By Jasmine Clark
In my last post I wrote about the project that I would be coordinating along with my fellow resident librarian, Urooj Nizami, and CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow, Alex Wermer-Colan. Since then we have spent our time coordinating, planning, and getting organized. We are currently using a Shared Drive within Google to organize shared documents and folders and have drafted a Google Doc project plan that will be transferred to JIRA in more detail as we move forward. We have split the project up into four preliminary phases, with each of us taking on the role of coordinator for at least one phase. As we began to flush out these phases in more detail, a few areas stood out to us as presenting particular challenges. I will discuss two of those here: accessibility and pedagogy.
Access
Previously, before being joined by Urooj and Alex, I had a meeting with a Student Services Coordinator at Temple University’s Disability Resources and Services. During that meeting I learned more about universal design and issues surrounding access. I was given a number of very useful resources on topics like captioning and audio description and began looking into issues like the placement of captions in VR or considering color impaired viewers. There is research being done, but there is much to consider when discussing accessible VR design. I am currently looking into better understanding Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and am also reading more about the work of The AbleGamers Charity.
Pedagogy
One aspect of this project that we are further flushing out is its audience. We currently feel that it would be best to design with a high school audience in mind, and aim to create a module that could be used as a supplemental tool by high school teachers. This, of course, will require input from individuals familiar with state standards, curriculum, and course work. We currently plan to reach out to the school of education, as well as other potential stakeholders, to see if we can receive direction or aid in the pedagogical segment of this project. Ideally, we’d be able to produce a teaching guide along with the finished module, but that is to be further flushed out and explored as we move forward. We have created a basic set of learning objectives and know that we want to communicate the mission of the Blockson, as well as basic archival etiquette. We are also considering how our pedagogical aims will impact the module layout and activity design.
As we move forward, expect future posts about this project to be written by Urooj Nizami as well. We are moving towards beginning the photogrammetry process and look forward to sharing more about our work process.