Raise the bar... from Outlook!

I was playing around with iTunes U this morning, and in the process, I created an RSS feed for our blog. This means that if you have Office 2007, you can receive any new posts or comments to this blog as an email that shows up in your RSS Feeds area in Outlook 2007. Of course you could also subscribe to the feed using any other feed reader as well.

Here's the feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RaisingTheBar?format=xml

How to subscribe:
All you have to do is right click on RSS Feeds over in the Mail Folders area of Outlook, and then copy and paste the feed above into the dialog that shows up. Once you do this, it'll create a new folder called Raising the Bar, and all of the posts will show up there. The picture shows what mine looks like.



Also, if you're interested in knowing, I used Feedburner to burn the feed.

Incubation...

In one way or another, History 1700 is coming along.

If pressed to say where in the development process our current position falls, I would say we are smack dab in the middle of the Design phase and in the early parts of Development. More specifically, we are still collecting a lot of content (I would say we have around 10-15 percent) through email and design meetings. We are also analyzing content, working on storyboard and course design plans, and inching toward the creation of a first prototype. Marianne has really been working hard to outline the course as she envisions it, which has resulted in a fair amount of good content.

It is on the fleshing-out of part one and creating a prototype that we are going to try to concentrate our efforts in the next little while. But even as we do that, there is still a lot of design to be done. We're hoping that by creating parts of the course, new design ideas will come together.

I'm deciding that it would be good to define (for me) more precisely the activities involved in the "incubation" period (not an official term, just one that was thrown around at one point). I suppose "content analysis" was the more-fitting, decided-upon term. It seems difficult to have an "incubation" period without the project getting off track a little bit. Does having "content analysis" time inadvertently put the project on the back burner for awhile? And maybe that's not such a bad thing, either, if it provides the opportunity for a new look at the content and design of the course when you get back to it.

And how long does it take before a good design "hatches?"

Just some questions...