I began by scripting out the screencast. I didn’t want to forget the points I wanted to hit. I prepared by setting up the sites I wanted in a series of tabs and ran through the script a few times to rehearse. There isn’t anything worse than wasting time watching a screencast in order to learn something and having the screencaster not know where they are going or say “Um” a lot. Continue reading
As soon as my email went out I had more student volunteers than you could shake a stick at. I wish I could do more of a sample but I didn’t think I’d get enough if I didn’t offer some sort of incentive. Continue reading
After clearing the idea with my supervisor, I have composed the following email, going out this afternoon:
Students:
I am looking for 10 volunteers to take part in a usability study. Each volunteer will receive a $5.00 gift certificate from the school store redeemable for the tasty treats of your choice.
The study is simple and consists of you navigating a website while I observe. It should take no more than 10 minutes of your time and can be done in my office or on your own computer in a place convenient to you. Please contact me to arrange a time and/or place.
Ms. Clemson
I am interested in how well our Tech Support site (KUAPress blog) performs as a resource for two things in particular – How to change one’s network password and how to map one’s private network drive. These are two things that we as a department want every student to know and most do not. Continue reading
Create a KUA specific default theme – nothing orange and black I think, perhaps just a variation on TwentyTen. I have requested a couple of panorama shots from communications and got a few but nothing that is long enough and cropped to size they just don’t work.
In order to build traffic amongst the KUAPress community the default links have to be replaced with links to the KUAPress home site. I’ll also include a link to the support site
A student is a very fine photographer. She is doing an independent study on the topic and as she and her teacher meet in the lab where my office is located, I saw some of her photographs and admired them.
The next day we met on one of the walkways between buildings and I stopped her and complimented her work again and asked if she had thought of presenting her work online.
“Oh” she said “I’ve got them all up on Facebook!”
This is a student that I would like to teach about online publishing. I’d like to teach her that Facebooks’s Terms of Service allows them to use her work as long as it remains on their servers. I’d like to teach her to present her work like this.
Case Two:
I set a photography blog up last spring and asked the teacher of the Digital Photography class to ask her students to put the photos they liked best in a folder every week so that I could exhibit them online. The students never put anything in there. She wanted to teach them how to attach metadata to the photos and never got that far and as a consequence no photos ever were offered.
This term I asked her again. I had set up a folder called Photos of the Week in her class folder and six photos were transferred to it in the first week. Not all students did offer photos, but I thought perhaps they were just shy.
However a conversation today with one of the students was enlightening. “I’d love to exhibit your portrait of the little boy” I said. “It’s a lovely photo.”
“Oh, thank you” said the student. ” You are welcome to it.”
“Would you put it in the Photos of the Week folder?” I asked
“Oh. I don’t know how to do that!” said the student.
This conversation is particularly interesting in light of the fact that this student is a member of the administration.
A faculty member has set up a blog for her class. All students in the class are Authors.
She would like to engage writers in conversation with the students on the topic of: Why Do People Write? This is the title of the blog. She envisions the conversation spanning several years and classes. What she would like to have happen is that the students will communicate with various writers whom they admire, ask them why they write and post their responses. Then will the students comment?
Some thoughts:
This is an interesting case because this particular faculty member has historically kept very tight control over her class blogs. With this one, the fact that she is interested in opening up the blog to public comment, that she is interested in drawing readers from the public at large, shows a great deal of growth.
After a Skype session with my advisor, my first task is to rewrite my original, amended once already proposal. The project has changed from the original proposal of a technical support site to something much more.
