Adobe Flash Weather Forecast Presentation

It seems like there are an awful lot of different elements included in the flash presentation assignment including moving weather icons and working buttons (a very scary prospect). I am not sure how tidy my timeline will look at the end once I have combined all of these elements of the presentation.

Here is a Flash rain tutorial I found which I think is pretty good but I am not sure if it would be achievable for this assignment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6A9GIbRicw&feature=player_detailpage

Here is a link to a travel map animation. Although it is not exactly what we are trying to create the steps used might provide some useful information for us when we are creating interactive maps.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DJB8LHjQCg

The final tutorial I want to mention is for creating clouds in Flash. There is music playing in the background instead of an instructional voiceover, but if you pause the video you will be able to see the different steps the animator is carrying out to perform each action. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5VEMqHInI4

On a separate note some of the related links on these YouTube pages are quite interesting too but I didn’t want to overload this page with too many distractions from the actual project.

Captivate Interview Presentation

Once I have my interview report completed I will then begin on my Captivate Presentation. I am doing it in this order because the written report will provide me with a summary of information which is suitable for the Captivate presentation. As a technology Captivate seems more appealing than Adobe Flash for a start. The preset special effects make it a lot more fun to work with. I am going to approach the Captivate presentation as if it is a web design project as I think the principles of web design will apply directly to this online presentation as well.  I still haven’t set down a final interface design. From all the web design projects this semester I should have a pretty good idea of what works and what does not. The Captivate presentation is a great idea as it highlights and subsequently showcases what we have all learned from both our interviews and the preparation process. I think the quality of the presentation’s content is really just as important if not more important than the actual presentation interface design. There are a series of YouTube tutorials on various aspects of Captivate which are available at www.lynda.com and also on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAb1uW5UWvQ. I think I will be making a lot of use of these over the next week or so. It is also interesting to see how these tutorials use screen casting and the format of their instructions. Some food for e-learning thought! 

Interview Report

I started writing my interview report yesterday and of course it is taking much longer than I had anticipated already. That is one thing I have learned in this course; never underestimate an assignment. I have planned the report to follow the question sequence used in my interview, discussing educational background first for example. Mr. Boyce provided me with detailed information on the tools the company uses, how the team collaborates virtually and also on projects the company has worked on over the years. I was surprised to see that the company has worked on a vast amount of projects with the University of Limerick and even the student guide book for the current academic year. The report format seems to be the exact same as the other reports we have completed this year and I am no longer daunted by the thought of dealing with topics such as methodology. This has all come with practise and it is clear to see the value of report writing assignments as they would be quite common in any career related to this course whether that is in e-learning or technical writing.  

TW5212 Interview

I am delighted that we have an interview assignment this semester. It is far removed from most of our assignments where we are stuck facing a computer screen. It has taken me two weeks to finally secure an interviewee. Initially I started emailing different web design companies in the vicinity of Limerick, but I soon gave up on this when I did not receive one single response. Eventually after I started calling all of the companies on my list, Ray Boyce of Alphaset Ltd. Graphic Design in Limerick said that he would be more than happy to be interviewed for the project. I was quite surprised by this as the hour long interview did not seem to phase him. I gave Mr. Boyce a brief overview of my course, the module and what was entailed in the project. Mr. Boyce got back to me later the same day with a convenient time and date for the interview.

 When I was compiling my list of interview questions I realised that this interview would be like my own private careers seminar and I would be able to find out everything I wanted about the industry and the role of a graphic designer in specific. I treated preparing for the interview as if I was preparing for a job interview myself. Preparation really is the key and I realised that I would need to know as much as possible about the company, its projects and the role of each staff member in order to come across in a professional manner.  I think this experience will most certainly benefit me when it comes time for job interviews. 

The interview ran smoothly which I think was partly due to my thorough preparation. This also enabled me to ask questions off the cuff as the opportunity arose and provided a more interesting experience for us both. I found that I preferred when the interview questions became more spontaneous as the interview started to feel more like a normal conversation. Mr. Boyce provided me with lots of detailed, focused answers and I feel I was definitely lucky in this respect. The interview felt quite relaxed and afterwards we continued to chat about the course and what type of job I was hoping to have after the summer. I had read a lot of interview guidelines and tips and watched a few videos on YouTube which also contributed to me being sufficiently prepared for the interview.

Here are links to a couple of YouTube videos that I found particularly useful:

An interview with a technical writer:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbphUOvvIFE

Informational Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB2sA0vXk7E

Ennis Hub Public Space Interactions

I took part in an Ennis Hub public space interaction on Saturday the 2^nd of April. Taking part in this type of activity and carrying out a survey in a public space required me to make use of the interview skills that I had learned in Majella’s TW5212 module. This experience was also perfectly timed as my interview for Majella’s TW5212 module took place later that same day. This practise had settled me into asking questions and approaching people I did not know and made me feel much more comfortable and relaxed when it came to my interview later that day.  The Ennis Hub Plan will provide me with the opportunity to produce practical, useful and informative projects which will benefit people who live in, work in or use Ennis. The specific projects should hopefully be tied down this week so then we can all start researching and deciding who is doing what projects etc. Looking forward to it!

Ennis Hub World Café

A few people from our class attended an Ennis Hub Plan preparation meeting in UL on the 15^th of March where we were given more information about the background and purpose of the Ennis Hub Plan. We were also introduced to other partners of the project such as the Clare Active Citizenship Network and also Members of Ennis Town Council and other UL students who were interested in the project. In this meeting we were also introduced to the concept of world café sessions which were to be used to engage citizens and residents in the process and give them a voice for the future of Ennis.

After this meeting I contacted Chris McInerney to ask if I could participate in one of the upcoming world café sessions. On Friday the 1^st of April I attended a world café in the Ennis town council buildings. During the world café meeting I was involved in setting up the space and facilitating the world café participants as well as participating in the world café myself. All of the suggestions which had been made were then displayed on the walls afterwards to give people the chance to question or comment on any of the responses.

Apart from the tasks of creating an Ennis Hub Plan website and improving the current Practicum website other possible tasks for our summer projects were also suggested at the session. All of the results of the world café meeting and public space meetings need to be compiled into a report by June at the latest for distribution among partners and world café participants. Chris also suggested the possibility of creating an e-learning course to educate people on the findings from these initial interactions. 

Ennis Hub Website

When our team was starting this section of the project we had another face-to-face group meeting where we outlined the exact pages we would include in our website and the graphics, content and interactive features that we would include. We had to take the needs of the different website users into consideration when we were making these decisions and try to see things from their point of view, rather than from our view as designers. We set provisional deadlines once again as we had done with the proposal and worked away individually.

Susan and I were designated the role of content developers and Shane would then edit and upload this content after the initial write up. Avril was our graphic designer and Michael was once again our technical expert. Michael introduced the team to a web development tool called Joomla which he was familiar with and thought would be much easier to use than Adobe Dreamweaver. I think Michael’s previous experience with Joomla was partly the reason that he found it so easy to use. Even by the end of the project I was still learning about new features whenever I logged on to the site. Of course this was all part of the learning experience and you never know when these tools could come in useful. Even though each team member had specific roles to fulfil we all seemed to overlap into each others’ sections of the project and learned from one another’s expertise in different areas. For example Shane, Susan and I went to Ennis to take photographs which Avril then edited and manipulated for use in the website. After Susan and I had written our content we went through it with Shane and edited it. Michael also drew up Joomla tutorials for us, which meant that we were also able to upload some content and get used to editing the site and using the back end of Joomla.  I think without Michael’s knowledge of Joomla the project would have taken up way more of our time and would not have been nearly as successful.