Week 10: Final Blog of Quarter

I thought overall this class was a great class and I really learned a lot from a variety of people in this class as well as all the many different aspects and applications we covered in class from day 1.  Having never used any of the applications such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Wix/Weebly, or even blogger, I got a great sense and learning experience of what it’s like to use each of these many different software applications and will look forward to using them and applying them to future work I do outside this class.  For the group website, I thought it was a great experience working with Weebly as my group and I worked diligently as a team as we came up with our different topic and meeting days as well as working as a whole on this project.  It was nice to do some outside work as well, but I felt our group operated wonderfully together achieving our weekly goals we all set out for one another.  Using Weebly was extremely beneficial on getting a basic layout on our individual websites as well because it was nice designing our own layouts and get the basics down as far as the content and structure was concerned regarding our own personal layouts. 

The portfolio was another element of this class that I really enjoyed.  At first this assignment seemed somewhat confusing as our goal was to generate and compile information relating to class and content beyond that will help us in the future with many of our other weekly assignments and other projects we did in class daily.  Not only did I somewhat gain an advantage by printing everything off a week or two early, I found it beneficial that way because it allowed me not to fall behind in my organizational notebook which is what I was putting together.  Overall though, I thought the portfolio was a great source of information to go back and refer to whenever I had an issue and couldn’t successfully reach Jason via email or any other type of way.  The individual website has probably been one of the most time consuming projects I have done so far at my time at Western.  I think it’s been a great exercise over learning the attachments of Photoshop and Dreamweaver as well.  I think that funnest, yet most frustrating part of this whole project is the ability to get the C.R.A.P. principles down.  I think this has been a great task of our ability to learn everything we have done so far in class with not only these principles but also the creativity and ability to work outside the class too.  Since week 2, I have been struggling to find the appropriate topic to cover for our individual website and week by week I have been structuring my website to the design and layout I wanted too.  I think completing this project up to par is a goal I really hope to accomplish come Thursday but am sure it completely doable.

Finally, our class activities have been the best part of this class as a whole.  I think it’s been extremely beneficial to learn these different activities as a group and walking through step-by-step the basics of how to do and complete each activity to our fullest potential.  I thought the introduction of business cards, brochures, webpages and all the other activities we have completed in class with Jason’s instructions have been great because he walks us through one by one how to apply each concept to that particular week’s activity.  It’s nice to learn that way because if one person struggles and falls behind, it’s nice because the rest of the class gets to play catch up and help out everyone simultaneously.  Overall, I thought this was a great class and look forward to applying my computer skills in the future.

--below is a video I have added which covers the basics of the C.R.A.P. principles which is what applies to almost everything we have done in class thus far:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=crap+principles&oq=crap+principles&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=751l3338l0l3467l15l15l0l5l5l0l238l690l8.1.1l10l0

Week 9: A Day Without Technology:

In this day in age, I feel it's virtually nearly impossible for a college student ( or any other person in their early 20's) to go a full complete day without using any type of media.  For example, most students either check their phone, email, or immediately turn on their television without even thinking about it each and every morning.  I think it's almost set in our DNA to not even think about it but just to immediately feel as if we are not alone in this world and always need that secondary source of communication whether it comes from our family or friends.  Yesterday, I tried going a whole 24 hours without using any source of media technology.  Here were my results:

I woke up yesterday at 3:45 a.m. to get ready for work like every normal day.  Instead of immediately checking to see if I had any missed calls or text messages, I quickly got dressed and left for work at 3:55 and made it to work at 4:00 a.m.  From there, I worked til 11:00 a.m. still without checking anything on my phone and came straight to school.  This is where I got sidetracked by all the other hundreds of students on campus using nonstop technology so I quickly made a phone call to a friend.  This is where I knew I wouldn't last the whole 24 hours technology-free.  Though I was able to go the rest of the afternoon and last night without watching TV or listening to the radio, I felt that I was able to eliminate and save so much time that way which I normally wouldn't have if I hadn't tried this experiment. 

