Project Wrap-Up

Posted on August 2, 2009

Well, we’re done.  The project will live on with other students in the College of Communications and Information, but Charlene and I have to move on to other other things.  It’s a relief to let it go, but we’ve both really enjoyed working on this project so it’s kind of sad too.

We made a lot of progress this semester, although we didn’t get nearly as far as we’d originally hoped.  We learned that it’s important to really define your scope at the beginning of a project – we originally defined things in pretty general terms, and we had to revise that part of our plan several times as we realized we couldn’t write a completely comprehensive curriculum and teach it all in one summer semester.  Our biggest obstacle besides the time constraint was working with all of our sponsors and communicating with them effectively.  We found it tough to communicate with Tallahassee Housing Authority, but it turned out that they just needed our project plan so they’d have a clear understanding of what it is we’re trying to do, so it shouldn’t be a problem for future students working on this project.

The project took longer than we expected, and we had to split it up into modules that need to be covered in future semesters.  This is mainly due to the fact that developing a curriculum is so multifaceted – there is the information itself, plus activities geared to the specific students, plus handouts and other materials.  It all needed to be developed from scratch, and that takes a lot of time.  All of that has to be done before a module can be taught, and the entire process has to be repeated for every module.  We learned to multiply our estimate by 3 or 4, or to be extremely careful in recognizing all the steps of the process and counting them all.

There are all kinds of skills we’ve learned in the IT major that helped us with this project.  Since we were writing what is essentially an online textbook, we took a lot from the Communication for Information Professionals course.  I found myself being careful to word things in a way that students would understand and thinking extensively about appropriate analogies for people who don’t have experience with computers.  The skills we learned in Information Organization & Communication, Information Science, and Information Architecture all helped as we were organizing content within the Digital Literacy Project Wiki.

I’m really glad I took this course – I am taking from it exactly what I was hoping: a system for organizing all the aspects of a project before I begin, so I can stay on top of things and budget my time realistically.  I’ll be going right into the workforce, and I really feel more prepared as a result of this class.  Later I’ll be juggling full time work with grad school, so I’ll really need to be able to stay organized in order to keep work at work and still find time for school.

Even though the project’s over for me, I’m excited to see where it goes in future semesters.  There are already some good students lined up to take it over.  Their work will continue to be available at the Digital Literacy Wiki, and they should have blogs available for us to track their progress.