This Monday I met with Owen and we discussed our plans for the week. One task we worked on was refining a PowerPoint presentation he made with some common things for students to double-check in their work. We talked about how we wanted to present our Historical Era Link Collection and how best it would be to allow additions by the UCF History Department faculty.
After some research, I discovered an open-source tool called WorkFlowy, which functions much like a Google Doc but allows for interaction without the need for users to sign up first. Owen and I agreed this would be the best option for the project. We also talked about some other content projects we want to get started on soon. We followed up our meeting with an email to Dr. Snyder and agreed to meet with her next Monday to go over some of our completed content so that she can approve anything that will be added to the History Lab.
The rest of this week, I continued to work on our existing content projects in preparation
for our meeting Monday. I believe the sources widget and infographic I created last week are ready to be presented to Dr. Snyder. The Historical Era Link Collection is something that I will probably be continuing to add to as time goes on, just because it does have a rather immense scope. I’ve noticed that my curated links have tended to err a little Anglocentric, so I’m working to ensure I find more diverse media to add. Currently, there are over 100 links in the collection, which has grown exponentially as Owen and I decided to add a ‘dramatization’ category to highlight some of the more accurate works of period drama and historical fiction available. Owen and I also discussed possibly using hashtags to allow for easier subject searching, but we haven’t implemented anything as of yet. We’ll discuss it further with Dr. Snyder and work with her to figure out how we are going to present it to the faculty for their additions.
Thus far, I'm feeling great about this internship. Owen and I are working together well and getting a lot done which is gratifying. I'm hoping we can complete the majority of the content related projects before we being working one-on-one with students. As Kermit and Fozzy sang, "opportunity knocks once, let's reach out and grab it, together we'll nab it!" (You sang that too, didn't you?)