End of the Week

Today, I was pretty much wrapping up everything I had been working on this week. I may have finished the bulk of the NECC presentation yesterday, but today I made some last minute edits with Idit. I also reformatted the slides that Leticia and Aixsha had been working on, cleaning up the text and making hyperlinks, as well as continuing to make slides for their presentation. I also reviewed my WCTC game analysis with Jadry and Rim, going through the discrepancies and coming to a resolution. I also emailed with one of the WCTC students, gathering information about his game and becoming good cyber buddies with him. Shannon, Leslie and I also discussed our future plans for MyHlife - Leslie and I are going to go through the course with the Rethinkers in New Orleans, learning to program our own game and coming up with ideas. We hit a snare when we realized that flash was not available to download, but hopefully we will work that out in the next few days. My last hour, I sat with Leticia and Aixsha and worked over the slides with them.

Finished! The end of an Era!

We finished the NECC presentation!!!!!!! A very, very long day but after countless edits, animations, revisions, decisions, reviews, and mini presentations we have completed Idit's presentation and were able to present it to her in it's entirety so that she can start practicing her talk while using it. The presentation includes the best animation I've ever done with a powerpoint, and I learned how to make hyperlinks, which will be very useful in presentations in the future. Emily, Jadry, Leslie and I work very well together, and are a very efficient team - which is good, since I'm sure we'll be working on many more projects this summer together. 

NECC Presentation

I spent my entire day today on Idit's presentation for NECC next week. With the help of Jadry, Emily and now Leslie, we were able to complete the outline (which is currently taped up on the wall on six giant post-it-note-papers) for the presentation as well as collected all the images we would be needed. The first part of the day was focused on design and layout - specifically animation and color scheme. In the mid-afternoon we presented what we had so far to Idit, who had some suggestions and corrections regarding images and content. We then spent the rest of the day adding her corrections and laying out the game plan for tomorrow. Our deadline is Friday at the latest, but we hope to complete it by the end of the day tomorrow. 

WCTC Game Analysis and NECC Presentation

Today was also a very busy day! I spent more than four hours reviewing 4 different games from the WCTC wiki - "Truth and Consequences: Mario 1.v Edition," "Adventure West Virginia," "Brokeville," and a planet narrative game. I played each game many times over, making sure to take all the different paths I could and see all the possible outcomes and screens. After reviewing each game, I used the same code that I learned yesterday to code the games in excel, sending all four analysis to Rebecca. I also contacted the boys whose game I played yesterday (but could not beat!) in hopes that they will be able to answer some questions crucial to our research and provide us with screenshots of game screens we were not able to get to. 

I also started working on a new project today! - Idit's powerpoint presentation for the NECC conference in Houston next Wednesday. Jadry, Emily and I sat down to discuss her outline (an impressive 13 pages) for the presentation, and then, taking a cue from the students' whose work we have been reviewing, we set out to make a paper prototype of the presentation. My main job today was to design the slide background, and with input from Jadry and Emily, I was able to create an original design for Idit's presentation. We will continue to work on this presentation all day tomorrow, and I will be the one to compile all of the images and text that Jadry and Emily are working on into my computer. 

Zeitgest Game Review

A very busy day today! For the first 2 hours, I edited intern bios as well as downloaded the software used to manipulate the photos. I collected, cropped and resized the images, and prepared them to be launched on the website. 

For the larger part of my day I spent playing Zeitgeist and learning how to code it. First, I was given an almost hour long tutorial on how to code a game using excel, similar to the wiki analysis I did last week. Of course, in order to properly complete the analysis, I had to navigate my way through the game, making sure I saw all screens possible and played out all possible scenarios. The game proved to be pretty difficult - made more so by the fact that if you failed or died, you had to go back to the first level, as opposed to the level you were actually on. It was very frustrating! I actually ran out of time before I could beat the game, so I ended up coding the game to the best of my ability in the excel spreadsheet. Emily, Jadry and Rim were also playing and coding, and at the end of the day, we all sat down with Rebecca to compare our answers and to discuss discrepancies in our answers and to come up with new categories and coding questions as needed. I helped Rebecca determine the need for at least three new coding categories, helping to facilitate the gaming research process. 

