more boolean and Flash!

I met with Kevin today, briefly, to get some feedback on  Boolean Slots.  He had a lot of good ideas:

1. Make the “start” button disappear after it’s clicked on each machine.
2. Remove some of the “reminder” slides.
3. Show dollar signs on score cards.
4. He made new score cards, so I could redo those slides. (This required more work in Photoshop to create versions of the coins with just one object.)
5. Change the dollar coin slides to be centered.
6. Add as much interactivity as possible.
a. Instead of telling folks about and/or/not in the beginning, use a matching game.
b. Instead of reminding folks of their score at the end, use matching games.

We’d also like to add interactivity throughout the game, so I need to think about that some. I’d also  like to add a reflective slide at the end.

So, I was able to make corrections 1-6 this evening. I’ll see what I can do about the other two tomorrow (I’m taking a day of PTO to get a lot done on this project).

Again, the major problem is the sheer number of slides.  Things that should take all of 30 seconds to fix can spin out of control to take an hour.  I’m still not entirely pleased with the quizzing slides, so I need to work on those tomorrow.

Kevin and I also talked about the other games.  The only way to really make them like we envisioned is to use Flash.  Kevin doesn’t have time to do so yet, and I have a lot of hours of practicum to work on, so he uninstalled it from his computer and I am going to see what I can learn and implement tomorrow and for the rest of the practicum.

Installing Flash was the biggest headache and the worst part is that I don’t know what was causing the problem.  I had to restart my computer at least five times and for some reason the final one took.  Several websites on Flash recommended taking the 8 tutorials that come with the program, so I’ll probably do that in preparation for the other games.  Hopefully we’ll see some progress tomorrow!

Truncation Feud

truncation

Originally uploaded by lmpressl.

Tonight I spent three and a half hours with the other two games. One is a narrowing game, and one is a take on the Family Feud to teach truncation principles.

I spent a fair amount of time in Photoshop, manipulating images to make backgrounds for the games. After that, I tried to get a skeleton for the game, or at least enough to have an idea for how the game could flow.

The truncation game is particularly challenging because I’d like to have multiple “right” answers that have different outcomes based on the text the player enters. Captivate does not seem to have that ability. I tried the “short answer” question slide feature, but that is not particularly well suited for the game (if we’re trying to keep the spirit of Family Feud), and even though I knew the right answers, I could never get the game to say I had entered them correctly. I’m going to sit on this over night and think about what to do a little bit more.

The narrowing game isn’t much better at this point. Originally Susan, Kevin, and I had discussed replicating the “ice breaker” we use in LIB100, letting users “slide” cards around on the board to show the topic from narrow to broad or vice versa. Again, Captivate doesn’t appear to let you have that much control. I think you actually have to use Flash to get that type of functionality. Instead, I’m trying to make due with the “matching” question slide, which again, isn’t exactly right.

So, I’m going to let those percolate over night, and hopefully figure out something by tomorrow after work!

last of boolean slots for the weekend

This weekend I spent an hour making corrections to the Boolean Slots game based on my notes from earlier in the day and I ran a few of the previews to make sure I corrected the major issues I had found.  It’s in pretty good draft 2 format.  I output it as a flash file and will let Susan and Kevin know it’s ready for review.

I’d still like to add reviews to help people realize the important information as well as add a few leading questions (perhaps in these reviews).  I also need to get with Kevin to talk about the scorecards.

previewing boolean slots

I spent an hour and fifteen minutes this morning going through all the different iterations of the Boolean Slots game in “preview” mode.  I found a dependency error and took a lot of notes on minor changes that need to be made to improve the overall quality of the game.  I also figured out (finally!) how to get the “makes sense” button to work early in the game.  It turns out that instead of making the button point to “continue” it has to specifically point to the next slide in the game.  Perhaps “continue” allows the time to continue running on the slide?

