COURSE OVERVIEW
Online Interaction Design: Interaction, Authorship and Dissemination on the Internet
Assistant Professor Matthew Peterson with Graduate Teaching Assistant Jay Vaglio
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:15 – 12:05pm
GD 492 | Spring 2011 | 17 Juniors & Seniors | Elective Course | Small Classroom Setting
Presented Material, Facilitated In-Class Activity
Class Website
Reflection
The task of explaining sitemaps proved relativel easily because of its visual structure. By establishing a sitemap of a current site, the students recognized the ability to visualize opportunities for refinement and/or restructuring of the site’s content. The more challenging aspect of this presentation and subsequent activity was articulating engaging visitors in new ways with content.
Due to the quick nature of the presentation, roughly 10 minutes to set the stage for the activity, it was only necessary to touch on a few key components and then let the students begin working in small groups. The small groups were challenged to sketch/develop a new sitemap and overall site organization for a very simple pattern website.
I realized from the experience that I didn’t need as many examples as I provided but instead examples that they related to. Providing easily recognizable content, students do not have to work to decode the context of the examples I provide.
Presentation
In-Class Activity
I used this site as the website students would use to quickly ideate how the site could organize the patterns in a new and engaging way. Currently, the site presents the patterns in an apparent random fashion, six at a time, for a total 27 pages—searching for a new or desired pattern is painful. The pattern site has an opportunity to engage the viewer in any number of ways resulting in new patterns to be revealed for the visitor. The reason I chose this site is because it was highly constrained allowing students to focus heavily on new ways the numerous patterns could be presented, searched, and browsed by visitors {NOTE: Since the activity, the site has added an advertisement to the site…lame}