#readingresponses

For digital writers and designers, I feel like their jobs are about ensuring everyone can access and use the content they create. While they want the content to sound good and engage people, none of that matters if everyone can't access it. According to Horton and Quesenbery in A Web for Everyone, "When websites and applications are badly designed, they create barriers that exclude people from using the web as it was intended." They explain that accessibility is about designing in a way that gets rid of barriers for everyone else. They also make the argument that "disability is a conflict between someone's functional capability and the world we have constructed." In my opinion, this means that poor designs are usually what makes content inaccessible, so it's not always the designer's fault.

I understand intertextuality to be all about how texts connect to and influence each other. It’s when a piece of media, such as a book, movie, or song, builds on another piece of media in order to create new meaning. I feel this idea can take on a whole new level in digital spaces. According to Douglas Eyman in Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice, digital intertextuality makes it so we can have even greater connections because “contemporary users of Web-based discourse have at their fingertips resources that enable them to seek out information in the moment in order to more fully understand and appreciate an intertextual reference” (Eyman, 34).

(By Chiang, Yan Li)

Here are my reading responses as culled into 1 PDF folder.

Here are the slides I used for my presentation, the citations, the actual project, and its assembly instructions.

“Rise of Video Game Zinsters”

I really enjoyed the quote about how if one was to look solely at videogames, “one would think the whole of human experience is shooting men and taking their dinner orders.”  I think that this quote identifies what the entire reading was about, how we really don’t have much representation of anyone even slightly different than of straight, cis men, and straight, cis women.  “The Culture of Alienation” section of the article is mostly true.  The world of videos games is greatly limiting in that there’s a small group of people who make video games to relate or interest those that are a part of said small groups.  There needs to be a way to work around this, and by creating awareness of it is one way to begin to fix it.  Most of this article deals with how video games are perceived and who uses them.  It’s interesting to read an account from someone who doesn’t fit the group who makes them.  I think that it’s important for the article to be taken seriously for it to be written by a trans woman.  Because she represents one of the many demographics who aren’t represented by the gaming industry. 

Another aspect of this article is the accessibility of just the controllers alone.  “The amount of both manual dexterity and game-playing experience required to operate a game designed for the Xbox 360 makes play inaccessible to those who aren’t already grounded in the technique of playing games.  And to attain that level of familiarity with games requires a huge and continuous investment of time (and money).”  This causes a lot of exclusivity within the gaming world, which alienate even more groups who aren’t able to use games.  Older people, and people who do not play games regularly face a huge obstacle when just trying to play a game.  I’m one of these people, and the main reason why I don’t play games is because of the inaccessibility and problem with just learning the controller alone.  One time I was watching my brother playing Black Ops - I thought it looked like it would be fun to play, and when I tried I couldn’t even move around to save my life.  It ended up with me giving up and never playing games, unless simple ones that could be used with the computer mouse or arrow keys.

I enjoyed the author’s breakdown of tasks for designing a first game, and to help stimulate creativity. 

Task #1: Choose a Tool, Task #2: Introduce a Character, Task #3: Teach Your Character to Do Something, Task #4: Introduce a Second Character, Task #5: Make Some Noise, Task #6: Round out the Player’s Vocabulary, Task #7: Design a Level, Task #8: Finish the Story, Task #9: Have Someone Play It, Then Change It, Task #10: Distribute Your Game, Task #11: Make Another Game.

“Multimedia Tour Guides on Your Smartphone” “An Interactive Exhibit for About $30″ “Central Park, the Soundtrack”

“Multimedia Tour Guides on Your Smartphone”

I think museum apps are a step in the right direction.  It’s hard to go through a museum sometimes with just a map, because a lot of the time it’s hard for me to find something even if I know the exact area it’s in.  I think that if the VMFA used this it would be useful.  Others may argue that it’s wrong to use technology in museums as it may be distracting for people in the museums.  I think that if it’s used correctly it could be great. 

“An Interactive Exhibit for About $30″

Arduinos sound really cool.  It seems like they could completely change the way we curate and create art installations.  The idea that it’s cheap and basically limitless programming-wise is crazy to me.  “Imagine when every piece in a museum has an Arduino built in that can see how people interact and look at the artwork,” this would be great for artists and museums/galleries to use when thinking about how museum goers look and interact with art.  It would be interesting to see a museum which utilizes Arduinos to create a completely interactive experience between artwork and the people viewing it.  I also think it’s great to have such an accessible piece of technology.  Not everyone has the resources or the time to sit down and understand how to program.  Artists spend so much time creating their own works, they should have an easy time setting up their works for presentation. 

