Monday, Oct. 4

Good Day,

First, I want to apologize for my long and unintended absence from The Office. It appears that the Daily Messages from last Wednesday and Friday didn't publish. Apparently the autopublish function works best if you plug in dates for the current year and not corresponding dates in 2011.


I've republished the message from Wednesday, which had general info and advice about writing the reflective memos for each module. There's nothing in that post that pertains critically to the work you're doing right now on Module 4, but it's worth taking a look at sometime this week before you start working on your reflective memo for Mod. 4. Friday's post was just a quick reminder to contact your partners if you need to alter the peer review schedule, so I won't republish that.

Due this week
Remember that I have adjusted the original schedule for Module 4 so that we'd have a bit more time for both a peer review and an optional instructor review. That means, for this week you'll need to:

• ASAP - Wrap up your peer review ASAP (you should have returned response to your partners last night or today at the latest)
• By Wed., Oct. 6 - Submit your revised draft for optional instructor review by 11:59 p.m. (do not submit a draft to me if you did not participate in peer review and revise your draft based on peer review)
• By Sun., Oct. 10 - Submit your final Module 4 documents (ppt and reflection) for grading
• And read Chapters 8 and 9 in Designing Visual Language.

So I should have your materials from Module 3 tomorrow and will have some general comments about the materials on Wednesday.

Advice/comments on Module 4

Today, I want to offer a few comments about the PPT project that you’re working on.

A few things to keep in mind re: your ppt slides:

• First, the choices you make in constructing your slides should be simple and based on a clear understanding of good document design.  This should show up both in the slides themselves, but also in your Reflection, which should describe your choices in detail using language from the textbook.

• Second, it is imperative that you select what you believe to be the most important information from the chapter.  Your slides cannot be successful if the readers do not get the most important information simply and concisely.  You should understand the chapter well enough to select the most appropriate information to present.

• Third, the reader must be able to understand the chapter completely in a brief slide show.  So, not only do you need to select the most important information, but you also need to convey the depth of the chapter, as well.

• Fourth, your slides need to be clean and legible, which means that you should not use an overabundance of text.  Keep you bullet points to a minimum and try to avoid big blocks of text (which is good format in any case).

• Finally, try to incorporate examples if possible and where necessary so that your readers can get a more complete understanding of the chapter.

Simple, eh? I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.

Have a great day!

Julie