Connections with my classmates in ETEC-540
On this page, I am posting links to my peer's sites and/or tasks and speaking to our experiences working through the same course. This course has been very open to how we tackle tasks and there are a lot of different viewpoints that have been really exciting to explore. I have included links to the individual posts that I commented on but have written reflections on the similarity and difference in our experiences and organization of their overall pages.
Kevin Spachuk - Visit Site
I really enjoyed both reading Kevin's story and his analysis of voice-to-text technologies. Kevin's post came at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement and protests were at the forefront of my (and many other's) minds. Kevin's post began with his oral story, which was a very personal experience of racism and violence growing up in Florida. I thought this interesting as I had organized my post with the analysis first as I wanted to signify the importance of the analysis in the informational design. In Kevin’s case, however, I thought it was a strong move to lead with his story in the post as it instantly drew me in despite the errors made by the technology. This engagement was due to the timeliness and emotionality of the story. Interesting that the human connection was still made through the technological barriers that were present. The analysis in our posts was very connected however by having a lot of the same analysis of the errors and the way we thought about how our 'performance' of the oral piece could be changed to get better output from the technology.
When thinking about the site itself, I was happy to see that Kevin took some chances with his platform as well. I chose early to use the blog functionality within Weebly for my platform where Kevin chose Notion, both of which were outside of the base recommendation. We both chose the platforms for reasons related to our careers. Kevin chose Notion as it is a platform he uses it with his students and thought that developing his site in this platform would increase his troubleshooting and mentoring skills when working with students. I chose Weebly because, as a web and graphic designer, I value the tools to create a variety of modern layouts, embed rich-media elements, and the ability to make mobile-friendly websites. One part of ‘Notion’ that I thought was less than ideal was making readers create an account to add comments. I thought this extra step in the onboarding process may be a barrier to people leaving comments. The organization of our pages is quite different. Kevin has a homepage with all the posts listed where I have chosen to do a long reverse chronological presentation of my posts. I like the ability to jump to different posts without having to go through the list and I considered changing it to have both a page in which you could look at the list and individual posting links in a dropdown menu in the navigation. I was unsure how the RSS feeds for my site would update if I changed it however so ultimately I decided to stay the course on my original navigational organization. |
Andrew Shedden - Visit Site
Andrew and I chose different options for this task. Where I made potato stamps, he focused on manual scripts. Once again I found I was drawn in by the content of Andrew's post for Manual Scripts, which piqued my interest to continue reading the post. I identified a lot with what Andrew was saying and the way in which he brainstormed out his ideas in hand-written form. Even though I had completed the potato stamp option, I too had hand-drawn out some ideas for 'fonts' and shared those on my site as I believe in showing process, not just final products.
I thought just by virtue of Andrew's ideas being shared in a handwritten, unpolished format that a sense of intimacy with the reader was created. That you were being invited behind the curtain to see how the ideas were being generated. It was unexpected that this bond with the author would form from such a simple artifact. From Andrew's first post, I really appreciated his authentic voice. One that was personable and vulnerable in content. This Manual Scripts post continued to build this connection and was achieved in the way in which he writes, the images he shares, and the vulnerable reflections that follow. Andrew used a UBC Wordpress Blog. I found myself wishing there was some way to move more easily between posts as you have to click on his name to move back to the homepage and then click on a link to a post. Unless you happen to hover over the title, there is no indication that informs the user that there is more to the site than this one post. This could be strengthened by either including a top or side navigational menu to easily move between posts. This would draw the user into the site further and ensure that the reader continues to be engaged by the content that is there. The comments were very easy to add to and Andrew keeps people engaged by responding to the comments left. |
Laura Ulrich- Visit Site
I really wanted to connect with Laura on the Twine assignment as her and both completed the ‘Digital Learning and Games’ course last semester. I thought that she too may have delved a little deeper in her Twine creation as we shared this previous experience. Laura did not disappoint in this regard. Her project was very extensive and implemented some clever coding. She actually included TWO Twine projects, which was very impressive. The premise of creating an interactive essay that flows like a conversation was unique and interesting. Both the project and the explanation were compelling.
