Digital Critique: Scrolling Mashup

Throughout my degree I have spent a lot of time surfing elearningindustry.com. This site, which contains a wealth of content from industry professionals, posts a number of articles relating to various topics in eLearning. I found a recent article from May 2015 titled, "The Great eLearning Design Mashup - Scrolling In eLearning" by Li Whybrow decided to do a digital critique on one of the examples in the article.

In the article, Li discusses scrolling as a mashup technique for developing eLearning web content. Scrolling is how it sounds - creating a web page where the viewer scrolls down on the page to engage content in an ordered fashion. Parallax scrolling allows the background to change at a slower pace than the scrolling to create a 3D effect. The idea is to make navigation simple while providing an engaging experience.

I'm going to borrow one of Li Whybrow's example for a digital critique: http://nasaprospect.com/. This website was created by some students at the University of South Dakota in conjunction with NASA. The mashup combined music, voiceover, and content from NASA to create a unique learning experience.

I will evaluate this website mashup based on the following literacy dimensions:

1) Reuse/repurpose existing content for specific purposes

As mentioned above, the whole idea for the website was to take content from NASA and combine it with music/audio and web applications to create a unique learning experience. Knowledge and facts were presented in a dialogue that helped engage the viewer and tell a story. The background music enhanced the experience and set a tone.



2) Be able to put together a user interface for the mashup

The scrolling feature enabled navigation through the digital story keeping the user experience simple and less technical. The added audio features were implemented so as to keep the story ongoing and not require the user to have to do anything else but scroll.

3) Facilitate an activity, interest, or pursuit

This mashup was used for a learning experience which ties directly with course curriculum and focal theme. Viewers of this website can get a fun taste of science and space in a creative yet informative presentation that hopefully spurns interest in pursuing further education.

I liked this website and thought it was a great example of mashing up web applications (the scrolling feature) with audio and visual. I wouldn't change a thing to the site and would recommend it to educators wanting to introduce their students to science, space, and NASA.