I really thought I would be able to accomplish this goal of going a whole 24 hours without any source of technology, but I didn't actually realize how much we depend on so many of our handheld devices such as twitter, phone, i-pod, laptops and many other sources of technology we use on a daily basis.  I felt that I was able to actually save so much time and found many other activities outside my house that I was able to accomplish that I was actually really proud of.  This particular experiment made me realize the importance that so many of us depend on our technology that plays such a tremendous role in our lives that we don't even realize on a daily basis.  I told this experiment to many of my brothers last night and they thought it was virtually impossible to accomplish this goal for an entire day.  I don't think we are coming to any conclusions or moving towards a "digital-living" free world whatsoever.  With all the advancements on so many media products that exist today and how much technology has actually changed so drastically, I don't think we will ever escape what our society has adapted too.

Week 8: Sixth Sense Technology

I thought the video by Pranav Mistry was very interesting.  I thought his demonstration of his new Sixth Sense technology was extremely useful and beneficial because I hadn’t ever heard of anything like this before.  I thought his demonstration of all the 3 dimension projections, cameras in devices like a pen or on a helmet, or on the finger tips were fantastic because it was really amazing to see just how advanced technology has become in our society and how heavily dependent we are on it.  I thought his demonstration of taking a picture simply by putting your hands up just like you would if you were actually holding a real camera was amazing to see because it almost looked like a video game how he was able to shape and personalize photos by just using his fingertips.  I thought this idea of the Sixth Sense was truly amazing as it posed for a unity of satisfaction that many millions of people would consider.  It’s so hard to believe that such a small little device can act as such an important piece in communicating with the outer world.  

I think we are moving closer to a more advanced, digital world.  So many of us have devices that limit us from connecting and interacting with the physical world and over the years, our sense of communicating with others face-to-face has been much easier as more advanced and higher resolutions of technology have continued to come out over the past few years.  Living digitally seems much more likely now than it has ever been before as we have based so much of our behaviors on doing so many of our daily routines electronically such as online, phone, internet, texting, emailing, etc.  Yahoo, Google, Facebook and many other email services has regulated data and preserved so much contention that there are reasons why we have become so far advance on our technology ways as we move from problem to problem and from many different technology aspects from the digital world.  I think living in a digital world allows us to use our imagination much more as we familiarize ourselves among one another on developing new ideas that we could use in the future to maximize both profitable attention as well as the capability to allow users to adapt much quicker to society. 

 For example, our social media has skyrocketed more over the past 10 years than it ever has before due to the fact that our social media is so advanced and so many of us rely strictly on social media ways of communication that gets information across much easier and faster.  Below is a video I found which illustrates the benefits and drawbacks of living in a digital world.  Our society relies on electronic/social ways of communication that we may have last the purpose of communicating with everything we do being done online or more easier ways.  Enjoy:

Sources:

 

http://www.itu.int/newsroom/features/digital_world.html

http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/digitalife/docs/digital.life-chapter5.pdf

Week: 6 Blog Assignment

After watching the tutorials in class about the differences between Wix and Weebly, we found it most beneficial to use Weebly for our group presentation.  Although half of our group members decided to work with Wix on the practice day, we felt as if we were most comfortable sticking with Weebly based on the assumption that if felt a bit easier to operate and use when creating our group website.  I felt that adding pictures, videos, captions, and many other forms that associate with Weebly were extremely easy to use because all you do is basically click, drag and paste where you want what included on any of your main pages.  The easiest part of using Weebly compared to Wix was the ability to function everything around so much easier without creating a giant cluster of text that wasn't meant to be there in the first place.  That being said, we did come across a few complications with this free website builder.

For example, although we found it extremely easy to add text and pictures where you wanted them on each particular page, it was very complicated to get the pictures to line up exactly with the text provided based on the fact that we put most of our information into two columns.  As we described in class over the course of the quarter, we took the C.R.A.P. principles into affect as we were laying out the basic design of our group websites making sure everything lined up accordingly and making sure the layout was 100% accurate for each of our 5 pages.  I think that the biggest complication we came across was identifying each picture's size as well as putting the information evenly on the page provided.  Though I haven't ever worked with Wix in the past, I believe we stuck with a good choice on identifying Weebly as the right site for us as we created our project.  Below I have include steps to perfecting the use of Weebly accuratly in the future for students looking to build their own websites:

• There are two different types of pages you can add using Weebly©. 