I’m set up to get down to business this evening, after our 4^th Thanksgiving.  I have a long list of improvements to make!

big-time boolean slots

Today I was able to do a lot with Boolean Slots!  Specifically:

1. I worked in Photoshop to coordinate the images that we’re using in place of text.  I wanted to make them the same size, remove shadows, and remove the background.  It was a good learning experience.  I spent quite a while trying to get the JPG files to work, only to learn that JPG files apparently don’t allow you to remove white space.  GIF files do.  So, that was useful, as well as learning how to delete backgrounds in Photoshop.  I used these skills to make “smaller” and “larger” versions of the book, deacon, cupola, basketball, football, and lacrosse stick.  This maintains the same look throughout the game.

2. After updating the images, I went in and replaced them where needed, and made sure the updated slides still showed elements appearing at the correct time.  This went much more quickly than yesterday, in large part because I had practice.

3. I looked at each text slide to see where I could reduce the number of words displayed.  This was based on my research on online pedagogy a few days ago.  When I made changes, I copied the slide and pasted it in the places where the same changes needed to be made.  This was certainly faster than making the same change over and over again, but it disrupted the dependencies.  After doing this I had to go through and reset most of the dependencies dealing with “choose a machine.”  To make sure everything is corrected, I’m going to do a “preview” tomorrow.  I can note problems then and correct them easily and quickly.

4. Also based on the online pedagogy research, I went through and added instant messaging information for the Z. Smith Reynolds library reference desk to every page of the game, and I added a slide at the end of the game that has reference contact information via email, IM, and phone, in case players have questions after it’s over.  

5. At this point the draft was starting to look about right, but timing was still off.  So, I went through and adjusted timing, and matched timing across similar slides.  

6.  Everything I’m doing for the Boolean Slots game seems like it’s taking me much longer than it should.  I think this is because the game has grown to over 100 slides.  When one thing has to be updated, it has to be updated across many slides, and it takes a long time to do that type of work.  Keyboard shortcuts help, but it still takes a long time.  I will do whatever I can to keep the next game to be much shorter!

7. I took a few moments to show the draft to my mother in law, a professor at WFU, and she recommended making the sections that have to be read last longer and add in more reviews.  This evening I’ve added more time to the “reading” slides.  Reviews will come tomorrow. 

Things left to do:

• Run preview to make sure changes didn’t disrupt dependencies.
• Add reviews to help people realize the important information.
• Make buttons work.
• Add leading questions.
• Scorecards: get squared version from Kevin and make info easier to digest.

working with images

I spent two hours last night, and an hour this morning, fixing up some image work in Boolean Slots.  Kevin had suggested, and I’ve read in a number of articles, that when it’s possible it’s best to use images instead of words.  It’s also best to remove as many words as possible and make each “page” scannable.  So, I reduced the sizes of the Boolean Slots images and replaced theme anywhere the word was mentioned.  For example, instead of saying “Basketball” I used this:.

However, I didn’t realize that making this change was impacting the timing of the slides until I ran a preview after altering all 100+ slides. 

This meant that I had to go through and make sure each image showed up at the right time on each slide.  Strangely, there wasn’t a pattern to the incorrect timing, either. 

I still have larger timing issues to work on, but for now, everything appears in the right order, there is much less text, and generally the “pages” are pretty scannable. 

Now I’d like to find a way to get rid of the white space around the images and sub that version in.  It’d look much more professional and crisper.

My big take-away lesson: make a few changes and *then* do a preview to see exactly what you’re changing!

storyboarding

I spent a few hours yesterday evening working on storyboards for both the narrowing game and what I’m calling the “truncation feud.” I’ll add photos when I upload them.

It was good practice, inspired by much of my reading earlier in the day, particularly in Susan’s book.  Hopefully I can whip up something for next week!

reading

In the car on the way to Hertford, NC, in the post-Thanksgiving lunch stupor, and before bed, I was able to get in four hours of reading.   My biggest accomplishment was scanning and reading sections from Susan Smith’s Web-Based Instruction: A Guide for Libraries 2^nd addition.  I also read through several articles I printed out before leaving town.

I feel like this has been enough to become familiar with some of what is being said about online pedagogy.  I’ll talk with Susan next week to see if she’s accomplished this course goal. 

