February 26, 2015 (Thursday)

Time: 10am-8:30pm (10.5)
Hours completed (IST): 55/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 70/150

I observed Michael cover two English BIs for Tammy and also finished a usability study of the library tutorial modules that was assigned to us during a meeting of IST.

Michael has an approach that is closer to my own (up-tempo and full of bad jokes) which was good to observe as it made me think about my presentations. He did a great job filling in for another subject area though there were some odd instances that we discussed between the first and second session. He did not cover synonyms, Boolean operators, or truncation because the faculty in Communications have continually asked him not to; however, the faculty in English have always felt this to be an aspect of the BI session that is very important for their students. When we discussed this he took my comments with the same weight as a peer, which was a good feeling. The second session went much like the first, though he did add in the extra material.

The usability study was a lot of work. As the only person at the IST meeting with a Windows 8 computer, I was asked to review modules 1-5 with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. In other words, I had to prepare fifteen reports. Because I had the least experience with these modules I decided to put myself in the head of a student viewing these for the first time. I also decided that, as the least experienced person in the group, I would focus most of my attention of technical problems and inconsistencies rather than content construction. Further, as the report also wanted to measure the amount of time it takes to complete each module, I did each test twice: once just to complete it and then again to really analyze and issue I came across during the first pass.

This experience made me think a lot about both content creation and the amount of work that goes into further refining and updating content. Unlike books, you cannot publish and forget resources like learning modules.

Below are a few examples of work: