Week IX: Bottlenecks

After we tried the Wix.com, we felt getting on an express line.No need to worry about design,visual effect, social control, etc but in this way, we found the bottlenecks, with no surprise,which would potentially prevent us to being successful. Here is my thought.

First,Donggil gave us a question, "Who is your SME?" We never really thought about this question, though we talked about this at the beginning of the project and we all agreed that we ourselves would be the SME or we can ask alumni of IST to be the SME but Donggil said they just experienced their time in IST with the career plan but what we should do is to follow a general process,so we still need to find the real "authority" in our content.We had two options, one is to ask IU/SoE career development centre but we tried this already but received mere ordinary information and they claimed themselves as "providing career service for undergraduates mostly." Another option is to do some literature review. Though it sounds funny, but it would be the only solution. Dear, Hoosier Buddy, what do you think?

Next, Donggil also criticize our draft website as "feeling nothing to learn". We have not put some draft content in the website but it sees no potential to beat other unsuccessful career websites I found on the Internet,no attraction, no clue of sequencing, lack of motivation. Though we had a huge plan but the website is too big a information container which is wildly beyond our expectation. Seemingly, little did we prepared for this website. We have to either enrich our content or narrow down the scope to make the website look neither crowded nor empty.

Thirdly the pre-made website is hard to make it flexible as we wished to design some pop-up windows to give scaffolding for first time users, no, not here.But we have no way back since we would spend too much time on learning html codes if we chose to start from a blank page.

Anyway, it is not the time for frustration. Guess we will be fine after further discussion and literature review(I thought we should do it before but it is still cool to do it now.)

Week VIII: Know your topic, and keep it

As the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates said, "Know yourself", a good instructional designer should also know your audience, your environment and the most important of which is to know your topic.

People wouldn't speak without a topic in most cases but just sometimes forget the topic during the middle of speaking. It is just not good for instructional design as well since your topic could be your basic story line, your target and where you enter the instruction process and exit.Once you get in the topic, you'd better stick to it.

This is like what I felt when I reviewed my infographic work. When I was designing the "College entrance test for Chinese" I wasn't so clear about my topic at the beginning, so I spent lots of time to explorer the facts, digits and dreamt to create a greatest picture ever being. But, in the end, I was exhausted and the outcome was not that ideal. Why?

First,the topic should be as small as possible as I still put up a huge topic for a mere graphic. I found a lot of digits about enrollment points,admission rate of something but they don't match up well with each other in a single picture. The surplus information wouldn't bring you as a designer the feel of fulfillment but the opposite. You would feel like being chasing by a hound when you catch up with more than enough information.

Second,once you got the topic(which should be do-able at first),come to the desk and sit down, say to yourself,"I won't run away this time." None of the topic would save the disturbance, believe me. You may want to change the topic all the time but the audience don't expect to see all of them. They have somewhat pragmatic nature, which would be translated as critical, outcome-oriented, or anything you just don't like but hey,no one would pay for your changeable mind, your discarded work or your abandoned dreams. So, it is good to keep it up and fight to the end. Don't run away from a potential master piece easily.

Third,know your topic means know yourself.Warning: You must make sure you are not Leonardo Da Vinci's reincarnation. Ok, proceed. I have to concede masters are around us but, you should know Leonardo and his alike were not born to be great painters.You need the patience to make yourself to be a great figure. So, now, please work on this tiny,little, humble topic for a while.(BTW, Leonardo couldn't speak English, right? And is not an ISTer?Great!)What I learnt from the infographic work is, you should know the limitation of your ability.Don't ask yourself what you can't do even after you spend time to learn. It is not bad to hand in a smaller, shallower work, never mind but once you decide to have a huge one, please remember, you should also make it as good, or it would leave worse impression to your audience.

Last but not least, check the details carefully. color-match,font,spelling. In a word,if you want to be perfect, please define the perfection, remember it and have fun!

Hope I will be fine in the Job aid work! 

Week VII: Storytelling and Job Aid

In this class, we have been introduced to two new concepts "storytelling" and "Job Aid".Both of the concepts have clear literal meaning, but how about their implication in instructional design?
First, story telling contains some major elements,"what is the story"and"the way of telling".However, it cares more about the latter, which means the way of telling can change more of the effect of the story telling. Usually, a less formal, humorous way of story telling is generally welcomed and for different age group, different way should be used accordingly. For example, a Shakespeare story can be displayed with animated figure for the characters in the story and they might look smaller and cuter while the narration and lines can be more spoken.
We received a on class task to use ipad to "sell" our project with proper storytelling.Since not all of us had much trust to use some fancy video, BGM to design the performance in such short 30 minutes,we used the ipad in the least modern way, a writing pad for the narrator but the rest part was performed by body language. The truth was, the decision was wise because the technology was really time consuming and less reliable. Though you have a good story, fanciness still can not assure you a good performance.A good story telling still needs a suitable way of telling rather than a fancy way.

