Course Reflection

My first impressions of this course, were, unfortunately, nothing special. I think the introduction week was pretty slow and I can't say I learnt very much. I do have a lot of experience with blogging so I wasn't necessarily the target audience for that component of the course. In fact, I wouldn't say that this blogging exercise has been especially fruitful for me.

The other components, however, have been very useful. I'm thinking particularly about the individual work we did making and showing our own posters and abstracts. Although I've had to produce them both before in other contexts this was an opportunity for me to really sit down and think about what I was doing and why, and to discuss with others and see what they'd done.

The abstract work I found really quite difficult. Having to work with so few words seemed to make every single one much more significant. Getting feedback from my peers about my draft was very important. Mind you, I think the most useful aspect of that exercise was just getting the abstract to a draft state and thinking to myself that it would have to be at least good enough to show to other people without being too embarrassing. The actual feedback I received, while useful, only really served to highlight the points that I already felt needed more attention. Having a kind of template format turned out to be very useful in providing some kind of structure and a benchmark against which to test my own words. This generic structure came from reading other example abstracts and trying to identify what works and what why, which we conducted during one of the Friday afternoon seminars.

A general point I'd make was that the Thursday lectures seemed less valuable than our sessions on Friday, which were also more sociable and hence made the group feel more cohesive.

I was fairly pleased with my poster, though seeing other people's work made me think about things I'd do differently if I had another chance. One comment I received was that mine looked kind of bare. Perhaps this wasn't such a big deal with an A3 sized image, but I think it would be pronounced on A1. This is another interesting point, that looking at the poster on screen or on an A4 sheet of paper is very different to seeing it on a projector or big piece of paper. This is one of the things I learnt from the course, to check what the final piece will look like. I think a technique I might use for the future is to print out a draft as a series of 8 A4 pages, then hang them on the wall so that I can see how the overall layout and text size seems for real. The other thing to check in advance is colour - I noticed that on the TV screen in the lab the colours seemed washed out in comparison to my poster or monitor on my desk. I think Geraldine mentioned this as Powerpoint has no colour correction facilities. Other than that I thought it made actually a pretty good tool once I'd learnt how to use it like that. Initially I made several flat-coloured objects to act as borders for my text, which I created as separate text box objects, then linked the two together into a single group. After a while I realised that I could just add text to the first object and not have to worry about managing it as an additional step, so that's clearly a practical skill that I learnt. When it came to actually displaying the poster and talking about it I felt very comfortable. There was a lot of material I'd intentionally left out of the poster because I didn't want to distract or confuse the readers, just draw them in with a high-level overview of what I'd done and why. I'm happy with this technique as I think it functions as a lure, a hook to get them to read the paper. This is certainly what happened to me when I saw other people's posters at the HTC Postgrad Workshop last year. After skimming over the posters I spent a long time talking to their authors about the specific details I was interested in.

Having written the title, abstract and created a poster, the presentation almost wrote itself. I think on reflection working over the same material in a variety of media gave me a much better mastery of expressing the content in different ways. So much so that I feel I could now present my work in some other media - clearly an interactive medium would work well for my work as it's essentially an interactive project. In fact that would probably be the ideal way to present the work at a conference, with links to the paper for download, but me standing next to a live demo similarly to how I would with my poster. It's worth reflecting further on what this would mean though. When I gave my presentation I was able to spend more time on the motivation behind the project, which might become lost behind the application per se if it were just standing there for people to play with. The novelty of using the demo might be more interesting than thinking about the larger issues of accessibility. I might deal with this in the way computer games often do, by using cutscenes or dialogue to set the scene: "imagine what it'd be like to be blind, what you'd miss out on." In fact a nice way to represent this would be to allow people to play with Second Life as they normally would, or have a fly-though of someone playing it, but then fade out the visuals until only blackness remains. After a moment of shock and confusion fade up the audio / haptic cues. All the time a voiceover could explain what was happening.

I think that's a nice little thought experiment: what have I learnt that I could apply to other media? My description of an interactive presentation is perhaps a good indication of how successful this course has been for me personally.