<em>Sczerba worked closely with the course instructors, Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman, to develop and refine the Google Earth tools and to train students in building tours.</em>

1. Describe your role in this project.

I work for a faculty support center at Johns Hopkins University called the Center for Educational Resources (CER). As the center’s multimedia developer, I aided Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman with the technical and logistical aspect of the project. This included determining a viable technology for the project tours and developing resource guides that aided student tour creation.

2. What tasks did you perform at various stages of the project?

Initially we had to find a program that would be freely available (both in access and cost) for students to use with a relatively low learning curve. Google Earth was selected since it allows tour creation with rich media and text mapped to the earth and is free to download on PCs and Macs. I then created a template tour, set up with pre-made place markers as a starting point for the students, and content layout templates for the appearance of the tour’s place marks. After those two resources were set, a well-written and comprehensible workflow had to be created. I chose to create both a visual and textual workflow to clearly express the actions that needed to happen and at what stages. The final step was to present this workflow to the students in a training workshop so that they could see how it all came together and do it themselves.

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3. What sorts of interactions did you have with faculty, students, and other members of the project community over the course of the project?

I met with Elizabeth Rodini and Ben Tilghman initially for the project’s requirements gathering, then later to introduce them to the proposed solution. A colleague of mine from the CER also joined these meetings to offer ideas. I was also available by email to answer questions as they came up, especially during the approval process of the workflow, as it needed to be as simple to follow as possible. I also held a training workshop with Professor Rodini for the students. I continued to be available for questions by email as the students worked on their projects.

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4. What particular challenges did this project present?

This project required that every place mark on a tour should include images at that location. The only way to do this in Google Earth was to code it yourself. Certain aspects of using Google Earth were easy to master but customizing the appearance of the place marks requires HTML programming knowledge. Despite the fact that most students nowadays have grown up with the Internet, we have found very few know how to use HTML. Our solution utilized an online HTML editor that had a prebuilt HTML template loaded in it. When the students were ready to create the content for their place marks, they simply copied the content from a Word document then pasted it in the HTML editor to generate the code. That code was then pasted into their Google Earth place mark, circumventing the need for the students to learn HTML.

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5. What lessons did you learn from this project and what might you do differently in the future?

A more ideal solution may have been to create an application that would generate the tours without necessitating the use of Google Earth. This would have taken more time and resources to build than we had but it could have been a useful application for other courses as well. It was disappointing realizing that Google Earth didn’t have an HMTL editor built in and at the time there wasn’t an application that suited our needs. Perhaps when this course is offered again, there will be an ideal solution available that would allow students to create tours, focusing on the content rather than the technology. If not then perhaps we will have time to build one ourselves and share it.