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title: 'MDF Spring 2022: Show-Your-Work'
tags: [cd]

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tags: cd
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# MDF Spring 2022: Show-Your-Work

This spring, we're going to use our Friday meetings to develop a **Visual Storytelling Project**. The purpose of this project is to document regularly the work we all do to support courses and faculty, develop resources and tutorials for the LL and beyond, and learn tools that facilitate sharing knowledge. This project builds on the Show and Tell work you did throughout the fall and aims to connect your work to LL staff and LLUF projects. Through the activity of documenting and sharing, we can foreground this crucial aspect of our work and meanwhile learn from each other's processes, ideas, and workflows!

Our Visual Storytelling will take place in **two new Slack channels**, which you'll be added to:
* show-your-work
* show-and-tell

In **show-your-work**, everyone will regularly post images that document their work(s) in progress. Ideally, these images will visually represent the experience of developing and completing a project or prototype. Images that you could post to this channel might include:
* an image of a model for your project
* a picture you took of a text you're reading 
* pictures of your notes, drawings, imaginings
* a picture of something you made
* an image that captures some experiential aspect of your work process (i.e., a picture of a place you're in, a picture of you at work)

**Plan to post in show-your-work regularly, at least a couple times a week but ideally every time you're working on something in your capacity as an MDF** (LL staff will try to post once a day). The more visuals, the better! Think of these images as capturing your "shifts" at the LL. You can caption your images with one sentence (or even just a few words), if you think some context is necessary for all of us to understand the image. But otherwise, just post images! 

Please note that anything you post in show-your-work will be public, and this is the goal! When you post an image in this channel, it will automatically generate a Markdown link for you, which you can then use to make HackMD docs about your projects and how you approached them.

The **show-and-tell** channel is where we'll explain our work in a bit more detail. The plan for this channel is to:
* Post an image of your work (ideally something you've posted already in the show-your-work channel)
* Write a short paragraph (i.e., 3-4 sentences) explaining **why** you did what you did at this stage in the project and **how** you did it.

Think of what you post in the show-and-tell channel as a very short blog post of sorts, comprising both image and text. 


We will launch this visual storytelling project at **our first meeting of the semester on Friday, January 28. This first meeting will take place on Zoom from 10:30 - 11:45 am EST.** Going forward, we will meet every other week in person, following Harvard's Covid guidelines. **This biweekly meeting will be the required MDF meeting for the spring term.** 

At these meetings, we'll discuss the images you've posted during the preceding two weeks. Christine will randomly select a few examples to highlight to guide  discussion, but please let her know if you're especially excited during a particular week to discuss your work in progress! We can also use these meetings to talk about any challenges you've faced in your projects and give each other feedback.

During the "off weeks," in between these required meetings, we'll hold optional designLabs and activities that help us build our skills in visual communication, documentation, and multimodal storytelling. Many of these activities will allow us to develop prototypes for Harvard courses, too. Please let Christine know if a course you're supporting might like to see a prototype designed by us!