Gbridge1987’s Weblog

     Last Friday, I did not come to class with a clear idea of what I wanted the subject of my webtext article to be. I was confused when trying to find a topic that would relate my webtext review to my final project. There are many things that I like and some hobbies that I have, but I did not feel that any of those things met the requirements or were up to the standards of this assignment. They were mostly popular culture ideas and would not be beneficial to me when dealing with the content of my final project. So I left class still in a rut, pondering my options.

     On Monday, I was in much of the same predicament as when I left class on Friday. I was still without direction. I found it difficult to even right a couple of sufficient ideas when we were asked to write our thoughts so far on a piece of paper. Then, even as some examples were read aloud in class, I was still struggling to find a topic that I had enough interest in, while meeting the standards of the assignment. I had hit a wall in my head and it was becoming very difficult to get past it. I tend to over think assignments and make them bigger than they are, so it is often frustrating when I find myself in these seemingly “deja-vu” predicaments that I’ve come to know. Then when I met with you one-on-one and we started to talk about my options and interests the wall started to slowly break down and I began to search the Bowling Green website for the organization on campus that I recently joined. The webpage for the organization, was to my surprise, barely a webpage and more of like a slideshow posing as a webpage. When we found this to be a good option for me that would work for my webtext review and my final project, it was a big relief and I began to feel more confident with the assignment.

      I submitted my topic on Wed. before class feeling confident in my topic of reviewing the IPCO website and also using it as the subject of my final project. Then in class I started going through the three articles from last week and started highlighting the cirteria that I thought I would like to use in my webtext review assignment.

     This week we had three readings: “The 7 C’s of Web Service Design, The 7 C’s of Interactive Design” and “How C.R.A.P” is your site design. These three readings helped give me insight into the critera I should be using when I am designing my website. I think these articles are very helpful and will be necessary to refer to as I go through the process of designing my website. It will be beneficial to use these readings because it will help me understand how to make a better website that is not necessarily just “cool” but has all the elements that will make it appealing to my audience.

     I thought it was very beneficial when we analyzed the BGSU website in class on Wed. following the criteria from the “…Interactive Design” article. It made it a lot easier to show me how to think crtically when actually applying these criteria to a website that we are all familiar with. It was also interesting to see how we as students thought about the usefulness of the website and how it was percieved by us.

     Today we had a substitute teacher who taught us about the importance of alignment. We learned the differences between left alignment, right alignment and center alignment and how they can visually draw your eyes to certain things and the importance of where you want to be looking. We also looked at how colors can affect the way we look at things, how cool colors often have less emphasis placed on them than warm colors. Then we talked about proximity and how relationships of objects are built based on spacing.

     This week in class we focused a lot on perception an how it can change the way we look at things. We talk about different concepts like audience and framing and text and purpose and how these can be important when we are looking at visual images.

     Audience is important when looking at visual images because figuring out who the audience is can help you better figure out to whom the message from the image is being conveyed. We looked at a black and white photo vs. the image again with color to see how that might change the audience. Framing is also important because it can be divided up into different ways and depending on the way the image is framed you can see the specific purpose that the image is offering. One way that we saw framing in the images was through lighting.

     When talking about images with text, we talked about what the text was trying to accomplish; why was text used at all? We talked about a sentence of text vs. a few words and how that affected our perception of the image.

      For our assignment at the end of the week we looked at a picture from Dan Eldon and tried to analyze all the different aspects of the collage to figure out the message of it when you looked at the collage with all the different elements.

      I really enjoyed the analytical aspect of class this week and the critical thinking that came with looking at all the different aspects of audience,framing,text and purpose

     Last week in class we read several articles that all pertained to how technology is affecting our lives. After reading these articles, I sat back and tried to think about how these articles pertained to me and how reliant I am on technology. I thought the readings were all very thought provoking and made me realize just how important and necessary technology is to our lives today.

     In the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I thought I found it very interesting to try and relate this article to my life and figure out the extent of my own digital literacy. I thought it was very interesting to have some insight on the way Google approaches the mananging of their site. I don’t think that it is a bad thing that the internet makes things easy and convienent for its users, because at the same time that digital literacy is constantly changing the way we communicate in our lives, there are other factors that are constantly changing the way we live our lives as a society. We are a generation that has the whole world at our fingertips and want quick results. I don’t believe it is a bad thing that the internet caters to how we are as a changing society.

     In class, we also watched a youtube clip explaining the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey. I have never seen the movie, and the clip was a little over my head a first. I think the questions it presented though about technology taking over in a sense was very real. I think people can a lot of times get consumed by cyber-space and some of the realities of the clip were all too real. Technology can be an asset if you know how to use it. Technology can also be a hinderence if you become too dependent on it.