1) a  normal page such as the one you're on now, and 

2)  You can name your page whatever you want. 

• There are over 70 professional designs that you can use or you can customize your own one.  You can customize the template of your site, or build your own with HTML & CSS in the Weebly editor.

• Some of the things you can put on your Weebly page are pictures, videos, music and audio, documents, maps, links to other websites, links to other pages, photo galleries, files, YouTube clips, slideshows, even online polls.  You can divide your page into two columns to make room for more paragraphs. 

• There are no limits on the number of pages allowed, but there are limitations to a few things such as you have to use a certain font style but you can choose the colour of the font, the size, bold/normal, underlined, italic.    

Week 5: Social Media & Social Change

FACEBOOK:

Facebook is the fastest growing social network in the world with over 100 million active members and continuing to grow every second!  Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.  Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with people they know in a very trusted environment.   In the first half of 2008, Facebook saw significant growth both nationally and globally.  As in the United States, It has become one of the largest and most successful Web sites in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and much throughout Europe.  It also shares ideas and approaches to help get one started when first beginning their tutorials.  Facebook is now available in 15 languages, including Spanish, French, and German and is continuing to grow and add functionality that is appealing to businesses and other work related sources of all kinds.  Facebook nationally recognized that engaging with businesses and buying things are part of the everyday life and with that in mind, it has created a well-drafted system were ads are more relevant and actually enhance, instead of interrupt, the user experience.  This type of market-friendly functionality, coupled with the fact that many customers and prospects are have Facebook and are constantly looking for new business.   

TWITTER:

It is often thought that in social media marketing environments it is easy, quick and cheap. The most difficult aspect of achieving success in social media marketing is dedicating your time and resources to your social media strategy.  This hard work and dedication behind the scenes is what makes success seems so easy.  Twitter is really changing the way businesses communicate. Many businesses have come to recognize its value, and marketing power. Twitter has become a phenomenon with 32 million users, including major companies such as Apple, JetBlue, and CNN. Twitter is a real-time medium and one that is still experiencing rapid growth. It is a powerful marketing tool and is a place to promote products, conduct research, build customer service relations and loyalty, and more-so to get ideas. The use of twitter for marketing purposes is constantly evolving where almost every week an individual can read about a unique application and or strategy for Twitter marketing. With the social media marketing, you will be able to promote your business in the best possible way, create an intact supporters as well as followers. If you are able to build followers and loyal visitors, there is higher chance of dragging your prospect buyers. Compelling words of advertisement and selling point must be established in every social media optimization. Placing your business name and product name all over the social media marketing collateral will definitely increase the chance of generating traffic  that eventually be converted into actual purchase and sales.

YOUTUBE:

YouTube has quickly become as ubiquitous in society as the cell phone. Named as one of the reasons Time Magazine named you as their Person of the Year, YouTube has become the go-to web destination for just about anything on video format, from movie trailers to clips of TV shows to home videos to puppy/kitten cams. Its video domain empire has grown to the point it’s the main resource for Comedy Central’s highest rated show, Tosh.0, a weekly show showcasing the funniest videos on the web with a running commentary by stand-up comedian, Daniel Tosh. So we’ve compiled some information on YouTube to illustrate to you just how wide and massive its operation is, exponentially more so after its acquisition by Google, for you to marvel at and better appreciate.  Some interesting facts regarding YouTube are: it profits over $2 billion per year, 3^rd most visited website ever created, U.S. contains 22% of all users worldwide, averages over 2 billion views per day, 10% of all internet traffic, 900 seconds is average time internet user spends on YouTube every day,  over 24 hours’ worth of video uploaded every minute.  These are many facts that contain to what has made YouTube such a powerful icon among many millions of users and how fast information can travel online that many people can see daily.  This is just one way of communication that allows someone to show the entire world their accomplishments.

These 3 sites are just few of the many that contain millions and millions of people that explore and share information among one another on a daily basis.  It's really crazy just to see how fast communication has grown of the past few years as we have become a society that requires so much of our time on getting information across as quickly as possible.  The following is a tutorial that shows just how fast our society is growing and counting on these rapids amounts of information: enjoy!

