Greetings, all! Prepare to be amazed as you read my reviewing of our project contract in real time.
First, to the mission statement! Okay, actually, the mission statement mostly has generalities. So it goes. Let us evaluate it, anyway. We certainly did elucidate readers on the educational system in Ontario. Regarding the history of censorship, that mostly disappeared for a more modern description of censorship, but I find that to be acceptable. As I recall, I could not find any comprehensive histories of Canadian censorship, and it is likely for the best that I lacked an excuse to be even more long-winded. I would say we did well in terms of treating both sides with respect, sans our analyses, which were meant to be our own personal opinions. I ragged on Pullman quite a bit in my analysis, though there was also specified in the mission statement to be such a section, so that works out well. I cannot find much else in the mission statement I can evaluate, save for perhaps some descriptions of the ideals of how we were to treat the case, which I am not objective enough to judge.
For the digital tools section, I would say that we ended up using those tools that we needed. For instance, Audacity, YouTube, and iMovie were the three completely unused tools, as we did not have video or audio recordings of interviews, but rather transcripts (or email correspondence, both work). We did not end up communicating much, instead with Lauren and I focusing on our own work, so Google Docs was not used overmuch. We ended up using a Coggle for navigation and not planning purposes on the home page, and then this was cut, but Coggle did make a temporary appearance on our website. The other tools were used as expected.
We then get into the section entitled “Website Organization/Milestones.” This section ended up rather changed in terms of organization in reality, and even more changed in terms of deadlines. While I may have met a few of these deadlines, I mostly just hung out at Crickets Coffee, spending way too much money on tea and bagels, as we neared the due date for our website’s first draft, writing all of the things that should have been done weeks before. Such is life. The website looks good now, so I will say that my procrastination worked out in the end. I suspect listing organization differences would be pointless and tedious, so let us just say that, while we kept with the same structure for the overall headings, pages did end up being moved around.
Now, to the pages themselves. Looking at things, every single page that we had allotted to do, both Lauren and I, was included in the final website, sans a page on the complainant, which was provisional in the contract and ultimately information we were unable to gather. Some pages, such as “Primary Sources,” ended up being split into many separate pages with different goals, such as specifically providing school documents or dealing with the media response to the case. We also added a page on “The Taboo of Atheism” that we never predicted in our contract, and many pages have expanded degrees of content, though none are lacking as far as this section is concerned.
The “Additional Milestones” page was mostly just an extension of the previous section, and was concerned with due dates, so needless to say they were flexible, though due dates such as those for the completed and draft websites were approximately met.
Now, to the Division of Labor. One can tell than Lauren started this section of the contract, because I am the sort of person who would have spelled it “labour.” We did trade some amount in terms of who was doing what whilst in the midst of creating the website. Namely, I ended up writing the page on Philip Pullman, whereas Lauren took on the viewpoints of outside organizations, although said organizations appear throughout our website on both of our pages. We also ended up editing and proofreading our own work instead of each other’s, which was probably easier on both of us. Navigation ended up being somewhat more Lauren’s duty, despite being listed as being one of mine, though our navigation was not particularly complicated and was primarily just the bar at the top of our website.
I did indeed end up doing my “biography” page, which became my half of the “About the Authors,” as well as my allotted summary of the Canadian educational system, although that page ended up becoming strictly on the province of Ontario. My StoryMap for additional challenges is present as well, as are the inevitable editing and citations for my half. The history of Halton/Southern Ontario was the only part of this which ended up with significant alterations. Ultimately, I did do an history of Halton page, but because Halton is a Regional Municipality and has no real community history because it is primarily an administrative division. Thus, said page ended up being completely replaced with a page on Halton’s demographics, which is ultimately much more useful than an history of administrative boundaries. Ultimately, this was the only significant alteration of a page from what was originally listed in my half of this section of the contract.
I came into looking at our project contract with very low expectations, knowing quite a bit had changed since then, but it ultimately seems that while the content of pages may have changed a great deal, the outline in our project contract was surprisingly unchanged overall.
So, with this, I am all but done. Woohoo! Click here to a Google Doc with our project contract.
