So after a grueling quarter I must say my technological advances have been great. I did my first podcast, maintained my first blog, built a website with a group, built a website by myself from the ground up all by myself (something I never would have imagined being able to do), worked with dreamweaver and illustrator for the first time, refreshed my skills in indesign, built up my barely there skills in photoshop and did several other assignments from creating a business card to a brochure.
I discovered I enjoy blogging. I think I will continue to blog, probably on a different subject though and I might consider trying out tumblr since it seems to be pretty popular among my friends. This website does a pretty good job comparing blogspot to tumblr: Tumblr vs Blogger: The Blogging Face-off . The more that I think about it blogging would be a great way to continue the idea of my website, since the set up is already there and it's easy to post pictures and blogging seems to be a great forum for reviews.
As far as keeping up with my social media site, I now feel like I would die without pinterest. I am following 66 pinners and have 37 pinners following me. I have 278 pins across 10 different boards from fashion to food. My pinterst accoung: http://pinterest.com/kmoores98/
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After just wrapping up our big project of designing our own website. I have mixed feeling. I'm am glad that it's done, but there is so much more I would love to add. There are things I want to fix and change, but I just don't have the time now. I feel like a half an hour once every weeks of in class time on the website would have helped because it's such a big requirement, but I'm not sure it worked out for me fine this way, but there were some things I missed that probably could have been fixed with some more class time. I would have preffered to have had tuesday and thursday of this week to work on our websites and than came in and presented my website during finals week.
When it comes to the indesign programs I had a lot of fun using them and learning about them. Indesign is my favorite program. I had a lot of fun designing our book, which was probably my favorite project of the class and creating my brochure because I love the way it turned out and it looks very proffesional. Photoshop is probably the program I am least proffeciant in, partically because I dreaded using it I never understood it in high school when I tried learning it and everything just seemed so much more complicated. I really understood arranging my content in indesign either sending images or boxes to the back or just backwards, I got, but when it came to the layers in photoshop I hated it. I was always clicking on the wrong thing or making layers I didn't mean to and losing the layers I was trying to make.
Overall this is one of my favorite classes I have taken at Western I think that learning these programs is very valuable and will prove to be highly beneficial in my future. I would suggest it to any student.
Below is an article talking about Adobe products in education written by: Christopher Dawson
Adobe nails the value question with Creative Cloud and announces scholarships to boot
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Week 9: A Day Without Technology
I would say I check my iphone around a 100 times a day for emails, text messages, phone calls and browsing the internet.
When I bought my iphone I justified spending over $300 on it becaue it is a tool I use everyday and to me it was worth spending that money on something I carry with me 24/7. I literally sleep with the thing at night.
After reading "A Day Without Media" withoutmedia.wordpress.com I realized that I related a lot to what the students that participated in the study were saying.
They made this 'wordle' from the data they collected from the students feedback after participating in the study. The bigger words correspond to the amount of times the word was used in the students feedback, so the bigger the word the more frequently it was used.
When I bought my iphone I justified spending over $300 on it becaue it is a tool I use everyday and to me it was worth spending that money on something I carry with me 24/7. I literally sleep with the thing at night.
After reading "A Day Without Media" withoutmedia.wordpress.com I realized that I related a lot to what the students that participated in the study were saying.
They made this 'wordle' from the data they collected from the students feedback after participating in the study. The bigger words correspond to the amount of times the word was used in the students feedback, so the bigger the word the more frequently it was used.
My 24 Hour No Technology Expirience: Monday, May 21st
I realized within the first five minutes of my day that this was going to be difficult. The day started off rough because every morning I use my phone as an alarm clock, and after that I immediatly check all the notification (emails, text messages, and facebook notifications) that I have recieved throughout the night andin the morning before I woke up. So instead this morning I just immediatly turned my phone on off for the day.
It was pretty easy to go without my phone at school, but only while I was in class. I noticed that I check the time prett frequently while I'm in class on my phone. I also use my phone as a watch/clock outside of class which was one of the most annoying things is I was always wondering what time it was, so I had to run around looking for a clock.
Another thing that was rather annoying is that when I go to work study I usually do homework in the office their on the computer, checking my blackboard and my school email or working on my blog or online portfolio, but instead today I caught up on some of my reading from my textbook sine I ouldn't use the computer.
I also use the internet to look up the bus schedules so I know when to get on the bus from school, so today I just walked to the bus stop and hoped that a bus would be coming by soon luckily one was within the next 5 mintues so I didn't hav to wait to long.
When I got home at 6 was when things got really difficult it was rainy and gross outside so Ididn';t wanna do anything that involved the outdoors and music and tv and the internet were not options of entertainmnet, so decided to go to the store and get some grocery shopping out of the way. I finished tha that got home at around 8 and than made dinner so it's like 9 now which leaves me about 3 hours before I go to bed. I do so much stuf to music it really limited what I wanted to do. I thought about cleaning but that's no fun unless you have the stero blasting.
