Author: Joline

Reflective Article

By Joline

Text

The Reflective Essay should address at least two of the following four topics. Plan to devote from 3-5 paragraphs to each topic (2000-3000 words total).

1. Summarize the evolution of your capstone

Don’t just list the predictable step-by step process. Instead, focus on the turning points of your capstone’s development: when you realized an idea wasn’t going to work, or found a different way to do it, or had an “Aha!” moment.

Try writing it outside of chronological order, with your paragraphs grouped by analytic category rather than what came first, second, and third. For example, instead of sorting your experiences in time order (such as January, February, March) you might sort them by characteristics (such as what went faster, what went slower, and what went nowhere).

Your account may include any or all of the following stages:

  • Choice of research area
  • Brainstorming an idea
  • Architecting an approach
  • Engineering a release
  • Promotion
  • Pre-alpha, alpha, and beta testing
  • Feedback gathered
  • Refer to images, charts, or other figures as necessary to show your project’s evolution.

2. Describe your capstone’s connection to new media

Explain how your project fits in the context of New Media as a discipline and field of intellectual enterprise. Pick one of the definitions discussed last term–or propose your own–and explain how your capstone exhibits or challenges contemporary criteria or methods of New Media, especially those to which you been exposed in the course of the undergraduate curriculum.

You will get a better grade on this section if you talk about technology only peripherally, and instead focus on the cultural significance of your capstone as a new media project. What do innovations like yours mean for the field of music/ politics/ community/ journalism/ whatever?

Your capstone is the crowning achievement of your undergraduate major–probably the only major project for which you can claim complete credit and responsibility. When you show it during an interview for a job/grad school/art exhibition, the person across the table may well ask, “Is this what you mean by New Media?” Your Reflective Essay can prepare you to answer this question.

3. Assess your capstone’s successes and failures

Give a candid and detailed assessment of your capstone. Why were existing solutions to the problem you addressed lacking, and how did your project hope to fill that need? Now that you look back, which elements work and which don’t, and why? Where would or will you take it next if given the chance?

You will not be penalized in your paper’s grade if you decide that your capstone was in certain ways a failure, as long as you explain what you learned from the experience–it’s the learning that counts as a success or failure, not an object.

Feedback from others can be a valuable part of this learning. You may want to include:

  1. Other faculty
  2. Other students
  3. The Pool
  4. A focus group

Use graphs and other figures whenever possible. If you may want to include feedback from capstone night.

4. Plot a future for your project

Is your project worth pursuing after graduation? Then describe in detail how you develop it further over the next 1-3 years. Include your original two-year budget and Gantt chart, updated as necessary. Explain any refinements you envision, such as:

  • Additional features or bugfixes
  • New venues
  • New audiences
  • Promotion beyond your original audience
  • Funding

Finally, explain why you would choose to continue the project, now that you’re not doing it for a grade anymore. Which of these purposes might it serve?

  • Convince someone to hire you
  • Form the basis of a startup company
  • Build you a killer portfolio
  • Make the world (or your corner of it) a better place
  • Make your life more enjoyable or meaningful

Figures

Integrate figures, photos, or screenshots into the text to help the reader visualize your work and process.. For those that are too big, include them at the end of your essay. Make sure you optimize images—so none is larger than 300k..Use preview to optimize–File–>export (low quality jpg or png), or Tools–>Adjust size.

May include, for example:

  • Screenshots
  • Gantt charts
  • Surveys or other feedback

May be black and white or color, depending on how important you think color is communicating the concept.

Only include figures if they help support or explain the argument of your essay–not just to make the essay thicker.

Annotated bibliography

Include this as an appendix at the end of your essay.

You should be able to pull this from your preparations for last term’s research.

Roughly 5-20 items.

Style

Post your article with category “Article”, using your capstone title as the wordpress post title.

  1. Write for someone who isn’t familiar with your project but is well versed in new media in general.
  2. Don’t be vague; use concrete examples whenever possible.
  3. Spellcheck your document, and if possible get someone to read it for grammar, usage, and the flow of your argument.
  4. Use headings 2-4 to sort your post into topic area. Use the “paragraph” pulldown menu to find these. To do this make sure you do not use MS Word formatting, but compose in .txt format, copy to wordpress, then add formatting.

Press Materials

By Joline
  1. Title
  2. Creator
  3. Images for publicity; this includes you logo, images of the project and some images of users (people) using project.
  4. Icon: 200×200 pixels (a logo in png format)
  5. Illustration: 800×600 pixels or higher (usually a shot of an actual installation, performance, or screenshot)
  6. Paragraph abstract (condense your previous abstract if necessary)
  7. Press copy:
    Provide at least two paragraphs of description that could be used in an article about your capstone. You can recycle these from your blog, etc., but they should be written from a third-person perspective.
    Example: “Comic books may bring to mind stacks of staple-bound paper. But for Chloe LaPointe’s New Media capstone, comics are going virtual…”
  8. Capstone question
    This question about your capstone may become part of a scavenger hunt held during Capstone Night.
    Example: “What town boasts Maine’s only Lumberman’s Museum?”
  9. URL
    A link to your blog or, if appropriate, to the project itself.
  10. Outside email address
    I won’t use this for publicity, but if you want to me to forward your opportunities and other department-related news in the future, post or email me privately a non-First Class email address where I can reach you in the future.

