I enjoyed Marty’s presentation and channeling of Jeff this week, sitting in class I thought I “got it” when we were talking about it. I was baffled by the partner exercise part, but saw it’s purpose after it was done. When I sat down to do it, I simply didn’t get much out of the exercise. A caveat: I tried to do all of the prewriting on the computer, in MS OneNote, which allows free form text that can be moved and rearanged and grouped with drawing tools etc (available free as part of MS Office 2007 get it at iuware). This perhaps dampened my creativity during phase 1. Upon looking back at it I think this may have been a problem because as I brainstorm and ideate I usually like to walk around and scribble on white boards. That aside, the ideas just seemed dull, and the initial research curve very high because I didn’t know very much about the topic. It seemed like essentially I would have had to invest 15-20 hours researching in order to do some “proper” prewriting, which obviously given the time constraints of the assignment was impossible.

I never got much of a chance to do work on narrowing things down and organizing them because of the relatively small number of ideas I had. I had them organized more or less already.

Where did I go wrong? What were your experiences?