I decided the best way to fill this time was to hang out with people, but with no phone and facebook it felt impossible to get a hold of anyone. I warned some friends about this expirment and let them know that something like this might happen so I just showed up at their place and played board games till it was time for bed.
Overall the day sucked in my opinion it was nice to be phoneless and away from the responsibilties, but overall I think I'd like to keep my technology.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Week 7: Building a Website
Over the last few weeks in class we spent time building a website with a group using either wix or weebly two different website building sites.
When we first started this assignment we spent some time looking through both the sites, playing around with them to see, which one we liked better and to help us decide the one we would use to build our own site. I decided to start with wix purely because their site looked better to me upon first glance. From what I gathered in the ten minutes of using wix was that it wasn't exactly user friendly. I saw the cool things that it could do, but I couldn't figure out how to use them. At the same time I was slightly intrigued to learn because the template sites that they had were so well done. I wanted mine to look as good as theirs did.
After spending some time playing with these sited individually we came together to discuss as a group and share what we thought about the two sites. A member of our group showed us around the weebly site first. After playing around with wix for a while weebly seemed very simplistic and user friendly. You could put together a very basic but professional looking site with out much hassle. That is why we choose to go with weebly.
For my portion of the website I was doing drinks. I found weebly extremly easy to use. There is not a lot of glitz, glamour, and flash to it, but it certainly gets the job done. The template sites are somewhat basic, but classic and professional looking. I can not stress how easy to use the site was. Once we decided on a template as a group we went straight to building our individual pages. I had the setup of my page done within an hour and than from there I just had to fill in the content and add videos and other extras. I decided to link the website of what I was talking about with the picture, so you could just click on the picture and it would take you directly to the site. It was easy to do and added a whole other dimension to the site.
You can see the finished product of our site here. http://bellinghambucketlist.weebly.com/.
After seeing everyone elses finished products in class. It was clear to see how much awesome stuff you could do using either of these sites and the extent of options they both offered. Overall I feel like if you want do something fancier that looks cooler and hipper I would go with wix, but if you want something simple and proffessional I would go with weebly.
Here are video for both:
Wix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45O5xjFKOEE
Weebly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOW7ALVVVUc
When we first started this assignment we spent some time looking through both the sites, playing around with them to see, which one we liked better and to help us decide the one we would use to build our own site. I decided to start with wix purely because their site looked better to me upon first glance. From what I gathered in the ten minutes of using wix was that it wasn't exactly user friendly. I saw the cool things that it could do, but I couldn't figure out how to use them. At the same time I was slightly intrigued to learn because the template sites that they had were so well done. I wanted mine to look as good as theirs did.
After spending some time playing with these sited individually we came together to discuss as a group and share what we thought about the two sites. A member of our group showed us around the weebly site first. After playing around with wix for a while weebly seemed very simplistic and user friendly. You could put together a very basic but professional looking site with out much hassle. That is why we choose to go with weebly.
For my portion of the website I was doing drinks. I found weebly extremly easy to use. There is not a lot of glitz, glamour, and flash to it, but it certainly gets the job done. The template sites are somewhat basic, but classic and professional looking. I can not stress how easy to use the site was. Once we decided on a template as a group we went straight to building our individual pages. I had the setup of my page done within an hour and than from there I just had to fill in the content and add videos and other extras. I decided to link the website of what I was talking about with the picture, so you could just click on the picture and it would take you directly to the site. It was easy to do and added a whole other dimension to the site.
You can see the finished product of our site here. http://bellinghambucketlist.weebly.com/.
After seeing everyone elses finished products in class. It was clear to see how much awesome stuff you could do using either of these sites and the extent of options they both offered. Overall I feel like if you want do something fancier that looks cooler and hipper I would go with wix, but if you want something simple and proffessional I would go with weebly.
Here are video for both:
Wix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45O5xjFKOEE
Weebly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOW7ALVVVUc
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Week 6: Social Media & Social Change
This is an interesting topic for me. A few quarters ago in a sociology class we watched a video of a documentary inside the protests of Egypt following some of the lead protesters that we're deciding where to go and what to do. At the time I knew nothing of the involvement of facebook and twitter on the revolution there. They showed when the government in Egypt shut off the internet to stop the spread of the tweets cutting off the main way the protestors communicated. They made it sound as if they had just had their most powerful weapon taken away and it just well may have been.
I watched this video about the social medias affects on the revolution as well called Egypt's Internet Revolution. In the video they say that "social media did not cause what is happening but it might have acted as a vehicle that increased the speed at which these thing were unfolding". I agree with that statement social media isn't the cause, but it is a large part of the result. It makes this information easy and accessible for all to see I can't imagine an easier way to mobilize an already motivated people.
