Conclusion

I have really enjoyed this class. It was very different from what I expected it to be. I have to say that I learned much more from class discussions than I did from the assigned reading. In fact, I really don't see the point in requiring the textbook. However, I do have to say that the assigned chapter for today (Becoming a Professional Interactive Writer) was actually very interesting and beneficial. I liked how Garrand went into great detail about what a career as an interactive writer would entail.

Chapter 14: Museum Kiosk

It's hard to say this chapter was interesting since Garrand doesn't really write in an entertaining way (in fact, he tends to put me to sleep). However, the information in this chapter was quite interesting, and I enjoyed learning about it, just not reading it...if that makes sense. :) I don't know why, but I have a really hard time with the case studies Garrand uses. I really can't stand to read the sections when he focuses only on the case study. In the case of this chapter, those were the sections that looked at The Nauticus Shipbuilding Company in great detail. Oh well, that doesn't really matter, and I should be focusing on the content and not the writer in this post. You might think I'm kind of slow, but I didn't realize I had used a kiosk until going through this chapter. It was interesting to understand what a kiosk was and be able to see how often I use them. Probably the greatest realization that I experienced during the chapter was how difficult it is to write the text for a kiosk. It would be pretty difficult to make the language of the text easy enough for a diverse group of people to comprehend it and still make it interesting enough to capture a person's attention within the 5-second gap.

Montana, I liked your analogy to the "choose your own adventure". These type of website are very helpful when trying to complete a process, such as doing taxes or figuring IRA accounts.
Sounds like we all liked chapter 11 better than some of the others we have read thus far.

Chapter 11: Corporate Web Site

Overall, I found this chapter pretty interesting. I liked the descriptions of the five basic web site categories, and I was trying to determine what category the web site I am designing falls under. (I decided that it is educational...just in case you were wondering). I also enjoyed seeing the comparision in the approach to the T. Rowe Pice home page over time. It is interesting to see how the visible change in focus for web sites as time goes by. On the CD (which really just repeated most of the information in the book while adding a few new things), I thought it was interesting to see the way the web site provides the user to choose where to go. It reminded me of the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I actually used a web site like this over the weekend. I was filing my taxes on the TaxAct web site. I didn't realize how cool it was that I was able to choose options on every page until after reading this chapter. It is pretty nifty!

Chapter 10: Case Study--Writing a Marekting Web Site

Truthfully, I thought this chapter was kind of boring. I don't know if it was because of the example he used or just because he went into more information than I thought I needed, but I had a hard time reading through it. Especially parts like the "Production Background" section where Garrand seems to be giving a play-by-play of the situation with unimportant facts. ("...Ken Jones did the programming and technical development, and Laurie Styrsko did the photographs." Why should I care? I have no idea who those people even are.)On the positive side of this chapter, however, I did feel like I was getting an example of the upcoming assignment. It even talked about the flowchart or sitemap. So, in that way the chapter was very helpful, though rather hard to get through.

Chapter 8: Informational Multimedia and Web Achitecture

I thought this was a very interesting chapter. I had to re-read most of the website structure definitions in order to understand what they were saying, but I don't know how much of that I can blame on the author and how much of the blame I have to take for my mind wandering. :) By far, my favorite thing about each of the definitions was the examples that the author would give to relate what he just said with a common thing in the real world. It made sense in a weird way. :) I was extremely grateful for the pictures/diagrams as well. Without them I definitely would have been lost.

Chapter 4: The Mulitimedia and Web Site Production Team

I think my favorite thing about this chapter was how short it was. It really made for an easy read. :) I enjoyed reading about the duties of each of the 17 multimedia and web site production team members. It surprised me at first to see that there were so many postions for one project. But now that I think about it, it makes sense to divide the workload up that way for such a large project. As I was reading through most of the members' responsibilities, I thought they sounded like duties that I would enjoy, and I decided that some day I want to be on a production team. :) Many of the positions and duties surprised me. For example, I was surprised to see that there was a usibility expert position. It makes sense to me after reading the chapter, but at first I was a little startled. I assumed that everyone would preform usibility test on their own aspect of the project. The voice and talent actors position also surprised me. It was very interesting to briefly learn how audio narration is incorporated.

Chapter 2: Writing for Many Media

I thought this whole chapter was extremely interesting. Part of the reason I felt this way was because it seems like all of the other technical writing classes I have taken give the same information on writing effectively. However, chapter 2 was relating these writing tips to multimedia rather than relating them to print documents, which is why I learned about them before. It was interesting to learn the reasoning behind these suggestions for effective writing as far as multimedia in concerned. For example, one area that I thought was particularly fascinating was the "Web Writing Tips from Usability Experts" section. I had just learned today in my Writing in Professional Contexts class that we should put the most important information at the beginning of the articles that we are writing so that information after that can be cut out if it needs to. It was interesting for me to have the textbook for this writing for interactive media class essentially tell me the same thing with the reasoning that most people who view websites are looking for specific information and don't want to read the entire text to discover that the site wasn't what they were looking for.

Digital Literacy/Technology Autobiography

I first learned to use the computer in second grade. On certain days of the week, we went to the computer lab to learn to type. It wasn't until probably third or fourth grade that I learned the basics of using the internet. As far as online social utility networks go, I just recently learned what those are and how to use them (probably a year ago) :).

The ability to get supplementary online support through search engines is one of the greatest benefit to students today. This makes it possible for information on any given topic to be within reach of anyone with access to the internet within seconds. Unfortunately, oftentimes the information retrieved from these sites does not come from scholarly sources. However, this drawback can be limited simply by specifying which type of source you are looking for (e.g. ".gov", ".edu", or ".org" sites).