Well here we are again. Classes have started and the smell of academia is in the air. It's taken me awhile to begin contributing to this blog again but its been a busy year thus far. I don't think its so much that the professors are handing out a lot of assignments, its more like I'm scaling an endless mountain of readings.
I began meeting with Carrie a week or so ago about the projec
t and it would seem that the project is not as far along as we had expected it would be by this time, but that is just part of the learning experience.I left off in the Spring with a rough storyline for the project. Carrie has said to me that she feels like she has a better understanding of where we're going to head with the project no
w. She has shown me rough sketches of the storyboard and its all very exciting.We also had a meeting with Dr. Chai last week to discuss where the project is going. We discussed how the module would potentially work; The main component is an interactive concept map. We want the general public to be interested by the project and encourage them to learn more. The best way to present important information, is in a way that people can understand and find it interesting without the complicated and often confusing jargon. From the beginning I know they've been thinking about how we can make it so the viewer can CHOOSE their own story. To be more clear, we want them to be able to direct their own learning experience. We want the viewer (in whatever age group, education level or field of interest that may be) to be able to say "I'm interested in this aspect of climate change but not this" or "I want to know about specifically about circulation or fish kills" and be able extract an understandable, non-threatening explanation of it. Then, if the person wants to know more, they can click and find out more about the mechanics behind it. It was also suggested that we add in a glossary with diagrams that can be as in depth as the reader wants it to be.
On a side note, we have a few conferences coming up which is pretty exciting. The University of Maine is hosting a climate change conference called CC21 that we're submitting a poster and an abstract for. Carrie has the backbone for the poster prepared from her symposium last year, we just have to tweak it a little bit. Carrie just finish writing an abstract and now my job is to look over it and help her crunch it from 130 words to 100 words without losing any of the meaning.
Aside from this project I've got my capstone to consider this semester. I'm taking my capstone proposal class. I need to be thinking about what I want to do for it. I've been thinking about trying to incorporate this project into my capstone if there is a way to do it. I was thinking that maybe when it comes time to test out the module, I can be using the testing period and the module in my capstone thesis. We'll see. I need to discuss it with my professor to see if it will count because I'm pretty sure the capstone is suppose to be library based, lab based or... field based? So I guess it depends on your interpretation of field based. It seems like a lot of people on campus are not entirely sure what the parameters are for the capstone because it can be so broad in the SMS field. Which can be a curse or a blessing depending on the way you look at it.
My next step is the start expanding on each individual idea from the concept map, adding dialogue, explanations,videos, terms, photos, diagrams, whatever I can think of. Also, to start formulating a running glossary.
At the same time, Carrie has started a new blog for us to work on as well as our personal blogs. Carrie described it as being "a global conversation" of whats going on. The web page is http://arabianseaclimate.blogspot.com/. Before I leave today I need to decide which concept I want to work on next so we can get started on it asap.
Hopefully this semester I'm going to get to meet Annette and Joaquim and possibly a few others of the scientists which is really cool.
Its going to be an exciting and eventful semester I think!
