Blog Post #10

DTC 101 has not only strengthened some of my preexisting skills that I knew prior to taking this course, but it has also introduced me to levels of social media that I did not realize were there before. Besides breaking down social media and webpages to the levels of the C.R.A.P. principles, I found it especially interesting how our internet presence can be tracked in many different ways, whether its through cookies or some other form of invisible footsteps that most users don’t think of checking.

The unit I enjoyed the least throughout the semester was definitely the unit that included Voyant, and our studies to determine if our prediction on our topic was “correct” or not. The reason I put quotations around the word correct, is because at the end of that unit I didn’t believe my Voyant results were any more accurate than what I went into the project at the beginning with. This could have been because of my topic pertaining to a newer phone that hadn’t fully launched at the time of this project, but the fact still remains that I felt like I didn’t get any good new information out of my Voyant results.

The unit I enjoyed/currently enjoying is our final unit, and our social media platform redesign. My group chose Craigslist as our platform, and since I was put on the design team I’ve been thoroughly enjoying making mockups of our new design. When it comes time to present, I feel like our group is going to do well because we spaced out the work well and shared it evenly. As long as everyone in my group does their part, I don’t see how we can fail.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed this semester and DTC 101 as a whole, and I look forward to taking my next DTC class next semester.

Source: The Office, NBC.

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Blog Post #9

Overall, I felt like our pitch presentation went well and our feedback proves that point. The only thing that our group didn’t touch on fully during our presentation was our 5 readings to relate back to our 5 critiques, but we have those readings and will be sure to include them in our final presentation. As a group we all get along well and have agreed on the things we’ve decided to change so far. Some of these things are the overall design of Craigslist and the organization of the site as a whole.

This picture serves as a reference to how Craigslist is laid out currently, and what it would look like when you go to visit it.

This picture serves to be a quick mock-up of more of what we would like to see in Craigslist. A background image will change based on the city that you are searching in, and categories are more organized for drop-down menus.

Our idea of the perfect Craigslist will have a social media aspect to it, with sellers being tied to public account pages in an attempt to motivate sellers to stop listing sketchy items and stop ripping customers off with deceiving listings. Besides this, an entire overhaul of the current layout is necessary to breathe new life into this dated platform.

Blog Post #7

Personally I see myself bringing an element of design to the group project. Noah is in my group, so I’m not the only one who knows how to use Photoshop, but it helps that both of us know it so we can divide the work a bit more. During the brainstorming process, I helped come up with our name for our platform, so I would also like to use some of my skills from Adobe Illustrator to help design some sort of vector that could be our final logo. Either way, I’m confident that I will be able to provide a good amount of help to my group.

I hope to contribute to my group in any way that I can. Since Noah already was on top of the design for our app, I’m not sure if he will need my help with that, but I’m more than willing. If I don’t need to help with that, I can see myself helping design the logo. Last semester I took Com 210, which was a great class because it helped strengthen my skills with some of the Adobe suite such as Photoshop, Premiere, and Illustrator. While Premiere will most likely not be used for this project, Photoshop and Illustrator could be beneficial.

The handful of components that I’m slightly uncomfortable with is the written aspect and meeting our time limits for the presentation. With the help of my other group members, I’m hoping someone who is more gifted in the writing department will step up, because personally I don’t like my writing being the face of everyone’s work sometimes (lol). Other than that, I think that my group members and I will be able to put together a solid presentation that will meet all of the criteria.

Blog Post #6

After navigating Multimodality in Motion and reading The Politics of the Interface, my perception of access has changed a bit. According to both Cynthia and Richard Selfe, the current state of many, if not the majority, of websites are deemed unusable by many people because of varying disabilities they might have. Although I agree that these are issues that should be addressed, they’re not going to be able to be fixed overnight, and that most likely not everyone’s needs can be accommodated for.

