Holy Heroes!

So one of our first tasks in our Advanced Digital Collections course is to collect 15-20 digital items that we'll eventually use when we build our little mini online museums/archives. (I think.) I actually had a bit of trouble deciding what to collect. I'm sure I made it more difficult than it really is, of course. As it always does, my mind eventually drifted back to-- what else?-- Star Wars, and I hit upon my theme-- heroes.

Since the day I discovered Joseph Campbell and his ideas of the hero archetype, I've been fascinated by the type of stories that, for whatever reason, belong to the human experience whatever the culture.

So, my collection idea started from there and branched out to include a pretty broad definition of heroes-- real-life heroes, ancient heroes, superheroes, and movie heroes. Songs about heroes, radio stories of heroes, pictures of heroes, videos about heroes, and stories of heroes. I even included a satire of heroes.

Here's a list of the items in my collection:

1. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech (video)
2. Editorial about sports heroes (audio)
3. Interview with "Sully" Sullenberger (radio)
4. Superman picture (image)
5. Luke Skywalker picture a la Obama "Hope" design (image)
6. Luke Skywalker picture w/ lightsaber, black background (image)
7. Luke Skywalker picture in flight suit w/lightsaber, fire background (image)
8. George Lucas discussing Joseph Campbell (video)
9. "Have Gun Will Travel" song (audio)
10. "Superfriends" (1973) opening credits (video)
11. "Superfriends" do "Office Space" (video)
12. "The Odyssey" (pdf)
13. "Clash of the Titans" movie trailer (video)
14. "Holding out for a Hero" song (audio)
15. "What is a Hero?" CBS news segment (video)
16. Subway Hero CBS news segment (video)
17. Herakles killing the Nemean Lion vase (image)
18. Hercules comic book segment (pdf)
19. "Profiles in Courage" excerpts (pdf)
20. "The Woman Who Dared" editorial cartoon of Susan B. Anthony (image)

There could be many ways to access my collection. I might use "real" and "imaginary" as descriptors. "Ancient" and "modern" could also work. Describing by format image, sound, video, document, etc. might be useful. Keywords such as "lucas," "georgelucas," "george_lucas," "star," "wars," "starwars," star_wars," "skywalker," "lukeskywalker," "luke_skywalker," etc. can get out of hand right away. I think I'd like to enable user tagging to make keyword more efficient.

As to who might access this collection, I would think teachers, schoolchildren, and anybody with an interest in heroes. It's a broad enough subject that it should appeal to many people. It's not, however, the place to do serious research.

forewarned, forearmed

This week, in reading about project management, I was amazed at the advice Make sure to have a plan. Or, more to the point, I was amazed that there was a need to give such advice. Who would attempt a project in which other people were counting on you, and not develop some sort of a plan first?

Apparently people do. Crazy people.

I was really fascinated by some of the software out there to help keep projects on time, on budget, and on track. I wish I had one of those for everyday use. I already pretty much do mental Work Breakdowns, but completely underestimate the time needed to complete the tasks.

How long will it take me to finish my homework today?

About two hours.

Wrong! PERT says twelve hours. You forgot to factor in eating, sleeping, laundry, and staring off into space at random intervals.

I think this kind of software would be invaluable to a project manager who is in charge of a lot more than just herself and her homework!

So that's what the PM wants to accomplish. The other piece of good advice from the readings this week was preparing for possible risks. I loved the idea of the "cube" in Cervone's readings, where risks can be plotted and assessed as to risk, probability, and effect. This also seems like a sensible way to prepare for possible obstacles and avoid pitfalls.

Even though there are many types of program plans, each with their own processes and sub-processes, it's worth toting around a tabbed binder with project plan details to get the project where it needs to be.

learning curve

Learning anything new is a little exciting, a little tense, and a little frustrating. I definitely felt all three as I plodded through the units-- I say plodded, because the unit learning and exercises were fine and precise, and sometimes I felt as though I was extremely clumsy, like trying to knit with mittens on. Nevertheless, I have emerged from the course knowing a lot more than I did before about what goes on underneath the user interface of a digital collection.

Even using the word underneath with more confidence is a boon-- the layers of applications, protocols, scripts, and compilers makes more sense to me. At the very least, I should be able to talk to an IT person and have a semi-intelligible conversation!

As a former schoolteacher, I pretty much involuntarily use metacognition when I'm learning something new. I can't help but take a step back and analyze how I am learning something, and where I am in the learning process. I noticed that with almost every unit, I compared my learning-- not the content, but the learning process-- to when I learned HTML. HTML is the most recent computer language I've learned (and really only one of two, the other being BASIC, a language I was somewhat traumatized by in the 9th grade).

At any rate, when I learned HTML, through a combination of self-teaching and later through a Pima class, I got to the point where the syntax and vocabulary became second nature to me. Learning CSS (I kind of threw CSS in there with HTML as one of my two computer languages) was a little easier, having had experience with HTML. I'm no expert in HTML or CSS, but I consider myself competent. I could experiment a bit, using my understanding of the syntax and vocabulary. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but I was comfortable enough to try.

Another part of my HTML/CSS learning is that when I was finished, and I loaded the page, and something was wrong, I was confident enough to understand that I had the basic principles correct in my coding, but I probably had a typo somewhere. (With CSS I allowed that I may have made a mistake, but not a gross error.)

With the information and skills we've studied in this course, I'm definitely still a novice. I haven't acquired the familiarity with the concepts to be able to experiment much, or know that my errors are probably just typos and not a misunderstanding of the material.

But, novice is on route to competence, which is what we're aiming for (if I wanted to be an expert, I'd be in a computer programming school!). And I feel as though I'm ready to tackle the similar/brand new challenges of the advanced course. Because I know that the more I work with it, just as the more I worked with HTML and CSS, the less foreign and the more familiar the concepts will be.