You are expected to keep an online journal of your progress throughout this class. Your instructor will read this journal to see how you are progressing, so you should update your journal regularly over the course of the semester. At a minimum, you are expected to create a post for each Lab and each major Project. You are also exptected to summarize any insights you have in each week’s work, to discuss to the readings, and to document your production projects and technical research thoroughly.
You are also highly encouraged to view the online journals of your peers and provide feedback!
Expectations
In classes like Object, a significant aspect of the learning experience lies in the process - in your successes, failures, experiments and meanderings. Your online journal is a place to record this process, and your overall progress in the course. In every project and lab, you will be partly evaluated on your journal documentation.
Your online journal is not a portfolio! You may have a personal portfolio already (if not, you should be thinking seriously about this!), your online journal is distinctly different from a portfolio, but is a valuable additional record of your work. The journal should contain your notes, ideas, references, and so on. Focus on the process.
It may take you a few weeks to get into the routine of posting your work online, just stick with it! At the end of the semester, your online journal will be a strong reflection of your work this semester.
If you use your online journal for other classes or content (which I highly encourage), you must have a dedicated category for Object.
Good documentation habits
Good documentation should include a description and illustration of your project. You should include what it looks like, what it does, what the user or participant does in response. When it’s interactive, mention and show what the user does. Your explanation should give enough information that someone who’s never seen the project can understand it.
You should also include a section describing how the project works, aimed at a more informed reader (your instructor, or next year’s classmates). Include a system diagram to make clear what the major components of the system are and how they communicate.
Use pictures, drawings, and videos liberally to explain your work.
Document your projects thoroughly as you go, don’t put it off until the end. You can begin a post and continue to edit and add content to that post as the project progresses.
Make sure any code you post is well-commented, so you and others can understand what it does. Don’t overload your notes with code!! Code repositories like GitHub are best for sharing code, rather than blogs, so post your code to a repository and link to it from your blog.
GitHub Gist is an ideal way to share code on your blog.
Cite your sources
Make sure to cite the sources where you get ideas, code, circuits, and construction techniques. When you base your work on someone else’s, cite the original author and link to their work, just as you would when quoting another author in a paper. If you only changed one part of an existing program, post only the part you changed, and link to the original. Copying code or techniques without attribution is plagiarism. Few ideas come out of the blue, and your readers can learn a lot from the sources from which you learned and by which you were were inspired. So be generous in sharing your sources.
Remember, your journal lives on the internet, so use hyperlinks generously throughout your posts!!
Resources / Suggestions
- I highly recommend using Wordpress.com for your online journal - it is free and offers the cleanest layouts of any free blogging platform. It is also platform that you can continue to build on in the future (like, when you become internet famous!)
- Use Vimeo to embedding videos in your posts.
- GitHub Gist is an ideal way to share code on your blog.
- Photos and videos should be taken in landscape orientation.