Some of these can be accommodated for however, and they are in effect already on some websites. One of these ways, is through multimodality. An example of this is how some websites include other forms of media to learn a certain piece of material. Websites such as Khan academy already do this, and it helps not only people with disabilities, but it may assist anyone and everyone by giving a different approach to a topic. If there’s an article posted online, there should be a video to go with it, and vice versa. Someone who may be shy or lack the ability to participate in classroom discussions may now have the option to participate through online class discussions. One of the methods of multimodality is one that I see almost everyday, and that’s through YouTube’s option for closed captioning.

As you can see in the photo above, YouTube not only provides an option for content creators to include a transcript for closed captioning, but it can also auto-generate close captioning based on its ability to convert voice to text. While this isn’t always the most accurate, the fact still remains that Google has created this option to accommodate those with disabilities. This choice affects everyone however, and I myself have used closed captioning on YouTube videos in environments where I could not listen to the video.

It’s hard to accommodate for all disabilities, but if we continue at the rate we have, then people with disabilities will be able to enjoy the internet and consume content the way everyone else does.

Blog Post #5

As the internet has evolves, so does social media and the users that use the internet. Rewind ten years from today, and social media was no where near as prevalent as it is now. In the past, when someone wanted to share something online, it was either in the form of a blog post on a blog site, or your own website. This required users to understand how to build and design a website if they were actually serious about wanting to share content online.

Today, anyone can share content in a variety of ways. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, etc. are extremely accessible, and has completely transformed the way people share content. These platforms all have their different ways of displaying and viewing content, and it varies significantly. On a website such as Facebook, on your profile page it has options to display content such as where you work/worked, where you go to school, where you’re from, relationship status, etc. This wouldn’t be such an issue, except Facebook constantly bothers you to update your contact info, even if you haven’t touched it in years (such as myself). While this approach is beneficial to people who like to share everything about their lives to their friends, I personally don’t feel the need to share all that information. Comparing this model to a social media platform such as Snapchat, the information being displayed is much more minimal. When you tap on a friends name on Snapchat, you simply get their username, real name, and options to contact them via a picture, video, or text. This allows people to be more discreet with what they share about their lives, and some prefer that much more.

If I were to form a social media space, I would follow something along the lines of Instagram. Instagram allows you to create a profile picture, bio, and the rest is up to you to share. This approach is perfect in my eyes because it allows the user to share exactly what they want, and how much of that content they want.

Blog Post #4

So far, I’ve really enjoyed this semester. Last year my major was mechanical engineering, and after one year of taking pre-requisites for that major, I decided I didn’t want to continue with that anymore. After talking with my adviser at the end of last year, I made the decision to change my major to DTC, and so far this class is making me very happy I did that. I’ve genuinely been enjoying what we’ve been learning and the methods we’ve been learning it through, and I feel like I belong in this major.

I really enjoyed our Unit 1 project where we created the visual aspect of our project through Adobe Spark. Adobe Spark was a piece of software I had heard of in the past, but had never had the chance or reason to check it out. Growing up and using technology as I got older was a fascinating time for me, so I really enjoyed being able to tell that story.

Our most recent project however, was a bit more difficult. While I understand now what you wanted out of this assignment, during the times we were working on this project in the AML I wasn’t really sure how I was going to apply my topic to Voyant and get a result. Since I did my topic on the iPhone X sale projections, I wasn’t really able to get a final result out of Voyant except that I knew what people would be discussing on this topic. Besides that, presenting has never really been my strong suit, so I wasn’t 100% confident with my results when I went up to present. Going back and writing the written version of the project makes me feel a little better, but overall I was not a huge fan of this project.

I’ve been enjoying this class, and the projects that we’ve been assigned so far.

