And so CEP817 is done, but this site lives on. Hopefully years from now my kid will visit it and think, “Gee, I always thought dad was dumb, but look at all this great stuff he did”. Other than that, I have no hope for it 
The final Big Kahuna Documents:
So for several weeks I’ve been masquerading a site at http://ken.dirkin.com/bigkahuna as my Big Kahuna project. Well, this isn’t actually my main project as both Punya and Tianyi know, since I’ve been working on modifying Moodle for TE150 on-line. Today was the first time though that I had a chance to sit down with both Punya and Matt and figure out exactly what they were thinking about the interface. First a brief history.
In an attempt to do something productive for the college while having them pay me to take MAET courses, I decided to approach Punya and Matt about TE150, a class I knew Punya was very interested in trying to put on-line. I figured I could help with some of the technical parts of modifying Moodle to their needs. Punya is not very satisfied with the CMS systems out there and has alway tinkered with his Segue, Moodle and Angel courses to get them to look more like he wants. I figured I could take some of the stress of him and tinker with Moodle under their direction.
The first meeting we had, Punya wanted me to come up with some mockups of what I would think a good TE150 class would look like on-line, sky’s the limit, don’t let technology bog me down. I came up with a horizontal layout that was later was converted into a vertical layout (click on the link to see the Flash mockup). The main difference between my layout design and that of a traditional CMS layout was that there were no columns. All the information was presented in rows. The top row would be the module listing (of which there are seven), the next row would be the tasks and resources in a specific module (based on where you were in the course) and then the content for that task or resrouce in a giant 100% wide column. This, I felt, liberated us from the standard, squished looking two or three column layout.
So, I tinkered and tinkered some more. Now I’m not a bad programmer when it comes to building stuff, but I’m not the quickest when it comes to interpreting other peoples code. It took me probably 15 hours of fiddling to get things put into what looked somewhat like I had propsed. Now, this is a bit embarrassing, because I’m supposed to be very tech savvy. Well, for weeks I struggled with tinkering with Moodle, re-installing it and starting over from scratch and documenting the changes I made so we could reliably recreate them and make sure Moodle upgrades wouldn’t destory them. So after much frustration and effort the day came that I had to actually figure out what we really wanted to do. This of course coincided with a meeting with the Dean about continuing the project for a Fall 2007 debut.
So there I am, sitting in a triangle at a small table with Matt and Punya. Immediately Punya commented on the color scheme. He’s picky about colors, he’s a very Jacob Neilson type, wanting nice pleasant pastels. I think I had a beigess green background. One strike against the mockup and Matt hasn’t even released a broadside yet. Next Punya played with the controls for the blocks (which now hung precariously at the top over the content area) which made the entire page shutter every time he minimized/maximized them (which is a function that was destined for the trash can anyways). By this time my custom Moodle install was taking on more water than I could bail. Then Matt, in his very poetic way said, “I don’t like it, not at all.”
It was about at this point the site review reverted to what Punya and my original discussion had been about, which was picking and choosing functions from his modified Moodle and Segue courses from the past. This of course was a welcome turn of events, because instead of being told to explore, I was getting direct input from the two guys who were directly responsible for the whole TE150 on-line project. I would actually say it was a relief.
I welcomed the idea of bringing back a left gutter column to house important information (since Moodle supports that like it’s no body’s business). I was glad to see the horizontal module bar staid and was embraced as a useful way to move static module links from the all important left gutter. A thick artistic banner was once again brought into the picture, making sure that there was some sort of flair to the page. Several specialized pieces will still have to be built, or modified or re-arranged, but that’s chicken feed compared to restructuring how Moodle behaves completely. This was probably the best design critique I could’ve had because it actually gave me direction that I sorely needed.
If you’re interested in the new mockup of the TE150 on-line site, you can view Matt and Punya’s drawing of the interface here.
Since the “Testing” assignment required a script and a set of questions for the test users to work off of (and knowing full well Punya and Matt would probably not follow a script or question list if one was presented) I made some up for my Big Kahuna blog.
Script: Read several of the entries on the TE150 on-line blog. Notice how each blog entry has a set of resources in the right most column. View some of the resources that are associated with the main blog entries. Other resources pertaining to the development of TE150 are located on the far left column.
Questions:
A mild critique of my Big Kahuna site can be found at Google Documents
I can’t say it’s an all encompassing critique.
It’s up and it’s running…
That’s right, my Big Kahuna project has made its web debut at “Flight of TE150: The making of an on-line course“.
So far it has an introduction to the project and the first several steps that the TE150 design team has taken in the technical realm, including our fanciful design ideas and the attempt at implementing them into Moodle.
There’s a permanent link to “Flight of TE150″ on the right side under “Other things Ken”. Enjoy!
Using a piece of the Web 2.0 pie, Google Documents, I wrote up a piece on how blogging will help me concentrate on the task at hand, getting a TE150 course design on-line, and less on designing a website to showcase designing a website.
You can view it here: Blogs and the Big Kahuna
My CEP817 group and I wrote up a bit about http://www.jumpcut.com, basically functionality behind the site, with a little intro by me trying to expound on how Web 2.0 technologies are transforming the way we work (and probably why Google is going to become the next Microsoft).
To summarize, I plan on using these technologies:
