Rodney Dunican's Presentation on Project Management

I am amazed that people aren't taught project management as a matter of course while they're in school. Pretty much everything is a project of one sort or another and being able to manage it (either your own time and resources or a group's) is key to getting things done effectively.

I think that everything he went over was really helpful even if I've managed projects before. His presentation was so concise and broke things down in such a way that some very obvious things were clearly articulated (rather than just being fuzzy ideas floating around in the back of my brain soup).

Most especially, I liked his take away advice (parting notes & summary) which I've sort of listed here:

• Do celebrated work (do stuff you like & are proud of)
• Almost all jobs are project based
• Billing is critical (bill by milestones not just projects)
• When it comes to instructional design, the focus of your boss/whoever hired you is not learner-centric (the business' bottom-line and stats is what's important)
• Theory and practice don't line up. So the ADDIE model isn't going to match the real world well. It's a good guide, but not the rule.
  
• You may make more $$ contracting but don't forget the other costs, such as liabilitiy and professional insurance, as well as health care, home costs, dependents, marketing yourself, etc.
• Stay in contact with your classmates, even if they don't stay in this field or your field, since a lot of work comes from word of mouth
  

Weekly reflection: Google Docs

Well, I have to say that I really love Google Docs for a number of reasons. First among them is that I can take notes in class with whatever computer is available and I can access those notes from any other computer. I also like the new Forms function (can we say, "yay!"?). Let's not forget about how we can collaborate, too. I like it that it's a lot like a wiki in that you can collaborate with your team.

But it ends there. Because the bottom line is that it is limited in your functionality. When you're done collaborating, someone needs to download it and pretty-fy it. Take, for example, my last project with Hai and Tracy. While Google Docs was great for us to come up with the content of our presentation, we couldn't use Google Docs to make a GREAT presenation. No. And the nature of asynchronous online collaboration -- iterative, scrolling through each person's schedule to accumulate our collaborative efforts -- we couldn't get to the point where Tracy could fold our stuff into her awesome PPT template and neat animations, music, and slide transitions. Google Docs just couldn't handle that and all that stuff would get lost if she tried to upload the results of her hard work.

What Tracy did, instead, was de-uglify the original Google Docs template, but there's only so much de-uglifying you can do. Yes. I just made up that word. Welcome "de-uglify" to the English language.

Anyway, we uploaded the presentation to SlideShare, but it also removes all animations, music, and slide transitions. Oh well.

Anyway, here's a link to the .mov file, and the following is the embedded SlideShare file:

Where's ITEC

View more presentations from inannamouse.

Allosphere

I just read about the Allosphere project at UCSB. Pretty cool! Imagine taking a field trip here!

You should check out Prezi. It's a zooming presentation editor.

They have three pricing plans, one of which is FREE. Here's a sample slide show:

World Digital Library

I just heard about the World Digital Library from the latest Nova podcast. It seems like it would be a great resources for both instructors and students of history, culture, etc.

More detailed info is on their About page.

final project for ITEC 830

Well, I guess the think that was on my mind all week (actually for the past two weeks) is about the final project. There are a lot of interesting things in this world, but not a lot of time to focus on them ALL. One thing that I had on my mind before even joining the ITEC program was the uses of Second Life for education. No one is surprised by this, I'm sure. I wondered why SFSU didn't have a presence in Second Life.

Well, I did some poking around and I learned some interesting things. The SF State Visioning project, which has a small toe-print in Second Life. It looks like the DAI department has had some virtual world building classes in the past. But that's about it. I was told that one reason we don't have a Second Life presence is because our president and provost have not been big technology-type folks. A push for a Second Life presence would have to be a grass-roots movement. I was also told that the new provost is much more technologically oriented and we can expect to see some big strides in the technology area.

So, for my final project I'd like to research what other schools have done or had to go through in order to introduce Second Life to their campuses. What are the characteristics of the stakeholders? What were the hurdles to overcome? What were the pitfalls? Would they have done anything differently? What are the benefits to having a Second Life presence? What kinds of metrics would one use to measure the benefits/drawbacks. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

Design Critique

The website I chose to critique is Common Craft -- Explanations in Plain English. The website itself is really easy to navigate, with the standard (and simple) navigation at the header. The colors are simple and easy on the eye -- they don’t distract from the main content. At the bottom, flowing below the fold there are other types of links categorized by most viewed, popular right now, and recent blog posts. The navigation at the top is more important, and those below added bonuses but not absolutely necessary to get around.

The main content is right in the middle. (1) there’s a short video discussing the difference between types of licensing and versions (free or fee); (2) there are links to watch or purchase.

That’s just the site. The videos themselves are short, to the point, and easy to follow. They are not cluttered and use interesting visuals. If you like it, you can get the code to embed the video in your blog or site.


