Immersion, Spring Semester -- Weeks 13 & 14

Me as T/TAC staff persona Marlena Driver

Final Thoughts

Can this really be my final blog entry for the Immersion program? I can't believe how much the team accomplished in a little over 9 months and how much I have learned. We had our final presentation for the client Monday night. In attendance were GMU administrators, Immersion alums, and local ID professionals. The client and T/TAC staff at the presentation were impressed with our final result. I presented on the results of our usability testing of the Virtual Collaboration Center prototype. I also provided a demonstration of the current iteration of the prototype and gave a persona "walk-through" of the Training Collaboratory.

Looking back, I can't believe how much I have been exposed to during my experience in Immersion. Camtasia, wikis, blogs, Facebook, etc. All this exposure to Web 2.0 has even impacted my leisure time activities. Instead of taking a break by plopping down in front of the TV for 15 minutes, I play around in Facebook. I am willing to try emerging technologies whereas before I would have preferred to lurk. Heck, I even have a virtual resume and portfolio. I now have friends I never met face-to-face, and the number of my virtual friends keeps growing.

Above all, I had some things confirmed - I am a process person at heart and Instructional Design is all about process. When I first started grad school 1 1/2 years ago, I was completely scared not knowing where this would take me, but I am feeling confident about my career prospects for the first time in years. I have also realized that I need to keep my mental muscles fit by exercising them regularly through education. Does that mean a Ph.D. is in order? Stay tuned ...

Site Design

So right now, we are working on the visual design of the VCC. I recently found this rap, which very eloquently outlines what we are dealing with right now. Can I just say how much I love this guy? He has a whole series of these vids!

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!

Immersion, Spring Semester -- Week 9

I'm having a love affair with this wiki

Okay, so that doesn't roll off the tongue like, "I'm having a love affair with this ice cream sandwich", but it portrays the same sentiment. I first tried using a wiki in my Intro to Instructional Design class. It was a self-imposed experiment so I could learn more about Web 2.0 tools. Since then, I have used wikis as deliverables for class assignments, and a wiki serves as an integral part of communication and information sharing for our Immersion team. We have even proposed using a variety of wikis as a part of the Virtual Collaboration Center (VCC). I built out the team's experimental dekiwiki to demonstrate the suggested 2 prong approach for participant information gathering in the training tools development area of the VCC. We showed this to the client, and he really took a shine to the idea, thinking that it would not only be a useful way to design the VCC, but if enough components were built out before the end of the semester, then the Assistive Technology Priority Project members could use these tools now rather than 2-3 years from now. I am also using a wiki for my Educational Research project. In my pilot study, the subjects (my family members ... so much for limiting bias, huh?), are testing out a wiki for the first time. I am getting excited phone calls from my mother as she familiarizes herself with the features and sees the potential of what a wiki can provide to its participants. I didn't realize I would be delivering the gospel of the wiki ...

Immersion, Spring Semester -- Week 3

Agendas, agendas … too many agendas!

So this week we met with our client as a follow-up to the Needs Analysis conducted in the Fall. We discussed our results and suggestions for next steps. We weren’t exactly on the same page. For what the team would like to get out of the Immersion program (our agenda), we were focusing on a bottom up approach by looking at specific collaborative and development tools that we now know will work for our target audience. By the end of the Spring semester we will determine how to allow access to those tools as a one-stop shop, and we will build supports around those tools. Our client is looking for a top down approach and wants us to focus on designing an interface taking into consideration all of the potentials that could be offered in the Virtual Collaboration Center, and not focusing solely on what we know will work for the audience now. Then the client revealed that he needs this information as ammunition to present to his funders so he can get more money for tech support. Ah, ha … agenda revealed! Maybe we should have started our first conversation with – what do you want and what is the agenda behind it? I guess it is no surprise that it is money and probably flat out asking for his agenda would be too brazen, but at least it would have eliminated all the wheel spinning the team has endured trying to reconcile what we want to achieve in our graduate experience and what the client’s motivation is with this project.

In the meantime, we did have a great session looking at our Myers Briggs scores. As usual, I am an INFJ. But it was interesting to see how the rest of our team falls within the MB and it was good to listen to the suggestions for team interaction and problem solving.

Immersion -- Week 13

Movin' in the wrong direction?

So this week we spent some time trying to connect to the Movi server that T/TAC just purchased that will make desktop web/video conferencing a reality for T/TAC staff. We spent a couple hours trying different configurations, changing multiple settings (firewalls, ActiveX controls) to get it to work, but no dice. It appears that GMU may have put the server behind a firewall, which may take a few days (or more due to the holiday) to correct. So, we will try to test Movi sometime after the break, but all this makes me think that the T/TAC audience will have to go through this to make the Virtual Collaboration Center work.

In the meantime, I spent some time on Gliffy creating a graphical representation of GMU's Video conferencing capabilities. It was super easy to create the graphical representation using Gliffy and it was fun -- yes, I actually had fun doing my homework!

Immersion -- Week 12

Here is your fuchsia ...

We had an interesting meeting on Monday with our client. We broached the idea of conducting some parallel data gathering to check out assumptions about the Virtual Collaboration Center. In our interviews with the target audience, we began to see some serious disparities between what the client wants and what is truly needed for this audience. The client didn't agree. So we will give him the fuchsia he knows the audience needs. As a result, the iTeam received a crash course in video conferencing hardware and software. I now know more than I thought I ever would about video conferencing. I am responsible for creating a graphical representation of the GMU and T/TAC video conferencing set up -- if it is a decent representation, I may post it here in the coming weeks.

On a positive note, the folks at Springdoo came through and fixed my test Springcaster -- special thanks to Tom and all the folks in Springdoo's Tech Support! Now it can be tested for the PCD project I am working on. Here is the Springcaster -- take a moment to try it out and send me a response!

You too, can Springdoo

Immersion -- Week 9

The "virtues" of virtual communication

As I mentioned before, in order to consider what is possible in this "virtual collaboration center" for T/TAC Online, the design team is going to play with the various virtual communication tools that are available at T/TAC. So we dove right in and decided to conduct a virtual meeting using Adobe Connect. I set up my computer with the various downloads, tested the audio and played with uploading documents for participants to view and sharing my desktop. We started the meeting. Some had our webcams working, which initially seemed pretty cool. Okay, so the video representation of ourselves was about the size of my thumbtip, but at least we could see ourselves, right? And maybe the audio was a bit garbled too. So we decided to turn off our webcams. That seemed to improve the audio quality. I was facilitating the meeting and initially things seemed to go fairly smoothly. Then one person couldn't hear me. We logged off and logged back onto the session. Okay, now we could hear each other again. I shared my desktop so the group could edit a document together. There was such a delay between what I could see on my screen versus what the group could view through the Connect meeting that feedback on what I was trying to edit on my screen was tedious at best. Then someone in the group had to leave. The moment she logged off the session, another team member's audio went out. By the end of the session, I was about to throw my laptop out the window.

So the supposed "virtues" of virtual communication? Right now I don't see any. Perhaps I will have a different opinion if you ask me the same question a week from now. This experience makes me think of the article on Donald Norman's analysis of the failures of the personal computer that we discussed in my performance centered design class. This experience also clarifies exactly how much work we will have to put in as a team to adequately explore all of the limitations of these virtual tools in order to effectively design this virtual collaboration center.