We are five students from the New York metro area. We come from diverse homes, income brackets, and educational backgrounds. We are all different ages and at different points in our high school careers. Yet we decided to come together in the spirit of education and cooperation to enter the ThinkQuest competition. We are not doing this for school credit or anything of the sort. In creating this website, we merely seek to be more informed users of the ever-evolving Internet. We seek to educate others and, in so doing, educate ourselves. We planned, discussed, designed, researched, and wrote this website with minimal outside help. We communicated both through electronic means and face-to-face discussions. We are all grateful for this experience and, in addition to a better understanding of the importance and conceptual underpinnings of interactivity online, we have learn some important lessons, outlined below. In addition, each of our team members has written a short reflection on their experiences with ThinkQuest so that you can better understand our perspectives.

We feel it is always important to, after finishing something, take a step back and evaluate it. In reflecting on our experiences in ThinkQuest, we’d like to highlight four important lessons that we have learned from this project:

Communication is Key

Through this project, we’ve taken numerous steps to enhance communication amongst team members. Initially, as we had fluid discussions about our topic choice and site goals, we scheduled face-to-face meetings. However, these soon became difficult to schedule, as each of us is involved in many extracurricular activities. Because most of our work was electronic, we soon moved to electronic communication and held group discussions via email or an instant messaging system.

We used a two-tiered system of communication. Primarily, we used group emails and all content was emailed around for review by other team members. We also felt it was important to not force everyone to do everything, especially as this was the first time some team members had ever been involved in a web project at all. Therefore, when only two of us were working on a particular part of the project, we often spared others the gritty, often technical details of it. We found that this style of communication, in which everyone was involved in the big discussions but work was clearly compartmentalized, worked very well.

Work on Something Important

We cannot stress this enough. It was important for us, in picking a topic, to find one that was personally interesting. Creating a website was a months-long process that was labor-intensive and difficult. It was important for all of us to know at every stage that we were working on a topic that was globally relevant—more and more people are interacting in new ways online every day, many from regions that haven’t had internet penetration before—and to which we could contribute. The goal of creating a guide to new parts of the internet, technical and not, that was easy for all to understand was one that motivated us and kept us on track.

Planning is Imperative

After we decided our topic, we each discussed various parts of the site that we thought would be interested to us. We strove to give each person a section of research that they wanted to have, such that they would be motivated to complete it. Then we created organizational charts for the site, outlining, page by page, what would be in each page, how it contributed to our goals as a whole, and who would be in charge of completing it. This color-coded chart was agreed upon by the group and made it easy for us to know the status of each part of the site. We have also tried to emphasize interrelation in our site—for example, the case studies directly relate to concepts we discuss in our sections on history and interactivity today. This was by design. Planning our content in advance made it easy for us to highlight important connections in our work. Clearly assigning who was doing what parts made sure the project got completed in time.

Concept-Based, Compartmentalized Learning is Ideal

We know from personal experience how often many things change, online and offline. Yet we also know how some themes are recurring and present time and time again. We know that it is easiest to learn something by taking a big picture view to understand the broad implications, then by breaking it down into simple parts. This is exactly what we have done with our website. We have established the broad concept of interactivity online and broken it down for our visitors. We have created specific sections on the history of interactivity, for those who want to understand how it came about. We have written about the pros and the cons of recent trends online so that our visitors can be better informed about the impact of the changes. We have dedicated ourselves to writing in an entirely non-technical way, separating all the technical details into its own section for those interested in it. We have clearly defined emerging trends in interactivity and the technologies that support these trends. Lastly, we have shown how these technologies and trends are actualized in real-world examples through our use of case studies.

It is our belief that you can take whatever you’d like from our site because of this. If you are interested in one specific aspect of interactivity, whether it’s a particular case, like Wikipedia, a particular genre such as social news, the technologies that support interactivity, or the future or history of interactivity, we have a clearly defined section for you. For those inspired by our site to jump right in to learning about these important technologies, we’ve created a section for you as well. In our research, we’ve looked at the big picture and we’ve looked at the details. We think both are interesting. We encourage you to explore this exciting realm of interactivity and we believe our model of learning facilitates this.

Read our personal reflections and individual contributions here.