The process of planning and building my digital learning resource has been a challenging and rewarding one. I knew my previously built typography resources was something I wanted to redevelop but I did not have a clear idea of how to go about it. Now that I have spent some time working on that redevelopment, I think it is a good time to reflect on the process. To do so, I will follow Boud, Keogh, and Walker’s Model for reflection as described by Wilfred Laurier University (n.d.). This process involves reflecting on an experience by revisiting it, assessing your feelings about it, and re-evaluating your experience considering these emotions. After this, one should consider the result of the experience now that reflection has occurred and how this might impact their work going forward.
Returning to the Experience
At first, I was quite excited to have the opportunity to work on my resource since it was something I wanted to do for work anyway. My experiences throughout this program equipped me with a range of ideas and theories about how to proceed but I discovered quickly that this course required me to do more planning than I had originally intended. I was fortunate to have two students who were willing to take time for an interview regarding the resource and I gathered meaningful insights from our conversations. I analyzed these insights alongside my original plan and discovered a healthy mix of overlapping and new ideas for how to improve the resource.
I later worked with a team to construct a robust rubric for assessing a wide range of digital learning resources. While the granularity of our rubric may have been more detailed than my project required, it helped me understand some of the more nuanced elements — such as alt tags on images for accessibility — that I needed to include in my resource.
After this I worked on refining my text and visual content for the resource, requiring a lot more writing, rewriting, and illustrating than I initially expected. While I initially intended to redevelop the entire resource, I quickly discovered that I likely would not get more than halfway through. At the recommendation of my instructor, I created a new section to help students understand why the contents of the document matter to them and wrote another section describing how to use the resource. And while I had some illustrations from my original resource, I now have over 150 illustrations for visual examples and quizzes.
Having now put much of my content into Pressbooks (https://openeducationalberta.ca/typographyhandbook), the project feels like it is finally coming together. Revisions and adjustments to content and structure are being made constantly as I reassess the objectives of each area and work to ensure the content flow makes sense and will keep students engaged. While I am not going to be able to get the handbook completed, it will be reasonably far along and will give me a great foundation to continue building on.
Attending to Feelings
My excitement about starting my project was quickly replaced by frustration about being “delayed” by planning. It is not that I did not want to plan; I just felt I had planned enough in my head already. The planning period proved a meaningful “delay” as it uncovered many insights I would not have discovered otherwise. Similarly, I was unsure about how our rubric would work alongside my project and whether it would offer any benefit, but I discovered new areas to add to my resource through the analysis of the original rubric and our team’s discussions. Building out the contents of the handbook was both rewarding and disheartening as I created a lot of useful content but realized I had bitten off more than I could chew. While disheartening for me, it was no surprise to my wife who understands that this is just what I do with projects. The illustration process was incredibly frustrating as Adobe Illustrator gave me grief almost the entire time by crashing regularly. Finally, getting to see the content in Pressbooks has been satisfying and eye-opening. There is something wonderful about seeing your work coming together and I enjoy all the little discoveries about what is working and what is not once you see it in place.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention my elation when a student contacted me last week. Their computer crashed and they asked if I could send them a copy of “the typography guide you had made with everything about fonts, typefaces, etc.” (personal communication, July 27, 2021) because they “found it really helpful with other design projects that require typography.” It was so great to know that, even in its original form, the resource was proving to be useful.
Re-evaluating the Experience
It is never fun to realize that the areas of frustration turn out to be some of the most important steps. The interviews, initial planning, and rubric creation turned out to be far more helpful than I initially thought they would and likely saved me a lot of time in my content development process. This is something I should have known from my project management days, but my desire to save time got the better of me. I also discovered that my ability to estimate workload is as poor as ever since I have been working almost nonstop and have not even made it halfway through my handbook. As always, I need to take a step back before I get started, make a solid plan, and assess the workload before I get started on the actual development work. I am looking forward to my continued work on the project as I eventually finish it up and continue to refine it based on student feedback and needs.
References
Wilfred Laurier University. (n.d.). Write Online: Reflective Writing Writing Guide—How Can I Reflect? Writeonline.Ca. Retrieved August 4, 2021, from https://writeonline.ca/reflective-essay.php?content=section2
Thanks for your reflection, David. It’s clear that you are passionate about your topic and it’s wonderful that you got some external validation on the value of your document from a previous student. I too always seem to “bite off more than I can chew”. I wonder if you have any strategies you’d share about how we could avoid trying to do too much in the future?
Thanks, Kristin! I suppose I am sorta passionate about this topic. It’s weird, because I don’t think of myself as a passionate person. I think I just care a lot about nitpicky things and typography is super nitpicky. How to not bite off more than we can chew? Oh, I don’t know. Aim far lower? I typically just put in too much time and get it done in the end. It’s a bad habit. Maybe we could aim to do very little with the intention of adding to it if we have time? Maybe we should start by appreciating that we know that we do this and that even the knowing will help us to bite off a bit less in the future.
Hello David, thank you for sharing such a frank and insightful reflection about your process, the challenges, and the benefits of some of the course learning (and prior learning in the MALAT program). I also suffer from poor project management skills when it comes to estimating scope and scale. Your header for this post is quite beautiful, both technical and artistic, which is probably an important balance in typography. I really look forward to seeing your Pressbook under development. I feel very confident that it will be a key go-to resource for learners in your program well after graduation. That is one value in creating a publicly available, digitally accessible resource. Another part of the value is maintenance and suggestions for revision if you design a feedback mechanism. If you do decide to make your resource a fully open one (for any learner or educator) Pressbooks has a terrific new database of open textbooks. You would be amazed at the folks that are not learners in your program that might want to use and share what you create.