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).