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While at Illinois State University, I participated in a Study Abroad program with the Politics and Government Department on Human Rights in Peru. I volunteered to create a website based on the groups' experiences in the country, including a blog, photo galleries, resources from our classes, and itineraries. I used the University's software and guidelines, including ADA guidelines, to complete this project. |
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I took two Global History courses at Illinois State University. One on Human Rights in Africa and Latin America, and one on the Modern Middle East. My final project in the Latin America/Africa course was a website with resources on Human Rights, including books, articles, organization, films, and music. I was told to create a resource that would be useful to the teachers in the class. (Many students in Illinois State University's History Masters Program are High School teachers.) |
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Graduate Assistants in the History Department at ISU must take History 405, a course on Teaching in History. (I think this may no longer be required.) Our final project was to create an assignment for our "students" and then complete it. The project had to be on Gabriel Kolko's book The Anatomy of War and involve primary sources. I asked my professor if I could create a web project aimed at improving my "students'" research skills. The purpose of my project was to take the "students" through a research project from start to finish. |
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LIS 451: Introduction to Network Systems was a "hands-on introduction to technology systems for use in information environments. The course steps students through choosing, installing, and managing computer hardware and operating systems, as well as networking hardware and software."*
Our final project for the course was a community service project; my group set up a community computer lab at a local church. We nuked and formatted hard drives, uploaded operating systems, drivers, updates, and software, and set-up a computer network. Our professor set up a class wiki for our group, but we decided a website would be a better form of communication. (The wiki was not user-friendly.) We also had to give a final presentation on the project during finals. Because we had created a website instead of using the wiki, we were able to show the class exactly what steps we took while creating our lab.**
*Quotation from course catalog. |
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All students in the U of I's library science program have to take LIS 501: Information, Organization, and Access. One of our assignments was a group database project. The example given in class was a CD store. The assignment required a diagram, a series of tables, and a written explanation of the project. Most of the groups did CD and DVD databases. Our group also planned to do a DVD database but had difficultly getting into the project. While brainstorming, one of my group members, Corinne Michaels, noticed my cat's fascination with his toys and jokingly suggested we do a database of cat toys. That seemed like a good idea to the rest of us, and a lot more fun than a DVD store. I can only imagine what our professor thought when he read it. We did quite well on the assignment so he must not have thought we were too crazy. One of my group members, Ruth Whittington, was a computer scientist, and she created an impressive diagram to show the various relationships. I had the most experience writing so I composed our write-up and put everything online. Ruth and I then created the relational schema and sample data. |
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I took a course in college on html and php as one of my general education requirements. In addition to learning how to program, we also learned the basic history of the Internet and how it works.
For our final project, we were told to research a topic of our choice. My partner, Abby Weeks, and I decided to research fan fiction. We looked at copyright, warnings, disclaimers, fan fiction groups, types of fan fiction, ratings, and so forth. We also wanted to apply our knowledge by creating some fan fiction of our own. Since neither one of us wanted to write a story for the project, we decided to create a php quiz that would match people with their Star Trek Enterprise "partner," a TV show popular at the time. We included a disclaimer (acknowledgement that it violated copyright) and a warning that people might be paired with a member of the same sex or some other undesirable person. (This is common in fan fiction.) The write-up Abby and I posted about copyright and the other topics we researched was taken down when we graduated. As was our warning and disclaimer. But our quiz survived. It is currently hosted at a friend's fan fiction website.
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