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...