My quarter in English 138 has definitely been a learning experience. The most valuable skill I've learned in this class is how to make a website using Adobe Dreamweaver. When I was in middle school, I learned the rather tedious HTML code, and was turned off my designing websites, thinking that was only way to do it. Now, I have progressed to using Dreamweaver--a program that does not require the user to know code (although if you do, you can also use it). It is possible to design websites using only the "design" tab in the program. We were taught to build our websites using tables to help us align our pictures and text. However, it was not limited to that. The program also allows the user to generate templates, something that has proved useful to me in designing my webpages. Many pages use the same format and it would be rather annoying if I always had to remember what the format was using a previously done page. Merging cells, resizing pictures, and especially linking were things I could do with just one click. My website serves a hub for all my English 138 hypertexts, as well as for my make-up assignments, a page describing myself, and link to my online photography albums. My first hypertext, entitled "Photo Journeys", is a collection of my photography as well as links to other aspects of photography, in case a viewer was interested. As this was my first attempt at a Dreamweaver-made website and writing hypertext, it took me a long while to complete. I played with many tables and tried to merge cells together to try and get aesthetically-pleasing pages. Writing the hypertext was not so much a problem as everything was personally based. All the pictures were mine and the stories behind each picture were already in my head--I just had to type them onto the site. In the end, my navigation bar contained five things: Photo Journeys (a page dedicated to my recent photographs), Humanitarian Photography (a page dedicated to the topic of humanitarian photography and links to their official websites), Photographers (a page housing the links to my favorite photographers), RangeFinder Magazine (a page talking about the RF Magazine), and then a link back to my main webpage (splash). For this hypertext, it was easiest for me to write the text first and then transfer it to the website. When I was writing in Word, I just labeled each section, and each of those sections was a new page that had to be made. In the end, this hypertext was spread out over 14 pages. With some knowledge now about how to use Dreamweaver, I tried to tackle my second hypertext, entitled "Citizen Journalism: The New Generation of Mass Media". I consider myself a type of citizen journalist, in that I like to take pictures and post them to Flickr, and in some ways it counts as reporting to the public about what happened in my day. I wanted to delve deeper into the idea of a citizen journalist. This hypertext required doing some research into the subject area and finding which areas were in heated debate or were not talked about much. My topic had to do with the controversies surrounding the role of citizen journalism. For this hypertext, I wrote my annotated bibliography and review of literature first. Writing the review of literature helped me decide what each page was going to consist of. In this way, I found that writing and designing the sites first, was better for me. It helped me to see the progression and links on each page and decide what to write from then on. If you notice on my first hypertext, all the headings are aligned to the right. For some reason, I like headings aligned to the right. For my second hypertext, everything except for the navigation bar was aligned to the right. After I designed and wrote on each page, I put all my writings together to form the linear version of my hypertext. I edited out many tangent ideas and topics and added a conclusion. I then added that conclusion to my hypertext. Also, this was the first instance I embedded a video in my hypertext (Machinima Remix). Writing the linear version seemed much easier using most of the text from my webpages than doing it completely from scratch. I felt that writing the hypertext first made it easier to write the linear version. All my ideas were already there and written down. All I had to do was add a conclusion, edit out unnecessary tangents, and add some linking paragraphs. For my final project, entitled "Vision 2020: The Fight Against Trachoma", I had a good idea of what I had to do, having the experience of the first and second hypertext under my belt. This hypertext is about the idea of medical volunteering and infectious diseases and takes Trachoma as a sort of example or case study. So many people assume that medical volunteers only refer to those with medical backgrounds. In reality, a medical team works best when volunteers of all specialties come together to fight the disease. A medical team tackles treatment and prevention; only a well-rounded team can accomplish this task. The video I embedded in this hypertext is a video PSA that calls out to undergraduate students and those with non-medical skills--it gives examples of the variety of volunteer opportunities possible. For this hypertext, I did my research and then wrote my annotated bibliography and review of literature. From the review of literature, I had a good idea of what my navigation bar was to consist of. Then, I planned out the flow of my sites on a piece of paper, starting with the third