Samuel Lee
Marc Bousquet
English 138

Learning Essay

Prior to this class, I had some experience with Dreamweaver, but I lacked confidence in composing a full hypertext. After being assigned the personal hypertext, I started to fool around with Dreamweaver, and I got the hang of it but I was still learning everything about it. Throughout the course, my composing of hypertext became more instinctual because I was more familiar with the program.

Creating the hypertexts let me just start with any point I want, but on an essay, there are certain guidelines I need to follow. This made it easier for me to get all the ideas I wanted to say into text and composing my linear version, it was just a matter I rearranging my ideas in an essay form. It was pretty difficult for me to produce the printable version because I did not know how I wanted to arrange my ideas but again, it definitely made it easier that my ideas were already in there for me to work with. My printable version did not have much of an impact on my final revision.

My experience with critical thinking when composing this hypertext will have to be Daniel Kurland's definition. It defines critical thinking as being "concerned with reason, intellectual honesty, and open-mindedness". When composing this hypertext, especially my analytical hypertext, I cannot just look at one side of the story and begin to consider both perspectives. I think that changed the way I composed my civic engagement. This definition of critical thinking is a different approach I take when writing essays because we need to focus on a specific point so I will need some close-mindedness and focus on just one perspective. Composing this hypertext made me actually exploring both perspective and coming up with a conclusion.

I think my civic engagement will provide information to students who do not already know or are not familiar with the college application process. My site reaches out to prospective students and their parents. It reaches out by basically informing them about the current economic situation has affected college campuses.

The discussion forums helped me to understand a certain reading through all my classmate’s perspective and how they fell about the readings. Everyone presents a unique way of looking at something and it really helped me to learn through all these different perspectives.

My hypertext designs were kept as simple as possible. I realized how complicated it was from my personal hypertext. But for my analytical and civic engagement, I wanted to aim for a more simplistic and clean-cut design so it makes reading it more comfortable because the pages were spread out to more pages and the pages are not as dense.

If I were to continue working on my sites, I would probably add more content, and since these issues are still happening today, I can keep readers updated with any changes. This can apply to all three hypertext projects. My next website will continue to follow the simplistic design, maybe more links on the navigation bar, and a better, creative design.

My civic engagement project focused in on the constant rise of college tuition every year and especially these past few years when the economy has not been good. I think my ambition fall along the lines of Shirky with the idea of organizing without organizations, but in the sense of the students finding ways to relieve their college tuition without having to consult a financial advisor because all the information they need Is out there. It is just the matter of looking for it.

I have not taken a class that I would recommend using a website final project, but since I am a Biology major, I think that later upper division Biology courses would benefit from composing a website. Most upper division courses are very specific topic that branches onto different types of issue and using a website to illustrate these issue will benefit those who read it ad hopefully they learn something and recommend it to other people.

Overall, this class gave me a new understanding of technology and the Internet culture.

My Hypertexts consisted on average:

2400 words

14 webpages

6 navigation links

2-3 links per page

14 pictures per hypertext