. Software programs that were cutting edge back in early 80's were very primative by today's graphics intensive standards, yet still showed a surprising amount of key elements for menu layout and information presentation as commonly found in even today's most advanced games.
This week's face-to-face meeting to review my studies for the EDIT 6190 contracts appears to have gone well. I highlighted several of Zope's strengths as well as some of the artifacts I developed over the past few weeks and described my workings with some of the lower-level components of Zope. My secondary tool to learn was Adobe Photoshop and demonstrated some of the logos I had designed for the IT Logo Contest as part of my learning experience in Photoshop.
Hyungkook Park covered Model IT in an interactive museum. This tool was representative of an example of learning with computers vs. learning from computers. That is, the Model-IT application provides a supporting structure whereby the student can examine components of a model and play with and adjust different elements of the model to see how things interact with each other in real-time, thus providing them with significant feedback that leads to new insights not necessarily directly taught to the student. This modeling tool actually reminded me quite a bit of my days of playing SimCity and Civilization where you were engaged in modelling the ideal city or country. Although these are games while the Model-IT tools is a bona fide tool for modelling various things, both components shared many of the same sort of "design controls" that allow the user to manipulate the many elements of the model being played out before the user's eyes. Probably the only real difference between the games and this tool is the fact that the opportunity to interact with the model is serialized in the game and the computer gets to take a turn at manipulating the model as well. The other thought that struck me as I watched this IM was that the details of variable interaction probably very much represented what was probably going on behind the scenes in the games where the "ecosystem" variables are set by the difficulty level of the game being played. These ecosystem variables, which control how fast your population grows, how much polution a city produces, how much food isgrown, and so on would be equivalent to the variables being set in the Model-IT application during the demonstration of the air pollution model.
This week was highly focused on defining the scope of the taxonomy project as well as laying the technical groundwork from which to build the project. Probably the biggest challenge at the moment is being sure that a well defined scope is set to prevent an overly ambitiious undertaking while also providing something fairly useful and unique amongst the existing taxonomies available on the Internet already.
Over this past two weeks, I visited with the F1 Design team to see how this group interacted and what their project was all about. Although I realize there should be two paragraphs discussing this team, I have taken the liberty of summing up both visits in a combined observation here, especially as I had a very hard time following what was being said in the meetings.
In the first meeting I attended, I a lot of work had been done to-date and there was a definite shape to the overall project. Final graphics and sounds had not yet been integrated into the project, but you could definitely see what the team was striving towards. In the meeting the following week, there was significant progress and the site had most of its "blobs" replaced with actual images and some of the games were functional as well. Additionally, the bird had a voice!
What I found interesting was the simplicity of the games and the team's approach to presenting the materials by the games themselves. I have done game design in the past and it always seems like I always tend to go overboard in adding complexity and nuiances to the games I developed. So I was very impressed in the team's ability to define games that were simple, yet effective and informative and engaging for the audience (at least I was!).
As far as team chemistry, Anita seemed to be a natural at the project leader position and did an excellent job of conducting the meetings and reviewing problem areas and elliciting input from her team members. It was obvious that Anita had very clear ideas for the project and that definitely helped her take the project in the right direction in order to get the task completed, yet she appeared to do this while engaging her team members and getting them to take up her "rough ideas" and put their own influence on them.
Overall, the project looked very professional and sophisicated and the graphics were very much top-quality work and I applaud the entire team's effort.
Much of my effort and "reflection" is now taking place in the project entries, though of a completely different nature. Please continue to follow by reading here.
This class has been a very interesting experience as an approach to learning about design and project development. Overall, I have greatly enjoyed the freedom to select the tools to learn and the project to contract. As I worked on the projects, one of the things I tried to do was be very conscious of the design decisions I was making with the project. Even so, I am not really sure I adequately captured what it was I was really doing as I approached the design of the taxonomy web-site. Because I have been doing software design and development for so many years, I am quite sure many of the steps that others may be painfully stepping through are steps that I have been through over and over to the point that they are no longer conscious decisions on my part. That is, they are automatic (much as the pro golfer automatically reaches for the club he needs and addresses the ball without really thinking on the basic level just what he's doing). Troublesome spots are seen and planned for without really consciously calling them to mind.
Although the project I chose to do required a lot of work, I never felt truly pressed for time to complete the project since I managed to maintain a steady pace in the work and knew fairly well what my limitations were and how long it would take me to work through those limitations in order to complete some part of the project. That's not to say the project turned out 100% as I had planned it, but it substantially does many of the key things I wanted to accomplish with it this semester and I am pleased with the results of the project as well as the lessons learned from doing the project, not only from a design and development standpoint, but from learning a good bit more about taxonomic databases and about the animal kingdom and origins of the classification systems out there.
In re-reading my reflections here, it is obvious I didn't fully capture the insights from the required readings, though I do feel that I did a much better job of this in the WebCT participations where ideas actually got bantered around a bit. Even so, the readings have reinforced the notion that you must put the student and audience front and center in all design decisions and efforts and this is a notion that is also taught in the software development arena, though many developers do not adequately follow through on the principles expounded upon by the "experts."
One of the ideas that really came to light for me from the readings, especially in conjunction with how this class carried itself in the constructivism nature was that one must, as the designer, begin to collect feedback early on and often from peers and target audiences alike. If the designer does not fully understand what he/she is trying to produce and also doesn't fully understand the nature and approach the student is likely to be taking towards their project's end-results, then there is very little chance of the design being a successful one. The designer must successfully understand both sides of the equation in order to choose the best possible design and presentation if the project is to be successful. They must also be able to look at the scope of the project and the timelines given to accomplish the work in and make all the right trade-offs and none of the wrong trade-offs if they are to successfully pull the project together.
I definitely believe that design is design is design in that if you learn how to design well in one field, then the core principles you learn there will carry to any other field to move into. The main challenge in moving from design in one field to another is learning the subject matter and theories and practices of the new field. My own experiences in this class only reinforces this notion as I quickly find ways to relate almost all new material in this Instructional Technology field to concepts that were learned in the software development field, such as the ADDIE model and other design models vs. Computer Science's traditional Waterfall development model and others such as Rapid Prototyping, White Box, Black Box, Top-Down, Object Oriented, etc..
I would like to close these reflections by offering the following ideas for how to improve the course for future EDIT 6190 students:
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