I love summer. Did I mention I love summer? Summer means I can work on a variety of projects that get me thinking about new ideas and talking to new people. During the semesters, there are of course more monolithic, long-term projects that absorb my energy and thought processes. (Of course, there's also the lovely part where I'm not freezing, like nine months out of the year, and the world is green and lush.)
One of those summer projects is taking part on the Stuart Selber Faculty Fellow team, thinking about a framework for describing types of online instruction sets, ultimately for the purposes of teaching technical writing. Prospective tech writers need to think about the implications of different types of instruction sets, for example, are the writers the ultimate expert, handing down the law to users, or on the other end of the spectrum, are they co-experts with users, who may not have the whole picture but still have important tips and words of troubleshooting advice that are useful and valid, and contribute to an evolving instruction set? They also need to think about who their audience(s) are and which points on the spectrum will best serve them. You see, even I as a minutely detail-oriented perfectionist (I acquired my handle of Grammar Goddess on the ANGEL documentation team because of my propensity to "smite" those with poor wording) (in case you wonder, yes, I have tried to work on my "issues" in that department) can see that the old model, for instance that of my early '90s pre-Web experience with computer software and documentation, often let me down as a user. That was when you just got the installation media and a printed book, that might or might not address all your quirky questions, problems, or ideas for nonconventional use of the software, and if not, well pre-Internet, what were you going to do, travel the country asking random strangers whether they knew how to, say, fix the blog style sheet that you broke this week? So, this week, I read the first 28 pp. of Selber's scholarly article he plans to submit to a journal in the field, in which he is blocking out such a framework.
In a few weeks, our second annual Learning Design Summer Camp will take place. One of the pre-event activities was that anyone could design a sticker for people to place on their name tags, laptops, uh, foreheads, etc. If they did so by June 19, they would be included in the order from the sticker company. Well, I only thought of this after the deadline, but, in Photoshop, I altered the image for the "instructional designerd" sticker (see http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wiki/LDSC09_Sticker_Page) to say "instructions nerd." I think that applies both to the aforesaid team and to my regular-schoolyear monolithic project to provide instruction sets for Penn State's course management system, ANGEL.
Funny that I just happened to mention that one example, but this week, I broke the style sheet of one of my three blogs. I fully claim user-error responsibility. I think before we upgraded to Movable Type 4.2, I created a custom "About This Site" widget for the blog. Well, in hindsight I could kick the living daylights out of myself, but I decided I would add another sentence to that widget. I did so (in the evening, when tired and probably distracted), saved, republished the site, and voila, it reverted both to the default color scheme (not much of a biggy, other than that I'm not fond of blood-red) and default widget sets, so that the widgets were not in the order I specified and the custom widget was absent altogether. I tried to figure it out myself through trying many different measures. I consulted the ITS knowledge base and blogger.psu.edu community hub site. I didn't want to ask for help. In life, I'd always much rather prefer just about anything other than asking for help; but, today, I asked one of our department's resident experts, who could not figure out how to fix it. I need to wait till the other resident expert returns from being out of the office (and ask for help *again*, ouch). This explains why my Facebook status for today was set to "Mary Janzen has confounded the experts."
In this time period, I also created some "fixed" instruction sets for the Student Rating of Teaching Effectiveness (SRTE) system, which is an electronic system developed by AIS programmers to be housed within ANGEL to replace the paper system for students to rate their instructors near the end of the term. It is still in pilot, but the pilot will grow bigger in fall, so documentation needed to be in place by then. It was approved this week by the representative from the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence upstairs, so I converted it to PDF, and got it to the Schreyer webmaster to place on a redesigned SRTE site she is creating.
After attending a few meetings with representatives of all the sub-units of TLT and getting feedback from managers, I am gradually writing the next "main feature" to appear on the TLT home page, which is the essential information, with helpful links, to approximately seven services/facilities of TLT that faculty should be aware of for "back-to-school" purposes. This will complement a direct-mail packet containing several print pieces.
Another summer project to make me think again was to edit the white paper produced by the hot team investigating VoiceThread. I did the first edit of the incomplete paper last week, then the final edit today, with additional information provided by faculty member Dan, who used it in his CAMS course. Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum, or something like that. Last Sat. I visited my dear friend and former neighbor who lives one or two S&A developments over from me now. An "Iowa fan" car was parked in her driveway, which was weird, since she's Canadian. Turns out her spouse was out of town leaving her carless and neighbors who were on vacation in Iowa lent her their car. A couple days ago, I was chatting with coworker Matt on the VoiceThread hot team about his vacation to Iowa and about living in small towns vs. cities. During this conversation, the faculty member on the hot team arrived off the elevator and I said, "Oh, hi, Dan." I'd met him several times at parties with CAMS/history profs, because the friend I visited on the weekend is married to a CAMS prof. Now, why do I mention the car? It was Matt, whose office is across from mine, who lent the car to my friend while he vacationed to Iowa, because he lives right across the street from my friend. Talk about small towns.
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