Team Design Entry – Edutainment Blog

For the most part, our group wrote the majority of our content without consulting the schema.  We found the schema was generally challenging to follow and not entirely intuitive when writing the blog post. It was easier to write the post in a word document, allowing for the organization of all the scientific content we wanted to include, and then match that to the schema elements.  We felt that the schema could have been better organized and laid out in a way that is more easy to follow when writing.  This could include listing elements related to each other next to each other, or putting them in places that they would more likely be found.  For example, a misconception would often be seen at the beginning of a post, or the background paragraph.  One solution we mentioned was to list the global elements twice inside of the schema.  They would still be listed underneath the global elements part of the schema, but would also appear inside of the background and answer elements in an order that would make sense for a blog post.  This way, someone looking at the schema for the first time could see how elements fit together for this particular genre.  The template file could also be improved by having all required and related elements built into the template. For example, it was not clear looking at the template schema that a technical principle was required in the background section. It was not until an error message appeared that it should be included in the background.

Another change that we feel might be useful is to either eliminate or redefine the “specific topic” element.  In the schema, it is literally defined as a “specific technical principle” which may be redundant since “technical principle” is already an element.  This may help make the schema more clear. Additional, the first section header should be a title for the blog post or the overarching question that all the individual section headers work to answer.

We also found that the numbering attributes under elements such as “technical principle” and “important idea” were not very useful to include.  In fact, numbering the elements could be rather distracting as adding another element into an already written post would mean going through and renumbering the elements already written.  This could make the blog post easier to write when using the schema.

Additionally, a separate italicize element could have been useful, since there were some cases where a word or phrase that is not necessarily an important idea could be highlighted by being italicized.

On a more positive note, some of us found the schema to provide an outline in a clear way. The combination of section headers and technical principles allowed you to put your skeleton down immediately, and then flesh it out. Despite the frustrations of mandatory / dis-allowed elements, the schema still has a very usable heuristic.