Another interesting point that they brought up is the potential dangers that posting this information on the internet can cause. Using the internet in some ways can be like the ultimate paper trail you can trace back the IP address and find out all sorts of information about the people that were using it, such as their location. When you're trying to bring down a government dictatorship that really isn't the safest formation to have out there. These people are really putting themselves at risk. In a sense it's a double edged sword, social media is helping to make these protests happen, but at what price.
In the same video they talk about historians looking back on this time as a turning point, which it really is. I can't think of any comparison to getting information out there and it having such an effect.
Switching gears a little bit the article on CNN How social media are amplifying customer outrage is something that I found that I could relate to. They discuss what I like to call the netflix fiasco. The poorly executed plan on raising netflix prices that sent their users into an uproar. I was one of those users. I remember the initial email I received informing me of the price increases and the changes to the plans you could purchase. I was rather annoyed, but I didn't voice my thoughts about it. In the following days I read the articles that appeared on yahoo about the amount of disgruntled users they had and how upset they were. Reading how upset other people were made me realize that I should be more upset to. After reading all the comments I decided to join in and voice my concerns as a long time loyal customer. In the cnn article it says "But is a social network different? The comfortingly clear identities of people who share your outrage, reinforcing your opinion with camaraderie and conversation -- do these things stoke anger that would have otherwise fizzled out?" This is exactly what happened to me. Yes, I was annoyed with the raise it netflix's prices, but I didn't not become angry till I realized how angry everyone else was and what a huge deal this was becoming.
So whether it be a tweet or facebook post rallying protestors to stand for an injustice, or the simple raising of a widely used company's product to an unjust prices. Social media is having an impact good, bad or ugly. I guess it just depends on which side you of the trending topic you're on.
I watched this video about the social medias affects on the revolution as well called Egypt's Internet Revolution. In the video they say that "social media did not cause what is happening but it might have acted as a vehicle that increased the speed at which these thing were unfolding". I agree with that statement social media isn't the cause, but it is a large part of the result. It makes this information easy and accessible for all to see I can't imagine an easier way to mobilize an already motivated people.
Another interesting point that they brought up is the potential dangers that posting this information on the internet can cause. Using the internet in some ways can be like the ultimate paper trail you can trace back the IP address and find out all sorts of information about the people that were using it, such as their location. When you're trying to bring down a government dictatorship that really isn't the safest formation to have out there. These people are really putting themselves at risk. In a sense it's a double edged sword, social media is helping to make these protests happen, but at what price.
In the same video they talk about historians looking back on this time as a turning point, which it really is. I can't think of any comparison to getting information out there and it having such an effect.
Switching gears a little bit the article on CNN How social media are amplifying customer outrage is something that I found that I could relate to. They discuss what I like to call the netflix fiasco. The poorly executed plan on raising netflix prices that sent their users into an uproar. I was one of those users. I remember the initial email I received informing me of the price increases and the changes to the plans you could purchase. I was rather annoyed, but I didn't voice my thoughts about it. In the following days I read the articles that appeared on yahoo about the amount of disgruntled users they had and how upset they were. Reading how upset other people were made me realize that I should be more upset to. After reading all the comments I decided to join in and voice my concerns as a long time loyal customer. In the cnn article it says "But is a social network different? The comfortingly clear identities of people who share your outrage, reinforcing your opinion with camaraderie and conversation -- do these things stoke anger that would have otherwise fizzled out?" This is exactly what happened to me. Yes, I was annoyed with the raise it netflix's prices, but I didn't not become angry till I realized how angry everyone else was and what a huge deal this was becoming.
So whether it be a tweet or facebook post rallying protestors to stand for an injustice, or the simple raising of a widely used company's product to an unjust prices. Social media is having an impact good, bad or ugly. I guess it just depends on which side you of the trending topic you're on.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Week 5: Social Media Site
My choice: Pinterest.com
I choose pinterest because I have a lot of friends that use it and I was curious what all the hype was about. Pinterest describes itself as a virtual pinboard. People can post images and articles to themed board that they have created.
One of the most interesting things about pinterest is that you have to be invited to join the site. You can request an invite from the site, but that can take a long time or you can get an invitation from someone who is already a user. You would think this would turn people off to the site but exclusivity almost makes it more exciting and it helps to get the word out to people.
Since I started pinning I already have multiple boards for fashion, food, places I want to visit, drink, diy projects and more.
For what I have seen so far you just browse through images and you can repin them to a board you created, so you can have your own collection of themed pictures. You can also follow other pinners who pin stuff that match your interests. When you log into the website the first pins you will see are the pinners that you follow. It makes it faster to see things that match your interests or taste.