Susan’s book was useful.  It provided a really good context for the project, and I wished I had read it when I got it.  Some chapters are a bit techyier than my role in the project (chapter 4), but others are extremely useful such as chapter 5, on design and interface, chapter 6, on multimedia, and on chapter 7, on interactivity.  There’s a discussion of teamwork on page 51 that helped me think about my role in this project, and the role I’d like to have eventually in a professional position.  My coursework has prepared me to participate as an instructional designer and as a content specialist.  These are areas of interest for me, and combined with technology, are real professional interests.

The general take-away points for Boolean Slots that it’s good that we’re focusing on interactivity and a focus on concepts.  I think we should probably make the objectives clearer in the beginning and review the outcomes at the end. I should also look through the tutorial and remove as much text as possible and work to improve the scannability.  I’d also like to add the ability to email or IM the reference librarians during or after the tutorial. 

Several of the articles that I printed were not applicable after all.  It turns out that much of what is written about online pedagogy focuses on online classes, and not on learning objects. 

Articles I read:

The Pedagogy of On-Line Learning: A Report from the University of the Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute by Bernard Scott

To Boldly GLO-Towards the Next Generation of Learning Objects Panel—submission to eLearn 2004 (mostly a bibliography, but good information, too)

Constructivism and Emerging Online Learning Pedagogy: A Discussion for Formal to Acknowledge and Promote the Informal  by Shalni Gulati

Online Pedagogy–Online/On-ground: What’s the Same 

There were several themes that arose from these articles.  One was that online learning is non-linear and self-directed.  Our game is a little this way, but not really.  The user can choose the way they play the game, but there is a definite start, finish, and a limited number of paths between.  I also feel like our game doesn’t meet the nature of “non-linear,” but I think that might be okay.  Boolean Slots is a short module, designed to help students learn one specific concept, and in such a limited role, I don’t know that it needs to be presented in a fancier way.

Most of the articles focused on the importance of discussion, too.  Discussion was described as a way to meet the need for online collaboration and informal learning.  Since our learning objects are being designed to be asynchronous objects to be used as a very small part of a class, there isn’t really a good way to add conversation or discussion to the modules.  I think the best approach we perhaps could take is to add an opportunity for reflection.  Perhaps instead of a specific statement, it could be phrased as a leading question.  This is something to think about in the context of the Boolean Slots game we’ve worked on as well as the games we haven’t worked on yet. 

Reuse was mentioned again and again.  Boolean Slots was designed to be used in a number of contexts at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, but not outside of our university.  It has our branding all over it.  Should we remove this identifying information from the slides in order to make the games universally useful?  If we are interested in sharing the games with other universities, we probably need to look into quality assurance standards (and I need to know this anyway) so that we can meet the level of expectation.

Next Actions:

• Add slide: Why is Boolean searching useful?
• Add email or IM to Boolean Slots game.
• Change some specific statement slides to be phrased as a leading question.
• Look into quality assurance standards.

Meeting with Kevin & Boolean Slots Updates

I met with Kevin on Tuesday to go over the updates I made the night before. He had a number of good suggestions including working on timing for the slides that are text heavy and working on the images. We think that using images for words, whenever possible, makes sense in light of recent research suggesting students tend towards visual learners today.

Tonight I streamlined the background image. This meant I had to use Photoshop to modify the background, I had to figure out how to move images to the “back” of the slide in Captivate, and I had to manipulate about a third of the slides.

It was productive, and I think a good exercise.

I’m going out of town for the next two days, so I’m going to spend this time focusing on the practicum goal of becoming familiar with online pedagogy. I have a number of articles that I’ll be taking with me, and I’ll post a report of my reading when I get back online.

working on the draft

I spent 5 hours tonight working on the suggestions that came out of our meeting earlier today. I found clipart images for football, basketball, and a lacrosse stick. I fixed up the slots to return better results for the “Wake Forest ACC Sports” that we discussed earlier today and added a bunch of explanatory slides along the way.

It’s really tedious work! Every element on every slide has to have the right timing or nothing works. I’ve gotten most of the elements to at least show up at the right time, but I still need to make sure they last on the screen long enough to be read. I’m also not totally sure the wording is good. I’m used to working in committee, and determining wording for myself seems a little too independent compared to most library work.

I think I was pretty successful at meeting most of our goals from earlier today. Tomorrow I’m going to meet with Kevin, so perhaps I can get more feedback and I can make more progress tomorrow night.