EDDL 5131: Week 4: Activity 2: Information Architecture

First I copied the information from the file “Moose” (2019, CC BY-SA 3.0) into Word.  I changed the information in the following steps:

1.  I read through the introductory paragraph.
2. I reordered the paragraphs to match the order of the introductory paragraph.
3. I assigned each paragraph a heading.
4. I reduced and simplified the content.
5. Latin names were italicized.
6. I opened a new Google Site, and created a title, including a picture with Creative Commons licensing.
7. I created a table of contents.
8. I created headings and pasted the content into text boxes below each heading.
9. I added pictures, and included hyerlinks on each for picture sources.  I moved the pictures to the right side so as not to interrupt the flow of left-justified headings and text.  I also felt this increased the readability of some paragraphs so they were not too wide.
10. I added hyperlinks to Wikipedia for other animals mentioned in the text.
11. I added callouts below some of the pictures.

You can find my completed website here: Moose

My font choice was a non-serif font (Verdana) which I chose because I liked its readability on-screen.  Differentiating between readability of fonts on screen and on printed text was an interesting learning point for me while reading  The Brain on Books (Cohn, J., 2021)

After first publishing the site, I continued to make changes to reduce the size of the paragraphs according to Gutierrez’s (2014, December 4) recommendations.  I broke up one section into two sub-sections, and added more pictures on the right side for other paragraphs.  I also changed the theme to focus the reader’s eye on the text where the contrast was enhanced between the black text and the white background.

In accordance with Gutierrez’s (2014, December 4) recommendations, all headings are one size and colour, as are all paragraph text.  One thing I would have liked to have changed was the background colour of the callout boxes, which I could not do on Google Sites.

The final changes I made were to break up longer paragraphs using bullet points and spacing according to the recommendations of  Text Design for Online Learning  (Webster, 2018).  This made it easier to access different sub-topics within the paragraphs.

References:

Cohn, J. (2021). The Brain on Books: What the neuroscience of reading can tell us about reading on screens In Skim, Dive, Surface : Teaching Digital Reading. West Virginia University Press, 91-124. https://ezproxy.tru.ca/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=2899519&site=eds-live&scope=site&ebv=EB&ppid=pp_91

Gutierrez, K. (2014, December 4). Keep eLearning readable or don’t bother using text at all [Blog post]. Shift: Disruptive eLearning. https://www.shiftelearning.com/blog/keep-elearning-readable-or-dont-bother-using-text-at-all

Webster, K. (2018). Text design for online learning. In, EDDL 5131 Multimedia in the Curriculum [Online course]. http://courses.olblogs.tru.ca/eddl5131-jan18/week-2-text/text-design-for-online-learning/