Blog Post #3

These last few weeks we’ve had multiple days where we discuss readings in class. These reading’s and in-class discussions have played a good sized role in picking my topic and fully understanding project 2. The topic that I chose for my project, is the iPhone X, and how its sales are going to compare to the iPhone’s that have been released in the past. Many people are predicting that with the increased price and lack of home button, that it’s going to end up being a failure. I’m predicting that while sales may be low at first, in the end they’re going to end up catching up to the rest of the iPhone’s released, simply because it’s the “new iPhone.” In class last week, we read an article titled “Digital Outragicity” by Jeff Rice, which talked about how the internet can take a piece of media and completely turn it into something that sparks outrage. After discussing this article in class, I was able to get a better understanding of how some people view and receive media online. While this doesn’t necessarily directly relate to my topic that I chose for project 2, I will still keep it in mind for when I’m completing assignments for this class. Overall, these in-class discussions that we have had in the past have been beneficial to me, and I hope that we continue having them.

Blog Post #2: Technology and Literacy

Coming into DTC this year, I already knew that technology has started to play a really big role in how we receive and process our literacy, but I didn’t know just how big it has started to become. My first year of high school I went to a public school, where the school curriculum was just like any other public school. Once I moved to Yakima and started attending private school however, all the students in this school were assigned their own personal iPad to use on a daily basis for classes. This completely changed the way I learned and processed literacy simply because of the way I was able to read it. Relating this back to “Composition in a New Key” by Kathleen Yancey, Yancey writes about how our interpretation of literacy is changing/has changed because of digital media. “Writing IS words on paper, composed on the page with a pen or pencil by students who write words on paper, yes – but who also compose words and images and create audio files on blogs in word processors.” Yancey has good points here when she discuses this, because this is what literacy is becoming. No longer is it just considered words on a paper, but it also applies to other forms of multimedia literacy such as videos, pictures, gifs, etc. Considering this article was written in 2004, it has served it’s purpose because it has shown how literacy has even changed since then. While both good and bad things have come out of this new style of literacy, an example of something good is content curation. In that past, content curation has always been present, it just hasn’t been as easily accomplished as it can be now. According to Margot Bloomstein in “Breaking Down the Steps to Content Curation,” gathering multiple opinions from many people on a topic has never been easier. As a content curator, their job is to organize information and combine it in a way that is easier for the reader to process. This shift in literacy to me is a good thing. I’ve never been a big fan of reading physical text, and while sometimes it’s a good way to gather information, 95% of the time that same source is somewhere online, most likely in an easier format to process than just straight text. Whether its a video, picture, text, or a combination of all three, there’s many new ways to process literacy.

Citation: Gif made by myself on GifSoup.com

Copyright 1999-2017, Stephen Hillenburg, Spongebob Squarepants.

Blog Post #1: Medium

The platform that I have chosen for my project is Adobe Spark. Having used some of the Adobe Suite programs in the past, I’m already confident using Spark because of how intuitive it’s been in the past to learn an Adobe product. Adobe Spark most closely resembles Microsoft PowerPoint, but takes a new approach by providing more presets, rather than starting from scratch with PowerPoint. Because of this, Adobe Spark makes it significantly easier to create a “good” looking presentation with a lot less effort. After playing around with Spark for only a handful of minutes, I was already able to create a presentation that made it look like I was already proficient with the platform. Since all of my five literacy moments fall around the idea of learning and using new technology, I wanted to stick to something that would allow me to create a presentation, but add in my own pictures and videos when I deemed necessary. To create a presentation with Adobe Spark, you simply start by creating a blank presentation, and fill in from there. The user is given a presentation template to start and work with, and depending what pictures, videos, and other multimedia components they decide to add is up to them. The only cons to this approach is that I could see Spark being somewhat restricting when it comes to really getting creative. I don’t see this as a problem for me, simply because currently I don’t see myself as the kind of person who would be restricted with Adobe Spark. Overall, I’m really excited with choosing Adobe Spark as my platform. I have confidence that my work will be received well by my peers because of the information I will able to incorporate into my presentation, and the platform that I will be using to present all of my information.

Citation: Cattell, Aubrey. “Spark Post.” Abobe Spark, 19, May, 2016.