Learner #2: Notes from VizAbility session

Learner #2 first went to the culture section. Unlike learner #1, she listened to the entire introduction. "I don’t think I know what they’re talking about . . ." she mused. She didn’t listen to entire interviews though. She had to be told how to navigate through the introduction section. She looked through all 20 of the Idea Log examples, spending about a second on each one. "That’s pretty cool," she said. Observing the warm-ups, she again commented, "You know, I have no idea what I’m doing here."

The next section to be visited by Learner #2 was Drawing. She looked at the hand and did the whole hand-drawing segment. At the end, it became apparent that she had interpreted the instructions to mean that she should draw only the outline of her hand, without filling in the details. Therefore the outline she drew looked very different from the example on the screen, and she was disappointed. She looked through the gallery of previous students’ comments about the hand-drawing exercise and seemed interested, chuckling at some of their notes.

The next area visited was the Between Spaces segment of the Drawing section. She scanned through the images but didn’t try to draw them as the software suggested. Then she moved to Made In the Shade. She did some of the exercises, one incorrectly and the others correctly. Then she went to the Imagining section. She needed the instructions explained, but after they had been elucidated she quickly proceeded to get all of the introductory 2D x 1 exercises correct. When she got one wrong and the incorrect honking sound buzzed at her, she exclaimed, "It’s so mean!"

At this point she went and found the music and checked out all of the choices. She loved the salsa ("Oh this is cool!"). With the music playing, she went to the Guided Fantasy section. She then turned off the music to do the virtual walk through the house. She sat back and listened to the house vignette, making it about halfway through before switching to the Haiku section. She listened to a few of the Haikus.

Next she went to the worlds subsection of the Imagining/Guided Fantasy segment. She listened to the whole first exercise of that section, writing down observations as she went. The text that she wrote down follows:

rainy night

cars drive by

someone is looking for help

someone gets out of a car

walking up some stairs

looking for the source of a sound

cutting fruit, putting ice in a cup

someone got shot

She listened to about half of the second worlds exercise. This is what she wrote:

carnival, kids playing

car or truck starts, drives away

walking at night, jungle animals

Jurassic park?

waterfall or river

When she had finished the exercises, she was disappointed that the "answer" (i.e. what the image-less sounds were supposed to be describing) was not given.

Next, Learner #2 went to the Magic Theater section. She tried to click on the images arrows to make them go back and forth and clicked on the music choices a lot too. Like Learner #1, however, she didn’t attempt to type in any text. Instead, she experimented getting new pictures for a while and then went on to the Seeing section. She looked at the Flash-Sketching segment and tried one, but when she clicked <flash> it didn’t always flash up an image. Eventually she discovered that you had to hold the mouse down for a while before a flash occurred. "That’s kind of cool," she concluded.