My specific responses to the in-class questions are as follows:

On Information Design
Who are the users?
- The users are people who want to know what new technologies are, quickly & easily, in plain English.

Information chunk (gestalt principle, amount information)
- The videos are about 3-5 minutes each.

Relevance (graphics, content, reading level, text)
- Graphics are simple; content is accessible; the reading level is in plain English.

Labeling (visual with text)
- The labels are simple and clear, as are the graphics

Consistency (visual, text)
- Colors for the THML page are clean & simple; they don’t detract from the content.

Detail (too much on one page or one screen)
- There isn’t too much detail on the page, which makes it very digestible.

On Interactivity
Orientation (Can you find the path, and know your way around?)
- It’s very easy to figure out where to go.

Navigation (Branching)
- Navigation is simple & easy.

Functionality (Does it work?)
- The functionality works great.

Information access (Multiple entry and exit? Logical path?)
- Multiple entries; very logical path.

On Screen Design
Attractive (first impression)
- It’s very easy on the eye. The page design doesn’t detract from the content.

Color
- The colors do not detract from the content.

Lay out
- I like that the main navigation is on top and the content is simply placed in the middle. The extra links are at the bottom, going beyond the fold (but they are secondary in importance).

Readability
- Very readable.

Other comments
- I really like this site. I think they’ve done a good job.

Norman Door

When my husband and I first moved into our house, it was very confusing to figure out which light switch worked for which light. We figured it out and we would tell our houseguests that all they had to do is do the exact opposite of what made sense: If you think one light switch went to one light, pick the opposite switch. That worked. I had to think every time I wanted to turn on or off a light.

That was seven years ago.

The one thing we couldn't ever figure out or work around was our thermostat. It had pre-defined times set with pre-defined temperatures, and over the years (with the various black outs and power outages that we've had) the pre-defined times were nowhere near real-time. And almost all the settings were set at 72. Our home was a sauna, but we couldn't figure out how to re-set the thermostat timings. Luckily, the manual override was easy to use.


Right. The SET button in the middle would be the obvious choice, but we were wrong, and we couldn't figure it out. That's seven years of bad heating problems.

A few months ago, our carpenter decided that our light switches sucked so he re-did them. It was easy to rehabituate to the change and it's a relief that FINALLY the switch I automatically reach for has the desired effect.

It was at this point that we had a conversation about the thermostat and he offered to fix it, clueing me in on where the instructions were. Right. You have to remove the cover to find the instructions. Why didn't I think of that?? I guess I'm a newbie when it comes to these central heating units.


I finally found out where the instructions were! And they were complicated.


I finally got it done. They weren't easy to follow (the buttons didn't behave as they should), but I could figure it out from here. I just can't believe how long it took to actually find the instructions!

Apps for America

Talk about civic involvement! Check out the Apps for America contest page.

Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind"

In reading Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind, his discussion about the left-brain dominance of right-brain thinking reminds me of one of my problems with the critical thinking classes I've taken. While I strongly believe that critical thinking should be required and taught much earlier than college (maybe as a yearly spiral from 5th grade onward), especially now that he advocates STORY as a organizational tactic (to gain customers, p. 105-107, but more on this next), I do have a problem with the whole argumentation and debate thing.

I feel that sometimes it robs us of truth and meaning because winning can easily become more important than understanding, compassion, and empathy.

On another note, my sister has a collection of TIME Magazines dating back from the 1930s (about 2-3 per decade). I love print advertisements, so I like to leaf through her magazines looking at the ads. What's astonishing is that the earlier ads looked like articles and were text heavy. They told a story and were geared toward emotionally hooking consumers. Fast forward to the Dot Com Boom, and ads were just an image and a URL. Now, though, when I leaf through magazines, I'm finding a return to STORY again. I see many ads that look like articles, are text heavy, and are designed to emotionally engage consumers. Again.

Web 2.0 conference

Well, I had a lot of fun in the exhibit hall with Jeff and David. We ran into Brian and Lance there and they pointed us to a really cool product, OER Commons (which Tai mentions in his blog). I really liked that one a lot because after one of the reading assignments from my 801 class, I've been thinking a lot about pre-existing materials. They have an enormous database of freely available materials for education. Also, the lady was really nice and obviously cared deeply about her project.

The product that I really dug was gooseGrade. It's "crowd-copyediting." Great for students to improve their English if they copyedit each other's assignments, but also great for anyone who'd love to have input on their writing skills. I wonder... Does this work for whatever language? I imagine that it could as far as the users actually inputting corrections and/or responding to them, but that the badge and their "grading" dialog box would need to be translated.

There was a bunch of other neat stuff there, but I don't want to ruin anyone else's chances of reporting on it.