We are almost done with the main activities of weeks 16&17 and are close to creating a final storyboard (see below). As expected, not all tasks could be completed but everybody should review/update our activity planner and try to complete as much as possible.
Storyboard
- Patrick, John and David have created a storyboard and added it to the design section of our website. This has been very useful as everybody has emphasized other areas/topics from our previous contributions and discussions.
- We have reviewed the individual storyboards and discussed the different approaches and/or commented in our blogs. John has created a screencast to comment on David’s and Patrick’s storyboard (currently not accessible because it is set to ‘private’).
- As a team we will try to finalize our joint storyboard by tomorrow Tuesday, 4th of June.
- David’s storyboard serves as a basic template and everybody should directly add from all of our contributions (storyboards, case studies, design patterns, etc.) as discussed in our calls and blogs. The template is embedded in the story board page in the design section of our webpage (I recommend to stick to formats – colours, shapes, etc. – provided by the original OU template to avoid confusion)
Activities planner
- We have agreed to continue tracking our activities in our activity planner. I have updated it with the activities for week 18&19. Everybody to regularly check on progress and note what has been done/still needs to be done.
- Keep in mind that the activity planner will be a useful resource for TMA03 and will also be assessed as part of our webpage!
- The activity planner can now be easily accessed via link in the top-left ‘Navigation’ section
Team webpage
We have started tidying up our webpage and agreed to further clean up where possible: in each section, the original instruction text should be replaced by project relevant information (short introductions for each section) and links to resources (pages, documents) so that any visitor can gain a quick overview of the content. Responsibilities for each section are tracked in our activities planner.
Reflection on collaboration
Tutor group forum
We continue to update the team and raise questions in the weekly tutor forum to keep a ‘history’ of our project which will be helpful when writing our design narratives. This is also very helpful for team members who could not participate for a period of team and will also be very useful for writing our design narratives.
Weekly calls
We have again used the synchronous session to coordinate and discussing in more detail questions and ideas which have come up during the week. The personal talk is also important to share general experiences and encourage each other to keep up with the fast pace of the project.
Blogs
We continue to use our blogs for personal reflection on the project and specific activities. We also comment on each others blog entries (either in the blog directly or at the weekly calls). But it is difficult to keep track of the different blogs and we found it would have been worthwhile to aggregate entries in a central place. For the rest of the project we added the links to the team website so they can all be easily found by anyone visiting our site..
Commenting on other groups’ projects
We continue to find it difficult to provide valid comments to other groups’ projects. Although we fully appreciate the value of cross-team peer reviewing and try to visit the websites frequently, it is often necessary to understand the entire project to comment on current activities and resources. This is also a reason why I made this summary a bit longer, I hope it is useful.
We concluded that, at least early in block 3, more guidance and formalized activities might have been beneficial here. Similarly we found that only now, after two thirds into block 3 we begin to fully grasp some of the underlying objectives of it.
Based on this experience we are planning to provide sufficient guidance – scaffolding – in the learning design of our own storytelling course.
Next call: Friday 8:00 AM BST (and Saturday 8:00 AM BST if needed)