The "Beast" (as I've come to refer to it) started life as a graphic organizer created with Cmap, then morphed into a word processing document, ready to be posted to our website. That way participants could download the handout and follow the steps at their own computers, at their own paces.You can't do an Internet study without using the Internet, so I added some online components: sign in using a Google spreadsheet, take a pre-test at Quizstar (a tool from 4teachers.org), go to a wiki for explanations, add your own thoughts on a Google doc. All for an introductory study session. Great ideas, but a tad intricate. By the time I finished writing instructions for accessing the Quizstar pretest, the word processing document looked like a map of the Houston freeway system. Not the best example of how to use the Internet!
Back to the beginning. Trash the document, look at the graphic organizer again, and start fresh. Write, search, write, link...ask Dear Husband to try it out. He's a Mac person, so we have to amble through various browsers to find one that will work with all the links. He's also very literal, and stumbles at the second set of instructions. Obviously, I hadn't built a firm enough scaffold.
Third iteration looks better, but is still depending too much on a handout. As a friend observed, "There's something just...WRONG about having a paper version of an Internet study module."
The fourth and fifth versions got closer to what I had originally envisioned, but were still too laborious and paper-bound.
Now that I'm on the sixth version, I think I'm finally getting it. The wiki is carrying the weight, but now I'm concerned for those who feel uncomfortable reading/writing/thinking solely online. Can they be comfortable with nothing but links?