SOURCES:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOqRjNXxXBA
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/training/Harnessing-Social-Media-Connect-with-Communities.html
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

Week 4: Audacity & Podcast

Like many of the other devices/projects we have conducted so far in class, I have never worked with any type of sound or video recording before and I thought our week long discussion and class activities were extremely beneficial in learning about the new software. I thought that going into our podcast assignments would be a breeze, but as I worked more and analyzed research of what it takes to do a proper podcast recording project, I was amazed to learn how much actually goes into each detailed piece of the sound recording. As defined in my portfolio, podcast is actually described as "a type of digital media recording device consisting of an episodic series of files (either audio or video) to and downloaded through web syndication".  Audacity is free software, developed by a group of volunteers and is easy to use, and multilingual audio editor and recorder that applies to Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Thefollowing is a list that audacity can do:
1) Record live audio

2) Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs

3) Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files

4) Cut, cops, splice or mix sounds together

5) Change the speed or pitch of a recording


Audacity can redord live audio through a microphone or mixer, or digitize recordings from cassette tapes, records or minidiscs.  With some sound card it can also capture other streaming audio. You can record up to 16 channels at once, dub over trackes recreating multi-track recordings, and level sound quality levels before, during or after live audio.  Programs like audacity are also called open source software because their source code is available for anyone to study or use. There are thousands of other free and open source programs, including the firefox web browser, the OpenOffice.org office suite and entire Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu.  As far as our Podcasts are going in class, I feel like learning the audacity function online was a great tool in order for us to get better educated on the subjects of audio and other details regarding our podcasts assignment. The videos below demonstrate a few tutorials for learning the different functions of audacity and podasts. Hope this helps:

Sources:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hrBbczS9I0

http://webdesign.about.com/od/podcasts/a/aa013006.htm

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

 

Week 3: Basic Layout and Design Principles

This week in Comm. 350, we discussed the basics of the C.R.A.P. principles in order to make our personal website much more eye popping and easier to read for the viewer/audience.  In our personal websites I believe I need some help on each of these elements in order to make my website "flow" better and easy for the viewer to follow.  The basics of the C.R.A.P. principles include the following:

1)      Contrast—the basics behind this principle is to avoid elements on this page that are too similar.  Elements such as (type, color, size, shape, and space) are all too similar, then it would be a good idea to vary them a bit.  You don’t want the reader to think everything on your website is identical, so varying things such as content, heading, body, and comments would make it easier for your viewer to follow.  This doesn’t mean you have to make everything completely different from one another, but having some variation can often make your design and content flow much better.

2)      Repetition—You want to repeat your visual elements of the design throughout the piece.  By repeating color, shape, texture, sizes and other elements throughout different parts of the page will help organize and strengthen the unity and quality.  Examples include: having the same size of text regarding quotes, block quotes, background color, etc. Will strengthen your piece much more.

3)      Alignment—Nothing should be placed on your page arbitrarily.  Each element of design should have some sort of connection visually with the other elements on the page.  For example, making things centered, lined up straight, aligned left or right, and making things not left out of place will make it visually easy for the reader to view.  Titles, italics, and bolded text on your page should all make sense to the reader.  Making the alignment straight regarding your text is key in having the reader interested in your page.

4)      Proximity—Similar items relating to one another should be grouped together.  When several items are too close to each other it makes it very difficult for the reader to follow.  Having each unit a bit separated from other pieces of text helps organize information and reduces clutter.  You don’t need to fill up 100% of the white space, but you do need to make sure you have filled up enough to not leave significant gaps.  Organization of your pictures and text are key in making the page easy to read and visitors to follow.

None of these principles stand alone and in order to make your website successful and gather an informative audience, you need to make sure you master each of the elements successfully.  Before you submit your website you need to make sure each of the C.R.A.P. principles on your different pages of you website are clearly identified and each principle is accounted for.  Keeping your reader interested in what you have to offer is the ultimate goal in making your website.  If you need help fixing each of the main 4 principles of web designs you can refer to the different PowerPoint examples and resources listed below:

Sources:

 http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/documents/desktop_publishing/list3.cfm
 http://www.imaginationalley.com/layout.html
http://www.slideshare.net/lorielue/10-design-layout-principles-guaranteed-to-improve
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/design-better-with-crap.html