I think I’ve actually finished my research. After our class discussion on Thursday, I decided to limit my most in-depth research to 1948-1979. Within these years, Geneseo transitioned to a liberal arts college (1962) and later substantially revised the Common Core general education requirements(throughout 1976-79).

These two events are of the most interest to me, and I’ve yet to decide how much information about the curriculum prior to 1948 I will include. I also found a flip-book plugin (WP Booklet) that I will experiment with next week after I start scanning the relevant pages from course catalogs, Faculty Senate minutes, etc.

Additionally, I decided to present the general history of Geneseo solely through a timeline, using TimelineJS. I think this is a more visually interesting way to display this information, and it gives me further encouragement to incorporate images. I currently have a draft of the text for the timeline completed, and on Monday, I’m meeting with the special collections librarian to go through images from the archives that I plan to incorporate into the timeline. I’ll also be looking for anything that could be used or incorporated into a header for the website.

This week we have two interviews scheduled, both with professors who frequently teach the Humanities. While our first interview was great (better than I expected), I would like to be a little more organized and have more scripted questions for these interviews–I expect little variation will be necessary between the two. I’ll also be scheduling firm times for two other interviews: one with a music professor who teaches several general education classes and is fairly new to Geneseo and the other with a student. I would also like to start preparing for these interviews this week (although they likely won’t happen until next week), since we are approaching these interviews from very different perspectives than the others.

I’d like to have a completed draft of the timeline and some form of the flip-book of gen. ed. requirements up on the website by class on Thursday. I’m imagining some amount of text will accompany the flip-book, but I will base that on how the flip-book comes out. As reflected in the title of this post, I feel like I’ve been making actual progress this week and that’s really encouraging. I will also be perfectly happy if I never have to go through Faculty Senate minutes ever again.