The second part of the class, we were introduced to "Job Aid".Actually, from my perspective, "job aid" is a broad category.Anything can be a job aid, depending on how would you use of it.But usually, for the sake of convenience,one piece of the mixture of graphic and text is the major type of job aid we are talking about.Then, we can't avoid the discussion of its overlapping with "infographic" As far as I know, infographic is a way of display, but job aid is kind of function-oriented calling. So I believe a job aid can be an infographic, and something else while infographic can be used as a job aid or for other purpose.
Hopefully I can find my interested job aid as soon as possible.

Week VI: Smaller Scope and the evaluation

Unusual Week.
Only 3hrs blended lesson but tons of group meetings. Week VI is the one we use to check whether we are on the right track...or not. For R541, we as a group interviewed Dr.Haynes and two second-year master students and started to write our literal project proposal not just the fuzzy ideas.

Now we have defined our project to be a "Process Performance" issued informational project, which is not a typical instructional project.We can not operate assessment for learners.Our objective is to clarify the career plan process and difficulties for the audience, give proper intervention or recommendation and help them to maximum their performance in the end, to get more satisfactory in pursuing their goals(further study or to find a job). Isn't that clear or not?

However the major bottleneck for our team is the scope. As Dr. G mentioned several times, she doesn't want to see 3 separated projects from our team but a whole project. We are still exploring to collaborate different part of information. Maybe we would not instruct the audience with the extreme details but give out a well-organized web which could connect each parts very tightly.

Though we can not assess our audiences in terms of their achievement or what they have learnt because it is just too personal to make standards for it, we still want to evaluate how much do they believe the adventure on our website helps their career plan.Do they feel more clear about their career plan or just more confused(We don't hope so)? You can call it "service satisfactory evaluation" if you think so. To achieve this goal, we must tailor the information for as individual need as possible . We would operate more interviews with alumini of IST masters to hear their voice and give more personalized solutions.

Week V: Retrospect of the infographic work

5 weeks are gone.1/3 of the semester is gone.I don't want to make people sad but time is flying!

Last week, after 8 hours editing of my infographic, I suddenly realize what I should do here in IST. I could not call myself a tech-person, who can not even use photoshop, illustrator to express my idea.

Yes, I change my topic twice and stopped at a most familiar with but never touched in the latest 10 years-- National College Entrance Examination of China. I was a candidate of that test 10 years ago. I spent the most unforgettable 2 days and a half there(now the test is only for 2 days)that changed my life totally.I decided on this topic finally around 9 pm Sunday night. I turned to PS first but I quitted because the layers drove me crazy, then I turned to use microsoft word, the text editing software. When I started to work on the topic, I found I had been back to the day as early as I was learning Office 97.It was until 3:30 that I realized I should leave the uncompleted "graphic" to the morning...

Several things about the drawing. 1)You need more than enough information before you started 2)Use the font which looks great in most styles. 3)Don't make the canvas too big to fill up 4)Check your typos(I found some typos after the submission and the submission channel was closed.)

I can not share the infographic here because it does not look gorgeous in a glance(too crowded and too stunning(black & Red))-view and it is in .pdf format(I would find the solution).

Think about the lecture in class. I agree with some of others'  opinions as we should narrow down our "helping IST M students with career planning" to several do-able columns or we may not be able to finish before May.

I like the motivation work. My group was doing the animation. I should say we are doing great with the xtranormal.com cuties!Hey, here comes Week 6 and Lunar New Year(Chinese New Year),Happy new year,everyone!

Week IV: Reflection on R541 learning: Hands on Infographic

For this week's lecture, the class reviewed our personal infographic storyboard. I felt excited to share the story with and from peers. However, some fellow-up questions came along.

1) Who is your stakeholder?
For my topic, I can't find any primary stakeholder, who would care about the length of the airlines? Who would have a chance to explorer those long and tiring airlines? Then, who would be interested and really care the infographic? After sharing my ideas with my peers, Dr.G and Jean, they gave me such opinions: first, to recall the motivation of choosing this topic;second, think over who would be stakeholders; third, it is fine to keep it personal but convert part of its function to public purpose; fourth,change a topic if you feel hard to fulfill the above things...