During my research I found an article that kind of startled me concerning copyright laws regarding pinterest.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-28/tech/31106641_1_repinning-copyright-entire-image
Shontell, Alyson. "A Lawyer Who Is Also A Photographer Just Deleted All Her pinterest Boards Out Of Fear." Business Insider. 28 Feb. 2012. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. <http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-28/tech/31106641_1_repinning-copyright-entire-image>.
This makes me think twice about using pinterest, but I have become such a fan. I'm not ready to delete yet. I have already tried some awesome recipes I found using pinterest.
Another article I read about pinterest was about ways you could boost your business. I never thought of the possible business uses of pinterest, but when you think about it what a perfect way to get your products out there. As a consumer I have seen things on pinterest and I wish I could buy whatever it I saw. You would already have a built in customer base and along as people were repinning your products. The article below gives tips to jump start your business with pinterest.
http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/9-tips-boost-your-business-pinterest.html
Brandon, John. "9 Tips: Boost Your Business With Pinterest." Inc.com. 20 Dec. 2011. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. <http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/9-tips-boost-your-business-pinterest.html>.
I choose pinterest because I have a lot of friends that use it and I was curious what all the hype was about. Pinterest describes itself as a virtual pinboard. People can post images and articles to themed board that they have created.
One of the most interesting things about pinterest is that you have to be invited to join the site. You can request an invite from the site, but that can take a long time or you can get an invitation from someone who is already a user. You would think this would turn people off to the site but exclusivity almost makes it more exciting and it helps to get the word out to people.
Since I started pinning I already have multiple boards for fashion, food, places I want to visit, drink, diy projects and more.
For what I have seen so far you just browse through images and you can repin them to a board you created, so you can have your own collection of themed pictures. You can also follow other pinners who pin stuff that match your interests. When you log into the website the first pins you will see are the pinners that you follow. It makes it faster to see things that match your interests or taste.
During my research I found an article that kind of startled me concerning copyright laws regarding pinterest.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-28/tech/31106641_1_repinning-copyright-entire-image
Shontell, Alyson. "A Lawyer Who Is Also A Photographer Just Deleted All Her pinterest Boards Out Of Fear." Business Insider. 28 Feb. 2012. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. <http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-28/tech/31106641_1_repinning-copyright-entire-image>.
This makes me think twice about using pinterest, but I have become such a fan. I'm not ready to delete yet. I have already tried some awesome recipes I found using pinterest.
Another article I read about pinterest was about ways you could boost your business. I never thought of the possible business uses of pinterest, but when you think about it what a perfect way to get your products out there. As a consumer I have seen things on pinterest and I wish I could buy whatever it I saw. You would already have a built in customer base and along as people were repinning your products. The article below gives tips to jump start your business with pinterest.
http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/9-tips-boost-your-business-pinterest.html
Brandon, John. "9 Tips: Boost Your Business With Pinterest." Inc.com. 20 Dec. 2011. Web. 27 Apr. 2012. <http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/9-tips-boost-your-business-pinterest.html>.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Week 4: Podcasts
So this week we are really getting into our podcasts. My teams podcast is on craigslist and lucky for us one of my team member is really familar with audio recording and even has his own studio set up, so I'm really looking forward to making our podcast.
I also wanted to play around with audacity myself even though it is not going to be the program that we record our podcast with. I went home and tried some of the things that we did in class on my macbook. I recorded myself and than deleted parts and added some background music too.
http://www.voices.com/podcasting/plan-your-podcast
The website above was really helpful. There are multiple pages that are related to podcasting.
The first page I looked at was planning your podcast. It gives you a blueprint of how a successful podcast runs by keeping topics brief and interesting, adding guests and music, and using and making clear transitions so the show is easy to follow.
It helps you to write as script and with the style of your voice.
They discuss a more professional approach to pod casting and a freestyle approach. Depending on what your podcast is for you should choose between these two approaches before you record.
This site also has a section on branding your podcast.
http://www.voices.com/podcasting/brand-your-podcast
It discusses identifying the theme of your recording, selecting a name, creating logos, choosing colors,and music and sound effects.
I also wanted to play around with audacity myself even though it is not going to be the program that we record our podcast with. I went home and tried some of the things that we did in class on my macbook. I recorded myself and than deleted parts and added some background music too.
http://www.voices.com/podcasting/plan-your-podcast
The website above was really helpful. There are multiple pages that are related to podcasting.
The first page I looked at was planning your podcast. It gives you a blueprint of how a successful podcast runs by keeping topics brief and interesting, adding guests and music, and using and making clear transitions so the show is easy to follow.
It helps you to write as script and with the style of your voice.
They discuss a more professional approach to pod casting and a freestyle approach. Depending on what your podcast is for you should choose between these two approaches before you record.
This site also has a section on branding your podcast.
http://www.voices.com/podcasting/brand-your-podcast
It discusses identifying the theme of your recording, selecting a name, creating logos, choosing colors,and music and sound effects.
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