In Laura’s postings, I appreciated her sharing the ideation process (how she came up with her ideas). This backstory shows the evolution of the idea from the original nugget of an idea through how it was ultimately pulled off. She has a great way of reflecting and sharing insights on this process of evolution. The site itself is pleasing to the eye and isn’t just the default theme that the blog comes with. Clearly some conscious thought has gone into the design and creating a space that was reflective of her personality. The colours are pleasing to the eye customized to each page. This kind of consideration is important to me as a designer as I will judge a book by its cover. For example, a Fortune 500 company shouldn’t be using Comic Sans on their website. and if they are I will not trust them. Due to the changing colours and the choice of fonts, the site comes across as youthful and playful, which seems indicative of her personality. It retains a professional feel however due to the thorough textual content on the site and the well designed navigational architecture that makes it easy to navigate the site. One area to improve is in the engagement with the comments. I posted a comment to Laura’s site with several questions, including asking for a code snippet to understand how she had completed one of her programmatic tasks. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet received a response and have checked back several times to see if she had interacted. As a user, I found this frustrating. |
Kelvin Nicholls - Visit Site
I quite quickly realized what Kelvin’s emoji story was, which was satisfying and made me feel like I was winning some sort of gameshow (Anyone remember ‘Bumper Stumpers’). More importantly, this quick deciphering meant that he did a really good job of communicating a complex plot through simple visuals. Kelvin and I both decided to choose emojis to communicate the themes and plot of the story. I thought it was very smart that Kelvin tried to create a visual language that he reused throughout the piece to help drive home the themes. I found that I did this as well but I wasn’t conscious of that decision until I reflected on it after reading his post. Interesting that I had learned something about my own process through reading someone else's post!
As I mentioned in my comment, I thought it intriguing the disparity between the fun-loving emoji and the dark horrifying content of his movie. This disparity of content and presentation is something evident in the design and presentation of graphics and web spaces too. For example, if a website has the aesthetics of a site built in 1999, the visitor likely won’t think of it as a relevant and current website and undermines the authority that the published content carries. For the majority of the tasks in this course, I have found that the analysis of what occurred has been more important than the creative piece itself. For example, the potato stamped word is less important than what we learned by going through the process. So when reading my peer’s sites, I find this part of their posts more valuable for my educational journey. Throughout his site, Kelvin always presents his creative piece first and follows it with the analysis so I found that I was always navigating to a new page, scrolling down to the analysis, reading it, then moving back to the top of the page to go through the piece. I wish he had presented his textual information in the inverse order. I would like the ideation, reflection, and analysis presented first so that when I work through the Twine or read the story or handwritten information I have a clear understanding of the challenges and successes that my peer went through in the creation process. |
Linda Duong - Visit Site
My focus on Linda’s site was primarily with the Golden Record Weekly Tasks. Linda and I ended up in the same Palladio grouping and found her analysis of the Networks very interesting. Her level of understanding of statistics and exploration of ‘the math’ was intriguing. We had come to some similar conclusions, particularly when thinking about how our grouping made their track choices. We differed in our further musings with Linda looking at different ways the data could be analyzed and me trying to delve further into the insights that could be made with additional datasets.
Linda comes across as a deep thinker who wants to answer the ‘Why’ questions. I found her thorough nature was consistent through her website content. Her visuals support her words well and she has clearly thought about how to enhance images with things like filters to make their meaning more overt. I also found it very interesting to analyze the similarities and differences between Linda’s website and my own. Linda has used a UBC Blogspace but has taken the time to develop a navigational menu at the top of this page. I see in one of her ‘Ramblings’ that might have been more difficult in this blog environment than in other web builders. This menu however pays off huge in user engagement. I was able to easily move from page to page, which in turn encouraged me to do so. I would not have done such a deep dive of all pages had it not been present. One thing I’ve seen on several people’s websites, including Linda’s, is that Comments need to be moderated before posting for others to see. On my site, I chose to allow the Comments to post automatically to the webpage because I wanted to develop engagement with them. I found it frustrating for it not to be posted right away as 1) I wondered if they had successfully been submitted and 2) I wanted comments to spark further thought and conversation with peers. |
Jamie Ashton - Visit Site
I first engaged with Jamie’s Algorithms task, which was thoughtful and made interesting connections to current trends. I valued seeing how she extended the weekly content and looked for that in her other posts as well. I would love to see a final project (or research project) that looks at the ethics of presenting text developed by AI as human writing. There are complex issues of authenticity, authorship, and accountability that could be extended from what Jamie writes here.
The content on Jamie’s website is smart, well-written, and extensive. She makes interested and informed insights and presents them to the reader in a well-crafted page. Although I greatly enjoyed her productions, some were so extensive that I found myself intimidated by the length of the entries. I would have interacted with more extensively with the site if they were more concise. Jamie does have a wonderful way of talking about her working thought process and how her ideas have evolved, which I think is so important in metacognitive reflection. Jamie’s website is well turned out. The design is good and her graphics keep you engaged as you aren’t seeing a wall of text. My one comment on the architectural design is that when you are on a task page, there is no way of moving to another task without knowing to click on the title at the top of the page. This click takes you to her homepage, which has a series of ‘cards’ that link to the different tasks. It is rather confusing because there is a top menu that provides links to the various linking tasks but no way of navigating to the tasks. The first time I visited her page I was rather confused by this and if there wasn't a red colour rollover on the title it might not have occurred to me to click there. My suggestion would be to add those items and re-order the links to be a dropdown for ‘Tasks’, one for ‘Linking’ and finally ‘Contact’. This would mimic the order of importance for the viewer. Most people coming to the site are looking for her 'Task' intellectual productions so that should have the highest priority in the navigation. In this way the navigation would be more overt as the links to the tasks wouldn’t be hidden. |