Initial thoughts on the Projects Database
The projects database at ITP is a powerful tool that can store a lot of information about current and past projects. By serving the information it contains to students, professors, and public venues, the database would be more widely used.
Greg Dorsainville and I are tackling the projects database at ITP. For those unfamiliar, the project database houses student project documentation. Initially it was intended that students would submit projects to the database regularly, but because of poor visibility and meager incentives, most students only submit projects when it is required of them, and the resulting documentation is often sparse and last-minute.
Another often discussed topic at ITP is the desire to see what other students are working on. There is no centralization of required documentation (each student has their own blog, and each professor has their own project submission guidelines), and this makes it difficult to track down all the work that students are completing each semester. There are many services that students can opt into (such as the stupid pet tricks tumblr site and the ITPFolio tumblr, the blog blender, and Ben Turner's XML file of blog RSS feeds), but all these services require additional effort to maintain or post to.
Currently, there are more projects in development that aim at sharing student skills, projects and knowledge. In our networking class right now, students are working on a "FloorSquare" application that will allow people to find other people with expertise in certain areas. Another student project, called Cork Board, will help students find like-minded individuals who are interesting in collaborating on projects (both for school and for fun). Furthermore, there is a new initiative that will allow students to submit their projects for display on screens in the halls and in the lobby (form here).
All of these projects and initiatives got us thinking... couldn't much of this information be found in the projects database, if only it were readily available?
The answer, in short, is YES.
Interviews and Brainstorming
First, Greg and I realized that without strong incentive to add projects to the database, students won't make the extra time to submit thorough documentation to the database. We tossed around the idea of serving up coursework to professors through the database, the idea being that if a professor required submission to the projects database, students would do it. However, at the graduate level mandatory busy work seems a touch pedantic, and greatly hinges on professor's follow-through. Another issue is that daily assignments (such as blog posts and p-comp labs) don't really belong in the projects database. This means that professors would still need to set up their own systems for online coursework submission, and we would only be creating an extra step of work for everyone. This idea was thus abandoned.
As mentioned above, there is a great desire in our community to see the projects of our peers. Thus we discussed the possibility of a community projects page. This page would not be dissimilar in form to the existing gallery page. However, rather than including only preselected works, this projects page would include all works (current and past) in the projects database. Furthermore, this projects page would be viewable by everyone (the ITP community as well as the general public), giving projects exposure and providing good reason to document well. Another important feature of this page is the ability to search via tags, making it easy for students to locate past projects with similar technologies to those they are working on implementing or researching.
This public blog is not really different than a blog bender, however, and it still requires extra effort on the part of the student to participate, without offering any real personal gain. After more brainstorming, Greg and I decided that an automatic, fully customizable portfolio generator would be a huge incentive for student participation in the projects database.
Students are required to document their work, but often the documentation is not very polished. The fields in the projects database encourage reflection and careful consideration of how to present your work, and the resulting content is perfect for portfolio abstracts and descriptions. We are currently working on a fully customizable portfolio script that will allow students to style their site using HTML and CSS (or, use a sleek, modern, pre-scripted template), and then watch their portfolio grow over the years. Since the portfolio script pulls from the projects database, having a stellar portfolio requires no additional work from students as long as they update the database regularly with good documentation. Also, when it comes time for a show or thesis proposal, students will save time since their projects will already be in the database.
When we spoke to Dan O'Sullivan about the projects database, he warned us that many students have tackled the database "beast" in the past, and ultimately nothing has stuck. This is why we feel that incentives for use are especially important, and we hope that an auto-generated portfolio will peak student interest. Dan also mentioned to us that we might try a blog-blender or some such aggregation. We did consider this, but as it requires students to opt in and perpetual maintenance, we find encouraging regular use of the projects database to be perhaps a more appealing route.
We also spoke to Kate Watson about her work with digitizing and organizing old thesis projects and papers. She had a lot of valuable insights regarding the importance of documenting projects for future generations. I loved hearing her thoughts on the historical narratives that documents tell. We also spoke about the challenge of implementing good tagging systems, as well as the sustainability of digital projects moving into the future.
We also contacted Dan Schiffman regarding his Big Screens class site which pulls information about student projects from the projects database. He mentioned that his code was hacked together from existing PHP scripts, and we are looking forward to investigating this further.
Finally, we have also been discussing this project and its various iterations at length with Tom Igoe and the other members of our Understanding Networks class, all of whose comments have been extremely helpful and insightful.