Actually I'm thinking about a new topic. I would change to "how much the eurail global pass save your expense on european train tickets?" Since I have used the eurail pass and experienced a lot of its process and policy, I thought it would be a good idea.But other considerations would stop me doing so as it may lead to a complicated graphic, and I have limits of using some technology...Or I would find a third topic before it is too late.

2)How to draw the infographic?
I surfed the website Dr. G provided us in the class, then I would say though I found them too simple to fulfill some desired effects, I would have to use them because last night,I found Photoshop CS6 was just too gigantic a monster to conquer it in 3 days and make my job done...I would give up and turn to the magic gadgets for infographic newbies.And I find powerpoint is even easier to use than the adobe things to make clip art...

I would properly mixed the use of tools to realize the topic I can come up with. Let's wait and see.

Something about Presentation

Sorry about the late post since I didn't look through the to do list thoroughly, I missed the time to submit this post.

This semester I started with a new team and a new topic, then everything rolls back to the very beginning, rationale,objectives(maybe not necessary). Website has different function to face to face instruction as the learning process to me is all about skipping rather than focusing. The traditional learning would always have one focus, the teacher's presentation but the websites flatten the focus and make it a larger view.

For instance, in the past, I would remember clearly what the teacher's said about what to do in a week since my concentration worked with the only focus but now the written list sometimes caused left-overs because my concentration can not adapt to that properly yet, always skipped some important information.

Since the websites can not talk to you, and they are not lineal, nor concentration-oriented, we need to make full use of the other functions to fulfill better presentation.

Our major project in this semester is "helping IST Master Students' Career Plan".It is a practical topic for most of us in the R541 classroom. Our audience are very limited to IST current master students and those who are interested in IST. They are professional, down-to-earth and curious about the future. So we have a thousand ways to ruin the topic but only several correct ways to present it well. I should say, it is hard.

We need the following to make better presentation to our rare but precise stake holders:
1. Clear but useful message.
   Though we don't regard us as information provider, we still have to provide some information to the visitors of the website.They don't want to see tedious facts but useful message they can find within several seconds. e.g. "Welcome to IST master student career plan. Career plan is important for all of us.You can see the success of IST students start from good career plan."is a very horrible example that make people want to skip. We provided too much known information but almost zero new message.It is better with"Hello!In the career plan website, you will see..."

2. Authority
   It is not news that people doubt the validity of the information on websites.But we still need the grasp the authority sense in our website. It is not easy to keep authority but we would strive to keep the data collection authentically,exclude corrupted interview records and always use validated facts. Then we won't lose our authority in the presentation phase. In a word, presentation is all about convincing people with your authority in one field.Don't ever lose it!

3. Resources we can provide
   We would use much connection to the resources in the project and it is one of our major purposes. The more we can provide, the more attraction people would have from us.People would listen to you and believe in you, when you really have something good to say.

4. Sincerity
    I should say it is the basic ethic of presentation. If we don't have much good things to say in the presentation, it is not fine but people could understand our limitation, hopefully. But once you cheated and caught in your presentation, you would feel even worse when everyone leaves you and you would face with various punishment based on how serious the situation is. Presentation can be selling, publicizing or something else but not swindling.

5.All about skills
   Yes, when we fulfilled all the obligation above, the rest parts are all about skills.Skills are so broad to talk about here.Using color, Layout, Headlines, Banners, Video, Music,Picture cropping, Font, Bold, underlines, hyperlink, flash...

Few of us are born to be excellent presenter.Learning and practice can make us as good in the end!
   

My two infographic topics

I had several ideas about infographic topics, and I will share two of them with R541 classmates. They can be primary or even naive, but please forgive they are merely ideas.

1) 10 longest air line routes:

   I had this idea to find out longest air line routes, for long, as early as when I saw the movie"Inception" around two years ago, in which movie the hero would make use of one of the longest air line routes, Sydney to LA, which is almost 10 hrs, to steal the dream of a rich person...
   I found some digits on Wikipedia but it shows the longest non-stop route currently is the one between Singapore and Houston(The former longest was that between Singapore and New Jersey)operated by Singapore Airline.Additionally, I found none of prior example by google searching, so I would put it at my first topic.

