Today’s Plan:
- Gantt Charts
- Project Time
- Homework
Gantt Charts
I’ve asked that the proposal portion of your Project One contain a gantt chart visualizing what you plan on doing for the second project. For instance, you might come up with the following:
- Do tutorial one for InDesign
- Do tutorial two for InDesign
- Send Santos tutorial results
- Meet with church volunteers
- Take photographs for flyer
- Design flyer for upcoming bake sale
- Send flyer to volunteer coordinator
In the proposal I expect to have links to specific tutorials. And perhaps you cannot find a real world client–that’s fine. But you get my point: I want you to lay out a 3 week project.
Today we are going to learn how to take a list like the one above, input it into Excel, and use a simple algorithm to produce a visualization.
We are going to use Ablebits’ tutorial for making a gantt chart in Excel. I expect this to take 15-25 minutes (though it might take longer).
Homework
Please remember that we are peer-reviewing drafts of your proposals Tuesday. I’d like you to have a complete proposal (see our Project One workspace for more information). In short, the proposal should be business formatted (single-spaced, block paragraphs, written in active-voice) and contain at least four sections:
- An Overview or Summary
- A Job Research section that includes job postings data presented in tables and a discussion of the results
- A Proposal section that
- Argues, based on the previous research discussion, for what you want to learn/document
- Identifies what Deliverables will be produced
- Includes a gantt chart mapping out progress milestones
I will leave it to you to figure out how to take the chart out of Excel and insert it in your document. There’s a few ways to do this. If you are struggling, then think path of least resistance (take a screen grab, crop it, viola).
In constructing your Gantt chart, please remember that we are working on Project Two for 3 weeks–from Friday Sept 14th to Friday Oct 7th. During that time period, I will assign minimal homework (most of which will be reading an essay a week as we have been doing). I am giving you an opportunity to write your own syllabus. Let me know if you need help finding quality tutorials or are unsure what you could produce as a deliverable!
I originally intended for us to read and discuss Katz’s “Ethic of Expediency” on Tuesday, but it is a rather long and challenging reading. Since you are in the throws of a major project, I’m not going to assign any reading this weekend.
