Our task was to create a poster to highlight a singular piece of technology. This was for ETC 421 Research and Practice in Technical Documentation. We were tasked with creating a paper detailing the particulars of the artifact, and to inform the design of a poster to be presented in a multi disciplinary campus-wide panel. I chose to investigate learning management systems, and how they evolved from simple tools, along with how they are used.
The report I created as a companion to this uses the APA format, as required by the assignment. I include it here for your reference:
This report was curated in anticipation of being interviewed by professors from other disciplines, many without the specialized knowledge that we had. This was our intended audience of our work. We also had to keep in mind that other students would also be circulating, evaluating our posters, and hopefully the poster would generate enough interest in our work to invite further questions as well.
Our campus had recently embraced a new Learning Management System (LMS), and it was causing some consternation among both staff and students. I highlighted the fact that all learning management systems were simply built upon tools that many had used in the past, and this was only a new combination of these tools.
This poster was an early draft. I based it upon our current LMS, and connected the parts of the menu to the much older versions of where they came from. This poster was many elements in one line, and seemed to function well. However it lacked visual interest, having many dark and black images, and was overly simplistic in view.
The final poster is more visually appealing, the large black boxes have been reduced to one, and the lines of the poster allow for more natural scanning of the information. The use of the elements of our current LMS are kept, but it is displayed in a design that is more easy to understand and comprehend.