Intern Bios

Today I worked on writing intern bios for all the interns - a slow process when I don't know interns. I did have a lot of fun googling people and seeing what kind of information I could come up with. I also spent some time setting up an MSN messenger account to help connect with other interns and Shannon better. Towards the end of the day, I began working with Jadry and Leslie to gather screen shots of students' games to be posted on the website. 

FCH Wiki Analysis and Research

Today I was able to finish the FCH wiki analysis that I began yesterday - it came to 4-typed pages, but looked shorter when I formatted it to fit on my projects page. As I continued my analysis, I began to see that FCH was a very unique Globaloria participant: there were much fewer students and they did not utilize their wiki nearly as much as many of the other schools. Today's analysis was mainly focused on their blog, and how there was a feeling of community and support found in the blog, and that was not found on the wiki. I also started working on Rebecca's wiki research project, spending about 40 minutes learning the different code that is used to determine how the wiki was used by the students and how active they were with it. We discovered during our phone conversation that many students were uploading .SWF files or .FLA files but were not putting them on their profile or projects page - leading us to create a new column in the excel spreadsheet and a new code to determine how many documents were uploaded by the students. Originally, we only looked at the files we found on their pages, but particularly in the FCH students, who were more disorganized than other participants, we found that the students were more likely to upload and NOT post, than to do both. 

As a side note, I spent a few minutes today creating a profile on takingitglobal.com. We had talked about this website at our internship orientation, and I was eager to spread my internet horizons and learn more about how community is established via the internet. 

FCH Wiki Analysis

The first three hours of my day were spent exploring FCH's wiki, blogs and games. At first I had a difficult time navigating through the different pages, but I took copious notes while I tried their game, read their comments and blog posts, and surfed the different pages their wiki had to offer. What was interesting about the Globaloria Program at FCH was that all of the students (all female) collaborated together to make one game. I thought this unique collaborative process was inspiring - but what was even more inspiring was what I discovered about the students themselves. After looking through their blogger profiles, I discovered that one of the 17 year old students was a mother, which led me to believe that I was looking at the work of the group of underprivileged female students I had heard about on my first day. Playing their game I discovered that they learned much more than just balancing a budget - they learned to cooperate courteously with one another to create something; learned to be respectful of others ideas and thoughts through the blog and blog comments. It was very cool to see the work of the WWWF making a fundamental difference in a community. 

The second part of the day I began to write my formal analysis of the FCH blog, which despite its inspirational appeal, still suffers from technical difficulties. I also spent a good deal of time creating and formatting my projects page, where I hope to post the complete final analysis tomorrow!

First Day!

Hello! I'm very excited to be working with the World Wide Workshop Foundation this summer! Well, today I spent a good deal of time working on my profile page, where I played around with wiki formatting - and I found a way to get rid of those annoying boxes that sometimes show up on your profile. The dotted boxes are the result of preprogrammed wiki formatting, and are triggered when you hit the space bar before you type something. In order to avoid the boxes, and thus maintain the artistic flow of your profile page, you can add ": " before your text. 

For example, if I wanted to indent the sentence "I have two cats" I would type this code into the edit box:

: I have two cats

which appears as

I have two cats

For larger indentations, add extra ":", leaving a space only after the last one

::::: I have two cats

which appears as

I have two cats

This way, you can create intricate and unique patterns with your text (like I did on my profile page!) without disturbing the rest of your profile. 

The latter part of the day was focused on developing a Facebook group for Globaloria. Jadry and I worked side by side to create a coherent and inviting group so that Globaloria users with Facebook can connect to one another through Facebook, and not just with their own wikis. We spent a lot of time researching the different networks, writing descriptions for each network as well as gathering information to be used in the group description. We also spent a lot of time searching for images and videos, as well as struggling with Facebook applications, as we hoped we could find one that would allow us to upload games directly to our profile pages, and thus give Globaloria participants a chance to share their games via their Facebook pages. We were not successful in finding a working flash program today, but will continue to try in the coming days. We also collaborated on the design of the group - deciding to include general descriptions of the three main networks - MyGlife, MySlife, and MyHlife - under group description as well as creating discussion threads for each of them, allowing all members of the group to participate in discussions and view information on the different networks, even if they do not belong to that particular network. The group is a work in a progress, but already looks good!