I had a hell of a time this semester with my Information Architecture II class. It's one of the classes that is for the major I am in currently and it is something that I do for a living. So, I thought it should be a snap. Did I ever think wrong. Information Architecture I was all about HTML, so I figured II would be much of the same. I was wrong. It was all about Systems Analysis and Design. Otherwise known in the IT and Business worlds as SDLC. I put the book we used for the class over to the left. I am not selling it back either. It's actually got quite a bit of useful information in it that I can transfer over to the current job.
The worst part about this class was that it was all group work. Weekly group assignments, and a term group project. Getting five people with five different schedules together is not the easiest thing to do. One of our group members missed so many classes he was dropped from the class. He didn't do a whole lot anyway, so it wasn't anything all that major. But it just pissed us off that we were doing all the work at the time while he was just riding along. I will say this, thank god for
Google Docs. Without it we would have been dead in the water on all of our assignments. We were able to work miles away from each other and all be editing and collaborating on the documents in real time. The class wanted us to use Visio, we used Google's Draw. There was a learning curve, but in the end it worked out well. We even noticed a couple other groups starting to use Google Docs after we told them that we never actually "meet" up. We just did everything over the internet and that it was working out well for us.
But, today was better because I turned in our final group project for L&I Sci 340... and because I'm done with that class.
Well, another semester has gone by. The bad: I ended up having to take less than an A for the first time in my college corsework. The good: I didn't fail. This was a bitch of a semester. See that first class there. The one with the B+. I worked harder on that class than anything else I've worked on before and I still managed to squeak out a good grade. I dealt with the following: group work, group members not showing up, getting everyone together, figuring out we needed to use Google docs to collaborate, times and schedules for everyone, work, home, life in general. All of that in a class that decided there was weekly group work and a term group project.