hypertext splash page and downwards. In this hypertext, some of my headings are aligned to the left and some to the middle. I felt that I should shy away from the right alignment and try another one. I tried to include a picture on every page to give the reader-viewer an expectation of what the page is about. Also included in the hypertext are two simulations--a single-person perspective and a multi-perspective exercise. The single-person perspective simulation is meant to show the reader what it's like to be a young boy living in a place that is very susceptible to Trachoma and how easy it is to contract the disease during his/her daily activities. The multi-perspective simulation's purpose is to provide people with examples of how different types of people can contribute to medical teams. My hope with the third hypertext was to reach out to people who have an earnest desire to volunteer in medical teams around the world but are intimidated to inquire about it because they do not possess some sort of medical background. I know many people myself who are in this predicament and I hope that when I show them my website, they have a better understanding of the situation and what they can do. Whenever I think of my civic engagement project, I think about Juris' article about global activism and networking technologies today. Many activists are using modern technologies to spread the word about what they most passionate about. In this way, I feel that I am a global activist, not because I want to change policies, but that I want to change/open people's perspectives. I want people to know that volunteering is not limited to a specific range of abilities; rather it can encompass and utilize many others. My civic engagement hypertext is spread out over 30 pages and has an average of 4 internal links per page. The navigation bar has eight standard links. There are five external links in the whole site. The whole site includes 4,679 words of my own writing, a 2,555 word linear version, and an annotated bibliography with 9 sources. All sources are from an academic journal, organizational handbooks that I have physically acquired, or from online sources which I have provided links to. If I were to continue with my website, I would create a blog section and keep updating my first hypertext with more photographs. I might try and play with more intricate designs of the site in general as well. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We talked about critical thinking and its relation to our hypertexts a couple weeks ago in class. The definition of critical thinking that I thought most represented my strategy in creating a hypertext was this one: "Critical thinking is the development of cohesive and logical reasoning patterns", Stahl and Stahl, 1991. Creating a hypertext requires you to make a website that follows a logical pattern--creating a splash page that then leads to more pages and those pages have links to other things. You must make sure that even your tangent ideas make sense to the topic of your hypertext. The designer needs to think about how the hypertext flows and how a linear version can be edited to present the same idea. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Creating a website could be especially useful in one of the classes I am taking this quarter: Biology 179, The Biology of Cancer. I actually proposed this idea for using a website on the narrative evaluations for this class. Grades for this class were based on writing on a blog and creating a wiki that housed all the information about a specific cancer that we choose. Each pair chooses a cancer and then creates and writes on a wiki dedicated to their cancer. I thought it be more worthwhile to create a website that houses a section for blogging and information about the cancer all in one place. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The discussion forum for the class was a first for me, especially when we were asked to do it in class. So many people respond at the same time that sometimes it can become overwhelming when you are trying to reply to a comment. However, I felt that it was a good way for people to write exactly what their thoughts were--the forum did not have a limit to how much you could write (or, at least I never encountered a limit). When discussing things in class, it is easy to just keep your thoughts quiet if they are not revelent to the topic to which the class is discussing. In the online discussion forum, students can post their thoughts and other students have time to read it and respond to it accordingly. This type of informal writing was helpful in learning in that when I read other students' thoughts, it gave me another perspective as to how to think about the topic. The readings were pertinent to the class and online discussions and helped in better understanding each of the topics. Simulations, activities, and videos we were shown all related to the class work and readings. I especially enjoyed playing the online games, specifically crayon physics. It was one of the games that had me thinking the whole time. I even made some of my friends, not in the class, play it and they enjoyed it as well. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In conclusion, I can say that I have learned much from this class. I have learned how to design and publish a website, which types of games stimulate critical thinking, and in general how new media technologies have influenced society today. |