Poster

By Joline

Design

1) a tabloid-sized (11X 17″), portrait-format poster and

2) a 20×30-inch, landscape-formatted backdrop poster.

Make sure the smaller one includes the words “New Media Night” and the date, time, and location (building) for your presentation, (optional QR code). Post your designs as .pdf, .png, or .jpg (not .psd or .ai), under category “Poster”. Print 2 copies of 11X 17  poster for Velma by Friday April 17.

NMD Capstone Posters 2013

Located: 420 Chadbourne

Feedback

By Joline

Gathering and presenting feedback

Choosing a sample

Random

Best for performances, installations, and other face-to-face live events.

Accost visitors with a clipboard and pen.

Hand-picked

Best for early tests of an online project.

Actively try to get a representative sample.

Create occasions for testing, eg schedule demos of installations or performances for your classmates.

Mass-invited

For mailed/emailed surveys, expect less than 10% to respond. So if you want 10 responses, you need to contact 100 people.

Requires a lot of promotion.

Scheduling testing

Schedule each phase separately in your Gantt chart:

Pre-alpha phase

About 1-2 weeks of deployment.

3-10 people.

Don’t worry about a representative sample.

Can be friends, roommates, relatives.

Alpha phase

About 1-2 weeks of deployment.

10-20 people.

Draw from classmates, unless they are not a representative sample.

May require throwing out any previously accumulated content.

Beta phase

About 4-8 weeks of promotion, followed by 4-8 weeks of deployment.

Can be shorter for live events.

Should not be friends, roommates, or relatives.

May require throwing out any previously accumulated content.

Postgraduate phase/s

Occur in the year after you graduate.

Goal is not just to improve the project, but also to attract the means to sustain it (funders, advertisers, clients).

Ideally should not require throwing out previous content.

Feedback format

Data types

The more quantitative, the easier it will be to compile statistics. But leave some room for comments if possible, to capture what you didn’t include but is important to your respondents.

Quantitative

Continuous (decimals)

What’s your GPA? (4.0, 3.84, 2.37, …)

Discrete (whole numbers)

How many computers do you own? (1, 2, 3, …)

Qualitative

Ordinal (rank ordered categories)

How much computer experience do you have? (Expert, Moderate, Newbie, …)

Nominal (categories without rank)

What’s your ethnic background? (Latino, White, African-American, …)

Freeform text (comments)

How did you like this course? (“It sucked because…”)

Explaining differences

One of the main purposes of testing is not to come to a single conclusion (“Everyone likes my capstone!”) but to identify and explain differences.

Differences in respondents

Correlate demographic differences with other responses.

Example: A new media installation asks how technically savvy visitors are, to see if that affected their enjoyment of the work.

Differences between versions of the work

Create two versions of the experience and share them with different visitors to test for a preference or demographic disparity (“A/B” testing).

Example: A Web site randomizes which of two versions of its front page visitors see, then logs which spurred more click-throughs to deeper content.

Helpful tools

Online survey sites

SurveyMonkey.com

Doodle.com

Google Charts

Offline applications

Microsoft Excel

Apple Numbers

Onboard surveys

Best for catching users when their experience and motivation is fresh.

Drupal Polling module

Survey examples

Seeing Double: a test of emulation as a preservation strategy.

Meeting

By Joline

Pick a 30 minute meeting time between 9am-3pm Friday Jan 16

[APCAL]
Web Presence

Web Presence

By Joline

Your task is threefold:

  • Register for this blog during class time when I will open registration. Use your maine.edu email to register; use your first and last names, use your first name as nickname/screen name, and use a password I will give you in class–or you can get this in the email I sent you.
  • Create a post with your first name as Title, a face photo as “featured image” and “Designer” as category. This will add you to the Designer section of this Capstone website.
  • Create a post with your project title as the Title, your best brief description of your project (1-2 paragraphs only), and your best visual as a “featured image”; then use “Project” category.
  • Add any tags that describe your project. Consider how someone else might search for it in a tag cloud. Include such data as: tech () , themes (death, travel, food), or location, like: fish, video, maine, arduino, housing, Javascript, orono, death, afterlife, installation, social media narrative, etc.

