Phase III

During an online class meeting last night, we discussed the progress of GLIP and the problems that we have been experiencing such as the lack of participation from group members, including the other NCSU student from ECI 524.  We were instructed to email the professor with a blurp about it.

For Phase III, we were informed that the member from ECI 524 was incharge of it, and we were to be active participants.  Phase III requires everyone to answer questions on their individual pages, and then participate in an online bulletin board with our group.  As hard as it is going to be, I am going to sit back and let my co-leader take the full lead of this.  So far I have taken the lead since the beginning when it was not my assigned role, so I am going to step back out of his way.  I have not talked with him since that one email that we sent back and forth, and he has not participated in much of anything else.  I hope he is able to take the lead on this.

It is kind of a blessing that this Phase has been assigned to him.  I can feel myself loosing steam when it comes to GLIP.  I began very excited about the group, the activities and the potential.  However, through the last 2 months, I have been practically the only person doing anything outside of the individual pages and it has drained my excitement.  Maybe through this interactive bulletin board members will be able to post freely onto it and with me being an active participant I may be able to regain my excitement for the project as a whole.

Working URL

I was informed that the second link did work.  The correct URL for the presentation is:

http://www.empressr.com/View.aspx?token=mRVMJvVQ3pQ%3d

Posted Empressr

I went ahead and posted the link to the Empressr video into the Phase II forum, as well as at the top of the Group's main page.  I've asked for feedback on the video.  Hopefully I will get some response.



**Update:  I did receive feedback from 1 group member.  One of the students in Russia.  The link was messed up, so I reposted another link.   Hopefully this one will work, and I will recieve more feedback.

Another Russia Student participates

Yesterday I was able to update another GLIP group members' listing!  Another student from Russia completed their Phase I and II!  I updated their space on our table which brings our numbers up to Phase I = 11, Phase II = 12!  I am very excited about those numbers!  Now if we can only get them to respond to something other than just posting the answers to Phase I and II on their own sites. 

I completed the Empressr presentation... on my own.  I did go back and edit it so to add information and pictures from the newest participating member. 

The URL is: 

http://www.empressr.com/empressrflx/Empressr_Viewer.aspx?token=mRVMJvVQ3pQ=&popup=true
or
http://www.empressr.com/empressrflx/Empressr_Viewer.swf?token=mRVMJvVQ3pQ%3d&loc=http
or
http://www.empressr.com/View.aspx?token=mRVMJvVQ3pQ%3d

I'm not 100% sure which one will work.

The presentation begins with a picture of a traveling suitcase.  It then shows an map depicting the overall travel through all of the countries.  I then showed each country 1 at a time.  The USA had the most places, pictures, and information so I put it last on the trip.  I even broke it down by state and then by city so not to clutter the slides.  I ended the presentation with a walk through of the themes that were shown between all of the countries.  I think it turned out pretty decent as a whole.  Unfortunately with Empressr, when you set the slides to auto-progression, whatever time space you place between the transitions is applied to all slides.  So some slides seem to take too long before they change.  In the future I may not use this website for this type of presentation again because of this, but it was fun to use.  I did like the site, so I will most likely use it again, just when the time of the transitions is the same, or not auto advancing. 

Empressr

I have decided that I am going to use Empressr for our GLIP travel brochure.  I do not want to keep waiting too much longer, and I am not getting any additional feedback from members of my group.  On the empressr site, you are able to add pictures, music, and text to slides, just like you can on a powerpoint presentation.  I am going to go through and save a copy of every picture that everyone has submitted.  I am then going to see if I can narrow the pictures down to be only those related to the theme of Nature and History.  I know that a few students posted pictures related to sports, so I will most likely not be including those.  I am thinking about inserting a map as well with the different countries marked so a viewer can clearly see where around the world the pictures are coming from. 


I hope I do not end up completing this assignment completely on my own.  While I know that it will benefit me to work with a new website that I have not used before and to use pictures from around the world to create presentation, it does not benefit the other members of my group if I do it solely on my own.  I am going to begin it, and keep an eye on the GLIP site to see if any one else can help.

A wiki message from a group member!

I recieved a message from one of the GLIP group members in Russia today!!!  It was from a member who has not participated yet.  We exchanged messages a few times, with me clarifying the assignments for her.  She completed Phase I and Phase II.  She also commented back my post on the Forum.  It looks like we have a very active group member!!  I am very excited!  She is the first member to respond directly to anything that I have posted.  I assume that she was one of the students who had difficulty getting online, but maybe that problem has been fixed.  Atleast now, I may have someone to bounce ideas off of and another opinion to take into consideration.  I have already updated her boxes within the group table.  Slowly but surely our boxes are filling up. 

So far both students from NCSU have completed I and II.  3 of 4 students from Hawaii have completed I and II.  Both students from Ravenscroft (Raleigh) have completed I and II.  The one student from Dillard Drive completed I and II before he left the class.  1 of 3 from Russia has completed I and II.  The student from Bejing has completed Phase II.  The student from Turkey has completed Phase I and II.  Unfortunately, 0 of 3 students from Exploris have completed any of the assignments.

I am sure that each of these schools were made aware of the due dates and what not before the beginning of this GLIP assignment.  Other than technology problems, you would not expect there to be so many issues.  Hopefully they will get ironed out very soon.

Email from Co-Leader

I finally received an email from my co-leader.  In it he apologized for not contributing to the GLIP group but assures me that he is going to take a more active role.  Hopefully with 2 of us trying to solicit participation we will be able to get a lot accomplished!  My co-leader did go through and update our table to show the students who have participated.  We are now up to 9 of 16 have completed Phase I and 10 of 16 have completed Phase II!!!  I am very excited about this!!  That gives us a lot more information and pictures to work with!  The theme still seems to be the same with Nature and History, so I think I will pitch that to the group and see what they think.  Once we have found a theme, the next step will be selecting which pictures to use from each country.  Ideally, we will be able to get the people from each country to talk with each other and narrow their pictures down, then create a description of their countries as it is shown through their selected pictures.  If we can get different groups to do this, then it will simply be a matter of connecting everything together in the end for our travel brochure. 



Editted -> I posted to the Phase II forum asking for everyone's opinions on the Travel Brochure themes.  I also updated group member profiles while I was there.  I love reading about these new people from around the world!  I did put a comment on the top of main page asking for everyone to look at the forum.  This way no one who actually visits the site can say that they did not know to check the forum at the bottom. 

Wish I could email group members

I spent sometime today working on adding the links to students’ profiles.  It went easier than I originally thought it would.  By this point we are up to 7 of the 16 group members have completed their Phase I, but still only 4 have completed Phase II.  It is very disappointing.  In a way I wish that I had the emails for each of the group members.  I would create a gmail group for their emails, and could send out reminders.  I would email everyone in the group weekly with updates and encouragement to respond.  I do not know if it would improve the amount of participation, but it definitely could not hurt anything. 

I have looked through the posts from the students who have completed Phase II so far, and I love the pictures that they are posting.  There are pictures of places that I would love to see one day, a few with attached descriptions to their pictures.  There are a few questions listed for everyone to answer, but not many people seem to be doing so.  I wonder if I did.  I cannot remember off the top of my head, so I will need to go back and check.  So far everyone seems to be posting pictures that have to do with either nature or history.  We may be able to pull a theme from that for our travel brochure, but I am going to wait to see and not jump the gun. 

I may have figured out what program I want to use for our travel brochure.  I came across this website www.empressr.com .  This is presentation software that is very similar to Powerpoint.  The main differences are that it is online and some of the transitions are different.    I am going to keep looking for another possible technology to use, but if I cannot find anything, I will use this one.