Design by design

The focus of this week's lesson is appealing to me. My background in website project management gave me experience working with designers and information architects on how to best display and present the content, both textual and visual. But as a pm, I rarely created the design elements myself. I have always wished I possessed artistic ability - I have such admiration for people who can create something so beautiful, impactful, meaningful where there once was nothing. What I am enjoying about this part of the course is that it is helping to at least supply us with a fundamental knowledge of successful eLearning design. So while I still may not be able to create a site design worthy of a Parsons or RISD degree, I feel that the basics that are there will best showcase the content that is at the heart of my project. The website analysis is a cool assignment - there is such a spectrum of design and subject matter in the list of sites we are critiquing. I really enjoy looking objectively at websites and critiquing strengths and weaknesses. I must say, however, that I feel slightly uncomfortable critiquing former eDI edweb projects.

The webinar is going pretty well. Some personal crises this week have delayed my ability to get as much accomplished as I had hoped by this time. But I have time to get caught up after this coming weekend. Working with Mindy and Ann is still very much a joy, and I still feel that our personalities are well suited to collaboration.

My EdWeb is probably the area where I feel I am the most behind. I know roughly what I want to do, but putting it concretely to paper and flushing out the concept in the proposal document are eluding me at this point. Back to what I said above about my lack of artistic ability, in my mind I envision an edweb project chock full of animation/cartoon characters and audio components, not to mention games, activities, and a fully interactive experience. But I have to find a way to deliver my content without the elements I can't provide. I know we will gain a knowledge of basic flash, and photoshop in this class - maybe I can find a web drawing workshop along the way so that I can at least build in some visual components as well. Because this edweb is for a third grade audience, I want it to look like it was intended for that age group, not just a two-dimensional, text driven program.