2) International Student Health Insurance@IU (using recommended insurance or find another<e.g. ISO's>)

    For many international students like me, buying health insurance is compulsory but it takes time to decide to choose recommended insurance products or to buy some outside products. The consideration can be the insurance fee,coverage, security, each time payment and overall ranking, etc.The recommended insurance is more expensive but saves time to think about it. The outside ones would cost you more on each time you see a doctor, but if you stay healthy, you can save half of the insurance fee at least.That would be amazing to visualize these facts.

My example of Infographic and principles of infographic

I found this infographic via google research with the key words"religious infographic" at http://visual.ly/one-nation-under-god.

A female bartender(representing the atheists ) and six customers of different costume(the structure of which looks similar to that of "the Last Supper" by Leonardo Da Vinci)

It is the most illustrative and interesting infographic I have ever seen because the message it used is very straight--costume and color. In this way, I don't have to explain much about the content of the infographic but my understanding of the essential elements or the principle of a good infographic.

1) Must be supported by facts and digits. To build up a infographic, you need a idea first and then the facts and digits, or you can not call it a infographic.
2) Exaggeration of the color and other visual element to some extent. In this example, proportion makes more sense than the exact amount, so their columns' colors are darker than that of the exact amount to get more impression. Since we know ordinary religious people would not dress like that, the designer's using clergy who do dress like that would be kind of exaggeration(and putting them in a same bar and sitting shoulder by shoulder is even more surrealistic...)
3) Using abstract items, or even icon. To avoid too complicated structure for viewers to follow, the designer should simplified the elements used in an infographic. Here, we can see the designer didn't use much facial information(except the bartender's exotic Asian face) which is less relative to religious affiliation but the costume information that is tightly connected to one's belief.
4) Cutting off surplus groups. An infographic can not contain all the groups, so the designer should decide which groups are more representative. Here we didn't any minor schools of Christianity or other religious groups as they are maybe less representative, less known and just have smaller communities. 

Repost:R541 Weekly Posting: Week 1(Jan.7th-11th)

I have to change to this blogger since the former one would mislead dearest Hoosier Buddy with non-English instruction... Anyway, this one is for everyone in R541 community!

Original Address: http://guomintian1984.blogspot.com/2013/01/r541-weekly-posting-week-1jan7th-11th.html

Hello everyone in R541:

     Good to see you here! I created this blog 5 years ago but I only posted once previously. Sounds like a long time ago, doesn't it? Since the middle of 2009, most of google products have been blocked in mainland China...so blogspot.com looks like a long lost friend to me, which was given the name by myself(?), briefly translated as "Settled, Curious, Patient & Extensive"（in Chinese: Anming Qiuzhi, Jieji Bowen）. 
      
      Well, I need to say something about myself. My name is Mintian Guo, a second-semester master student of IST@IU. I am from Shanghai, China, the city of which is extremely populous(6,500 km square for 18 million residents+7-8 million long-term residential migrant people, among which 170 thousand are foreigners). For example, my town alone is one-third of the size of Bloomington but there are as many as 3 times people living there... 
       
       Because of the family-planning policy of China(not att's family plan but a neutral expression of "birth control"), I am the only child of the family. Since childhood, my parents have been giving me most care, funding as well as restriction, which made me quite different from those who grew up in a more competitive and liberal context which made me feel lonely most of the time when I needed some partner(s).
  
       I graduated from East China Normal University with a BA degree in Teaching Chinese as a Second/Foreign Language, from which I learnt much about linguistics(language learning and acquizition, pedagogy) western and Chinese Culture, Contemporary/Ancient Chinese Literature, English/American Literature... what remain in my short lists of interests. My minor major was applied psychology, so I always hold the passion for that field.

       During the 5 years between my graduation from ECNU and arrival at IU, I was a high school English teacher. The reason why I chose that job was very complicated and since I already quit that one, I think I don't have to explain it any more:). But I would appreciate my former employer who gave me a chance to be an exchange teacher in Denmark for 10 weeks, which experience I would remember forever as I have great time in that kingdom of fairy tale , as well as many other European countries where I traveled during the Danish festival.

        Everything so far is positive to me in IU. I love IU, B-town, school of Education, IST, professors and classmates. I have almost zero cultural shock here. Last semester I took R511, R521 and Y515(Inquiry Methodology by Dr. Phil Carspecken, abstractive, challenging but good for your view of the world). In this semester I will be in R541, R561, R620 &R685.

        Hope everyone can enjoy our learning "journey"(quoted from Dr.Haynes)