Taking the HARD road?

 Taking the HARD road?  

What a week... CSS continues to plague me – I think I’ve got it, it looks right, and then it doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. As others have said, I now know what I’m not cut out for, but I do have an increased level of respect for those who do. Honestly, I’m terrified of next week. I know what I want it to do, I know how I want it to look, but I honestly have NO IDEA how to get it from point A to point B and that seems like a very big hill to climb.  


Challenge with my project... I’m really hung up on one major challenge right now. I originally wanted my module to be linear – do step one, then two, then three and you have tools to be the greatest customer service agent there ever was. Well, now I’m questioning whether I want to allow my learner to jump around – to identify what part they REALLY want and just head there without moving through the other parts.  


Pros to making it linear is that I KNOW I"ll have better outcomes when measuring success. However, I just took a course last semester that talked about micro learning and how people need the autonomy to hop in, grab what they need, and get out – and that that is appealing and relevant to today’s learners. Am I that hip?  

I’ve chosen a colleague and my son – a teen, as my testers. I think this will give me a broad view of how it will be received, and I know my son will be absolutely brutal, though probably kinder than my husband whose knowledge of HTML and CSS make him a terrible candidate.  


The templates I’m exploring are making life a little more manageable, and it is certainly nice to have a handle on the text, but thinking about how others navigate is fascinating – I think we all assume that everyone uses the web the way we do and probably takes it for granted.  


I spent some time revieing other learning websites, and I think that down the line, I could do some really cool stuff with animations, but that is far beyond my webdesign pay grade at this moment – I'm just hoping for the navigation to work.  


As a perfectionist, the paper and pencil prototype is appealing because of it’s flexibility but also terrifying because I won’t ever be “done” and get it to where I want it to be. It does seem like it will be a fun craft project for my procrastinator self - I’d much rather play with note cards, cardboard, removable tape etc than buckle down and tackle this thing- and the permission – instruction even – to purchase sharpie pens is never a negative.  


I have my prototype sketched out, but will re-draw or use the note cards etc for submission and clean it up before my testers see it because I don’t want it to be distracting.  

This week feels a bit like jumping off a cliff, but here we go! Only next week will tell if we make it out the other side.  

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