Schedule

By Joline

Jan 12  class meeting

Jan 13  individual meetings

Jan 14  First Presentation: class meeting

Jan 21  Milestone 1: class meeting

Jan 28  individual meetings

Feb 04  class meeting (optional)

Feb 11  Milestone 2: present project demo

Feb 18  individual meetings

Feb 25  individual meetings

Mar 04  spring break

Mar 11  spring break

Mar 18  Milestone 3: present complete project

Mar 25  group A testing

Apr 01  group B testing

Apr  08 Milestone 4: present project post–testing results

Apr 15  poster ads up

Apr 19-29  Capstone Fair period

Syllabus

By Joline

NMD499: Capstone II

Course Logistics

Requirements

NMD 498

Time and place

Wednesdays, 10 am – 12:30 am, 420 Chadbourne Hall; plus individual meetings with Instructor

Instructor

Joline Blais, 400 Chadbourne Hall, 581-4486
Office hours Wednesday  2-4 pm
3 credit hours

Course Objectives

  • Design and prototype a New Media project independently
  • Integrate technical, conceptual and perceptual skills learned in former New Media classes
  • Contextualize your project in a historical and cultural milieu
  • Assess most likely audience(s) for your project, work audience meds into project design
  • Assess the relevance and potential impact of your project on intended audience
  • Provide high quality feedback to peers on their projects
  • Learn any new skills or techniques required by your project
  • Plan digital and social media PR for your project
  • Contextualize your project within a conceptual New media framework, listing specific New Media tactics or strategies

Course Guidelines

Grading

Your grade will consist roughly of:

  • 70% Average of all milestone presentation grades.
  • 30% Final Presentation.

NOTE: Because of the grading structure of this class, procrastination will adversely affect your grade and progress.

Course Expectations

Completing work

  • Get your assignments done on time. Procrastination will cause you stress and will result in less enjoyable and lower quality project

Attendance

  • Don’t miss class. Attendance points:
    • 3 absences: 10 points off final grade
    • 4-5 absences: 20 points off final grade
  • Talk to me beforehand if you know you’ll have to miss time in class. We MAY be able to schedule remote make-ups IF we have enough lead-time. If you are responsible for making up work, I can help you when the unusual missed class occurs.

Behavior

  • Raise your hand to ask me a question at any time. (You’ll get equal participation credit for naïve or sophisticated questions!) But be prepared that I may choose to bracket your question in order to keep the discussion on-topic and on-time.
  • Respect the views of others. As in a good e-mail list, keep controversy to a maximum but flaming to a minimum.
  • Stand up and move around if the instructor gives you a break.
  • Respect your fellow students during oral discussion–pay attention, give quality feedback.

Equipment

  • Bring your laptop to every class. Your instructor will let you know exceptions to this rule.
  • Make use of the various labs on campus, including IMRC, and the Collaborative Media Lab in Fogler Library (features specialized audiovisual equipment and individual rooms) and any IMRC facilities you need.

Personal constraints

  • See if you qualify for financial aid for a new laptop.
  • See me if you have an especially difficult personal constraint–such as your own illness, or children or parents you need to care for. I may not be able to help, but I can probably direct you to someone who can. Students with disabilities can also do an end-run around me and go directly to the office of Ann Smith of Services for Students with Disabilities (581-2319). I do not hold any personal circumstance against you in terms of grading (though I cannot credit you for work not done) and will work with you to achieve your best work.
  • Don’t wait until these constraints affect your class work, however. By the time the dog ate your finals DVD, it may be too late to earn my sympathy.

Policies

Academic honesty

An instructor who has probable cause or reason to believe a student has cheated may act upon such evidence, and should report the case to the supervising faculty member or the Department Chair for appropriate action.

Disabilities

If you have a disability for which you may be requesting an accommodation, please contact Ann Smith, Director of Disabilities Services, 121 East Annex, 581-2319, as early as possible in the term.

Discriminatory language

The University of Maine’s non-sexist language policy may be viewed at:   http://www.umaine.edu/WIC/both/language.htm.

Sexual Discrimination Reporting

The University of Maine is committed to making campus a safe place for students. Because of this commitment, if you tell a teacher about an experience of sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, relationship abuse (dating violence and domestic violence), sexual misconduct or any form of gender discrimination involving members of the campus, your teacher is required to report this information to the campus Office of Sexual Assault & Violence Prevention or the Office of Equal Opportunity.

If you want to talk in confidence to someone about an experience of sexual discrimination, contact:

For confidential resources on campus: Counseling Center: 207-581-1392 or Cutler Health Center: at 207-581-4000.

For confidential resources off campus:  Rape Response Services: 1-800-310-0000 or Spruce Run: 1-800-863-9909.

For non-confidential support services on campus (helpers may have to report the incident to others who can help):

Office of Sexual Assault & Violence Prevention: 207-581-1406

Office of Community Standards: 207-581-1409

University of Maine Police: 207-581-4040 or 911

Or see the OSAVP website for a complete list of services at http://www.umaine.edu/osavp/

Syllabus Disclaimer

In the event of an extended disruption of normal classroom activities,  the format for this course may be modified to enable its completion within its programmed time frame. In addition, student input may alter the content and direction of our work, and I will adjust to make the course as relevant to our mutual learning goals as possible. In either event, you will be provided an addendum to the syllabus that will supersede this version.

Joline

Joline

By Joline

Writer, storyteller, teacher, web designer, mother, permaculture gardener, avid skier and rower, outdoor enthusiast…