It is now all finished. The project is complete, even after some major setbacks. The paper that accompanies the project is done. And the presentation was this morning.
Done, done and done. I still have one more class before I can add more letters after my name, but the big hurdle is finished.
One of the tidbits of information I included in my paper and in the presentation was my list of lessons learned. I want to pass these along to anyone who might need them:
- Back up your data. Often. In multiple locations. If you are lucky, you will consider this to be a waste of time.
- Get out for a walk. Stretch. Taking breaks occasionally will actually save you time in the long run (as long as they are breaks from the work and not an end to the work).
- Have reasonable expectations. More than likely any one project or thesis will not revolutionize your field of study. Add a good solid contribution to the corpus of knowledge and you will be doing an important job.
- When designing instructional resources, think long and hard about your target learner group and your content/learning objectives before picking a medium of delivery. Its fun to work on something with a lot of techno-cool bells and whistles because, to be honest, we (instructional designers) tend to be somewhat of a geekish lot. But the bells and whistles might not be the best way to deliver the instruction to the learners. Make the method and medium of delivery as simple as possible and not one bit more complex than is absolutely necessary! I found that I ended up creating the resource in a much simpler and straight-forward manner than I originally planned because I was bedazzled by the delivery method (”ooooh - a cool and sexy looking website with lots of embedded Flash multimedia that show off what a slick designer I am“). Consequently I ended up spending a lot of time exploring quite a few paths that didn’t go where I needed them to.
I pass these words of wisdom on to you that you don’t need to repeat my mistakes. Find some original mistakes instead! ;^)
Yet somehow, I don’t feel like everything is done. I’ve spent a lot of time putting this project together, and I’m not ready to let it die. One of the ideas that occurred to me as I was finishing up the editing was that this project would have made a dandy CD or podcast. An overwhelming amount of the video footage is me talking. If I’m going to be revising/tweaking the project, that’s how I’ll do it.
At the last minute, I also thought it would be a good idea to have some links to appropriate resource materials for anyone who is interested. To that end, I’ve set up a Digital Audio Guide wiki. It is quite sparse right now, but I will be adding to it quickly since I put the address for it in the credits of my DVD. If you are interested, you can find it at digitalaudioguide.wikispaces.com. If you can think of anything I should add, give me some comments right here or send me an e-mail at robwall@gmail.com