Heat Shock Protein Expression

Learning Essay.

Over the course of 10 weeks, I have learned how to design and publish a website. I think that this is the most important accomplishment from this class. In an age where we get most of our information from the internet, I think it is an important, if not essential, skill to have. Part of this course also covered internet in culture today, and I think that designing webpages and being able to make your point via text is very much so a part of our culture. Some people even believe that their culture IS the internet and their world revolves solely around the internet.

It didn’t take me long to grab a hold of Dreamweaver. I had little experience with HTML, mostly just hacking Myspace codes and such. I was a little wary of using Dreamweaver because it looked confusing, but once I got the basics down, I could figure the rest out. The first project wasn’t too hard, I just thought about what was lacking on the net that I could have used in my life. This is the origins of the “So, You Want to be a Science Teacher?” site. Santa Clara prides itself on its diversity and all-inclusion, however, it is so hard to figure out how to become a teacher if you are a science major. It is interesting that the science department pushes people to be doctors, but there is hardly mention of teaching. Who is supposed to teach these future doctors?

The one part of the class I found challenging was CounterPower. It wasn’t hard for me to post and to reply, however, it was frustrating to write and write and have no one reply, and have no conversation. It was like posting blogs just for the professor to read. Part of this is because most other people also had problems replying, but it was difficult to want to keep posting blogs if no one was reading/replying to them. It was more about being controversial on the blog rather than responding to people’s ideas, in the end.

The final project, something with our own personal contribution, was difficult to come up with. I wasn’t sure at all what was required or what was expected, so I just thought about something that I had become an expert in. This led me to my project for another class, my limpet research. I managed to turn this research into a hypertext web site, but still had some difficulties with the “hypertext” part. It was hard for me to dissect a research paper (mine) and make it into various websites. In the end, I don’t think I was very successful, not for lack of trying, but because it was just hard to make the site flow through links embedded in text. I ended up having 2-3 embedded links per page, which I know is below the average of 5 we talked about in class, however, I did have 2,700 words of original writing over a total of about 10 webpages, not counting the annotated bibliography, literature review, or pages with pictures.  My printable version, which I wrote before splitting it up into various webpages, was 4,500 words. I think I found it difficult to split up because of the format of the original paper. It is a scientific journal-esque paper and those tend to have a step 1, 2, 3 and a certain order to things.

Overall, I think I learned a lot in this class, and accomplished the technology portion of my core requirements. I was pleased that the writing component wasn’t as rigorous as I expected for an English 3 class. I may be good at taking temperature of limpets, but I am definitely not good at writing essays every week.