Evolution of the Native Bridge

Today, we received the initial information on WebJunction. Dr. Roy handed out the WebJunction brochure and gave us a general idea of what we are to do in building a Native bridge.

Over Spring Break, we are to look at the WebJunction content areas and come back with what we think needs to be done. Many of our class members will be visiting the Texas Libraries Association (TLA) Conference over Spring Break and will be coming back with some ideas to share.

We might consider Dr. Greg Cajete’s Information Seeking Model for Indigenous Peoples as we approach this project. At some point, we might take on various roles in completing our task. Dr. Cahete describes the roles of Artist/Poet, Warrior/Hunter, Shaman/Priest, and Philosopher/Teacher. The person in each role helps a community, including a community building a virtual space, find balance.

Our audience are staff and users of Tribal community libraries and other technology centers. These individuals are professionals and mostly community people who are interested in learning computers and teaching skills to the Native community.

We discussed various possible design elements, such as the possibility of including clan or guardian animals. We also plan to follow indigenous etiquette by introducing ourselves to our audience, including posting photographs and biographies of the team on the Web Site. While it might be nice to have audio clips in one or more Native languages, this task might best be accomplished in a future revision of the site.

• Amy Alcott -- Condensing and Redesigning the Buying Guide page
• Daniel Alonzo, TA -- Creating the Home page and second-layer template; Combining all elements
• Suzette Davidson -- Condensing and Redesigning the Policies and Practices page
• Mary Ettle -- Condensing and Redesigning the Technical Resources page
• Elise Hill -- Condensing and Redesigning the Learning Center page
• Becky Kyle -- Condensing and Redesigning the Glossary; Recording the progress of the the Native Brige project
• Jennifer Shakespear -- Redesigning the Sign-in page; Condensing and Redesigning the About Us and Contact pages
• Christina Thompson -- Condensing and Redesigning the Community Center page

We also began discussing the following design concepts:

• Bridge
• Oksale Website's circle
• Clan System use to illustrate topics
• Game element – Dr. Roy suggested gambling
• Turn it into a treasure hunt

We can use any one of these concepts or come up with our own in addition. Colors are colors of the earth, sky, and nature.

We have adopted Dr. Roy’s dog, Sheila, as our Rez Dog mascot. Sheila is a 10 year old Australian Shepherd who likes popcorn and gets excited watching basketball games. Dr. Roy will be asking Jim Northrup, a Native author, if we can use one of the names for the rez dogs in his stories. Of the names mentioned in Northrup’s stories, we liked Speed Bump the best.

Each of the students drew what we thought our group’s intro page should look like. The concept was similar---a train on tracks. Elise, our artist, worked out the combined drawing on the chalkboard with contributions and refinements from the rest of the class.

We also began to work on the ‘train hub/game board’ for our navigation page. This would be a wheel with WebJunction’s Content Areas as spokes. This is similar to the Native Medicine Wheel and should be a comfortable design for most of our Native audience.

The individual content pages would be ‘depots’ or ‘stations’ that provide help explaining WebJunction to our Native audience. The top menu bar would be the main WebJunction areas with the area selected highlighted so folks would not get lost in the links.

We developed our Mission Statement: "The mission of the Native bridge to WebJunction.org is to provide an interface to WebJunction content tailored for Native users."

We had our first meeting with Daniel Alonzo, our TA. He came up with a design based on our input from Dr. Roy:

• Opening shot tracks coming over a bridge heading to WebJunction
• Navigation Screen circle game board
• Depots menu bars for the main content areas

Sheila, the Urban Rez Dog, is our official mascot.

We are to come up with an idea of how to represent our content and start bringing them into class.

Daniel unveiled the rail hub page (second level) and templates for our individual content. (third level) We’re discussing whether to call them ‘depots’ or ‘stations.’

We will incorporate our mission statement on the hub page. Work is going on to refine the mission statement.

Greg Argo will continue to work on the Native bridge to WebJunction through the summer as an independent study project.

A. Arro Smith will consider public access computing as one of his three areas of investigation for his doctoral studies.

Next week, we’re to turn in our final content on disk and printed out. We’ll be having a pot luck brunch and a farewell to the graduates.

We’d like to thank our new Native friends and others for reading this page. We hope that the Bridge we’ve provided will be useful and enjoyable as well. Good luck!