Day 3: Setting the Organizational Stage

Presentation Storyboarding gave a good foundation for understanding storyboards. Although screen storyboards can be more collaborative and allow for duplication, paper storyboards have the flexibility of being able to record them anywhere the urge strikes. It is important to remember that storyboards are the intermediate stage of planning a presentation. The beginning stage was the vague ideas in your head. The final stage includes all of the details for an end result. However, when creating the storyboard, it is perfectly acceptable to use placeholders for images/video and only write the beginning of lines of text. The idea is to provide you with a visual road map to your final presentation.

Defining Tools for a New Learning Space: Writing and Reading Class Blogs by Sarah Hurlburt made some interesting points about class blogs versus real-world blogs. In a real-world blog, students are motivated by their own interests. In a class blog, students view the entries as assignments. This makes the class blog an “unnatural” social networking application. Students may experience anxiety when discussing areas in which they are not as proficient. They are very cognizant of personal exposure. In order to be successful, class blogs must take into account the need of the students to bring some personal authority to the subject, must provide external accessibility to information as needed, and allow for the personal exposure that a student may feel. Personalization of the blog will allow the student to create a safe zone where comments are viewed as peripherals. This may minimize the personal exposure felt.

One potential success of class blogs may be felt in writing. The author pointed out that the opportunity to read other students’ entries and the comments (especially of the instructor) gives the students a chance to view other work and judge for themselves what is successful. I think this supports a constructivist view of learning. Students analyze, compare their own work, and create their own definitions of “successful”. In my writing class, I frequently give students the opportunity to see student samples. I know myself that I feel better equipped to complete an assignment when I first have the opportunity to see what a finished product looks like. It allows me to create my own parameters of what my product should look like.