Been busy, just not here...

I'm in my second term now at Kingston University, and as expected, I've been pretty busy... even as a part-time student. In the last few weeks I've even acquired an amazing new internship so I'm busier than ever. I've been thinking again about all the different ways I contribute online (or have stopped contributing when it comes to this blog), I have a bunch of little blogs here and there... even a new website and twitter account that I created to support my previous freelance endeavors (though this may have to change again due to new opportunities). It's my hope to evaluate all of these identities so see how I can improve them and use them. Someday I do need to reign all of this in!

It recently occurred to me that I have been participating pretty regularly online with a very small group of people and we had been keeping our interaction private. So, contrary to what I would normally do, I wasn't sharing interesting insights and thoughts with a broad community, but rather a small group of two other people (and by sharing I mean via blog form, I'm not including Twitter in this because I am pretty consistent with the microblogging). Last term I began my course in the first of my Experience Design modules. I formed a group with two other people and I think it's been one of the most positive group experiences I ever had. We've continued this term as the same group +1 and I think we're even better than before. During the entire process we were encouraged to keep a blog, mostly as a way for our instructors to keep check on what we were doing. We are using Posterous (which is a fantastic group blogging tool!) to share articles, thoughts, brainstorms, and even to sort of archive our progress as we go.

Last term we kept our blog password protected, this was ok for us then, though now that we've added a new member to our team, and now have created a new blog, we thought it might be nice to open up the blog as a sort of "archive" of our project. I've removed the password. It may not be relevant or interesting to the entire world, but maybe somebody might find value in our research, who knows?

This term we've started a new blog with a new project and a new group member, and this we decided to open up the blog right away. We're not entirely sure how this might benefit us through our research as it is still a platform meant for a small group of people... but I guess it's a little experiment for me in if we could benefit from transparency in the development of our research project. Maybe it doesn't matter? Maybe our little corner of the internet is fine as it is? I guess we'll just have to see!

So here it is... where I've been spending most of my time online since last Autumn:

Experience Design I Blog - This is sort of an archive of the work we've done last term. Our final design idea and prototype was a BlackBerry application (yes, BlackBerry because our research showed us that this is the primary mobile device of our target audience!) Of course there's so much more we could have and wanted to do, but I think we did a lot in the few months that we had.

Experience Design II Blog - This is our current work. It's a lot more technical and a lot more interactive this term. At the current moment we're looking at creating a projected, large form, interaction for school children, introducing them to cultures around the world. There's many moving parts here and it's very exciting. We're also happy to have a graphic designer join our group... I had a few frustrating attempts at graphic design last term so I'm especially pleased by our newest member's skills!