Sunday, April 20, 2008

Immersion, Spring Semester -- Weeks 11 & 12

Semantics



This week we met with our client to review where we are with VCC concept mapping. You should see how many pages of newsprint are required to accommodate our lovely stickies ... so many in fact, we covered the client's office with them! In our review, we struggled a bit communicating the various labels we created for each user intention in the system. Not only that, but as we reviewed the area where Best Practices would be housed for review and participant contribution, it was clear the team and our client had different definitions of Best Practices. The team referred to Best Practices as it relates to the functionality of the VCC (Best Practices for Training Development Tools, Best Practices for Instructional Design of Online Training) and not necessarily related to the development of training content as it relates to our audience's main interest -- Assistive Technology. The funny thing was, after the client meeting when the team began to revise the concept mapping based on this new information, we started tripping over our labels as well. One discussion started like this - "Well, I think that (pointing to one of our lovely stickies) is a definition, not a description." Seriously, I really don't see the difference, but to make everyone happy, we coined a new word - defiscription. Lesson learned - you need to gain an intimate understanding of the client's vocabulary. We realized that we needed to get some of our audience members in pronto to review the concept mapping and to get a better handle on the best way to present information in our VCC prototype.

Nearing the end now -- only a few more weeks to go!

1 comment:

Jeannie said...

Hang in there. You're doing great!!

Talk to you soon. :D