Last month an open source desktop application for project management was given a trial. Open source can often demonstrate some advantages due to flexibility in letting the user set up a more personalized system. For example, the D2L is very nice and very fancy but the software design assumes that every user is exactly alike. In fact users have their own learning styles and their own way of setting goals. Open Workbench is nice for people who like to meet goals by setting tasks to finish before moving on to the next step. For people who are task goal oriented rather than time deadline oriented to finish up tasks Open Workbench is an attractive choice. (The download is free from Source Forge.net.)
learning environment, learning repository, and analytics modules
create a basic first stage, high level plan
project lifecycle stages software selection, D2L review, and plan design
My first step was to go to the Tools, click on options and do some customizing. For example every time I work with Workbench the “tips” box is on the top of all the windows with information that is nice to know but I prefer going to “Help” or the Manual when I want to know something. Having the “tip” box open can be a time waster, especially if you are networked with study partners that like to know those kinds of detail before really becoming a serious of new software applications. Maybe that is not a part of a High Level Plan for most users but I like to hide anything that encourages procrastination or takes focus off of a project that needs to get finished. To be honest the tip box opens too often. I wanted to try setting up three projects and did not want to deal with the tips box.
I decided to take a bottoms up approach to developing a high level plan. I have wanted to set up one of my study projects so I could sort out the tasks that needed to be done and the order they needed to done. I wanted to find out how I can integrate my study partners into the system but first I want to get myself organized on a per project basis in order to analyze if this software is really going to meet my needs so the testing the external networking connections will come later.
Keeping in touch with partners is easy and downloading resources can be done from my hard drive with no problem. The Dependency Definition is easy to use for task or resource dependent actions. Those are examples of details from the bottom up.
For the study project I want to organize in the software I do not need anything fancy like an iteration set up. I want to set up a regular water fall system with a flow chart. That means Step 1 to Step 2 to step 3 and so on. I reported last week that Workbench is not intuition based software that a manual is needed. I suggested that Workbench would be fine for a large project with a variety of interactive parts but for the type of Learning Modules the school is looking for this is not the software that would be the best choice. I am used to intuitive software and I have been trying to use Workbench intuitively (which I should not do but I am not used to using a manual). I am considering using the D2L for this project. Even all the bells and whistles are distracting intuitive user friendly software is the kind might work out the best for me.
References
MSDN. (2010). Modeling the Architecture of a Software System. Visual Studio 2010. Accessed 2 May 2012 from <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd490886.aspx>
Workbench software application. (2012). Source Forge. n.d. Web. Accessed 3 May 2012 from <http://sourceforge.net/projects/openworkbench/>.
