We intended to spend the time teaching each other the material, but found instead that the material demanded a new look at our organization. We also needed to reflect on storyboard presentation feedback and discuss divisions of labor. The two sections came to feel a bit forced. Instead, we want to have much of the information in the first section in a Network Module. The first section, if it still exists, can be devoted to a discussion of what the Internet is in general, an introduction into the modules which explain how they work. This intro can talk about Arpanet, and basic Internet history and an explanation of what it is to be a distributed system and why they are important.
Other modules we want to have include one on Issues of the Internet (security, etc.), and something which could be presented as an Advanced Topics Module, which would very briefly touch on and give references for more information on other applications such as FTP. Alternately, these topics could be presented in the glossary only, rather than in the tour at all. We're really divided on the issue of whether the glossary (FIND mode) should have anything that's not in the tour--is it a quick Internet reference on its own, or is it a support for the tour? Clearly, all of these ideas are leading us to a much larger project than we can handle. We'll e-mail Adam and ask him about his priorities.
Several classmates, including the one Classical High School student in the class, had issues with our use of the college example. Is it relevant to 9th graders? And more importantly, will it motivate anyone at all?? We were informed that perhaps the answer is no. So what can we use? The suggestion was made that students will only care if our theme is practical--related to such everyday necessities as finding a job or obtaining food, etc. We thought about revolving it all around the theme of finding a job, but we ran into tons of political issues there. What sort of job should we use? We're not sure we can make it realistic and interesting if we don't make it specific, but won't we exclude large portions of students regardless of which job we pick? Is there any job that's relevant to all? We're stumped, but will try to schedule a meeting with Adam's students for early next week to get direct feedback.
Last, we discussed how to divide up the project, as it is clearly inefficient for us all to try to do everything. In order to have a consistent voice, one of us will do the writing. Another will script. It would be useful to have one of us do graphics, but none of us were comfortable with that sole responsibility, so the other two of us will be divided between graphics, editing, and documentation. We will work together closely so that the graphics are also unified. We set a meeting for this coming Sunday to organize the keywords into topics so the writing can be started, and to discuss what graphics we want for each and how to make each as interactive as possible so that the graphics and the scripting can also be started.
We got feedback from Adam saying that history, issues of the internet, and advanced topics should all be secondary. He still wants just the main issues: email, www, newsgroups, and ISPs. We're having trouble finding anything on newsgroups, but Adam is trying to find info for us, and we're still looking as well.