“Central Park, the Soundtrack”

“100 Ways to Teach with Twitter” “99 Ways You Should Be Using Facebook in Your Classroom” “5 Opportunities For Ed Tech To Amplify Children’s Curiosity, Not Destroy It”

“100 Ways to Teach with Twitter”

I liked the lay out of the article - it acted as a master list of some interesting ways to use Twitter.  For myself, I don’t think I would use Twitter as a platform to connect with my students, but I think it could be very useful for contacting other teachers.  “25 Ways to Teach with Twitter” by Sonja Cole was interesting because it covered many ways to use Twitter.  She gave useful tips and reasons why using Twitter is effective as it can help you connect with others who may have experience with something you might need help with. 

Steve Wheeler’s “Teaching with Twitter” page was interesting, and gave me some ideas for communicating with future students.  I think that whatever schools use for sharing and communicating with students could use a lot of these tips.  I don’t like the idea of having an internet presence for students to access information about me, so using a website or platform used by a school system would be my mode for contacting students.  I’d definitely use the idea #1 by Wheeler, where you notify the students of any changes in schedule, assignments, etc.

“99 Ways You Should Be Using Facebook in Your Classroom”

Again, I disagree about using a social media platform for teaching (particularly middle and high school) because I think it can be a strange grey area where teachers could get into possible trouble.  There’s also the possible problem of parents and allowing their children to use these platform or not, especially at a young age.  Facebook has a lot of useful features like creating a group for your class would be useful, but I would probably use it if I was sponsoring a club after school or for college-age students. 

“5 Opportunities for Ed Tech to Amplify Children’s Curiosity, Not Destroy It”

I agree with Adauto and Klein’s thoughts about fusing engagement and learning together, not balancing them, as many students find that learning games especially are not fun, and do not allow for proper integration of learning and game play.  It makes no sense to create a game that has nothing to do with the subject at hand, especially when math is involved.  I also liked how they brought up the idea of intuitive interfaces and software to make the “abstract touchable”.  There’s been a good amount of data to indicate that the way kids are learning today - recording and using laptops/keyboard mice do a worse job when kids are memorizing something.  The fact that we don’t really write what we’re learning is beginning to be a problem.  I think that finding an interface that makes it possible for technology to incorporate activity for kids to learn better is really important. 

“Creative Producers” and “Preschoolers Outsmart College Students in Figuring Out Gadgets”  

The NPR article about preschoolers outsmarting college students poses the answer to the question of how younger generations are able to troubleshoot and figure out technology much faster than the older generations.

What was so interesting about this article to me is that even college aged people who are mostly tech savvy  were not able to perform as well as 4 year olds.  Even younger ages are able to think critically about the relationships between objects rather than on the things.  It was also interesting to find out that as we get older, we tend to lose this type of thought that causes us to think more flexibly.  I think that as we get older and go through school, the emphasis on rules and  how we perceive problems solving changes due to being taught very concrete operations.  Maybe our problem solving could be shaped better if teachers and school systems formed curricula that welcomes the idea of abstract thoughts or to look at ideas in different ways. 

“Creative Producers” Article Response:

“Participatory Culture” beginning producers/creators using ongoing interaction with engaged peers and audiences. 

Media consumption is not a passive act, and that viewers and readers actively shape cultural meanings.  I agree with the idea under “Creative Production in the Digital Age” that children and youth can learn from television and commercial media through teaching about the “conditions under which media are created and revealing the ideological dimensions of popular media.”  TV and commercial media like the internet and it’s various social platforms can be useful resources for teaching kids.  I think it makes a lot of sense for kids to learn how these tools can be used and to develop a relationship about media that isn’t just a passive act.  I like the statement regarding personal computers being produced with basic photo/video production tools and how it enables young people to manipulate the media around them. 

Evan Meaney describes the Blue Screen of Death as “a knight we’ve mistaken for a rogue.” He explains that this screen appears right before something really bad will happen to your computer, automatically shutting itself down. You may curse at the screen, you may lose anything you didn’t save, but “Blue” is actually protecting your computer from more serious damage.

The way Meaney describes “Blue” reminds me of a stick-shift. When you stall, it’s really awkward and stressful, especially if you’re in the middle of the road. I remember my first car (which was a stick - and a really tough one to shift too) would stall all the time (partially because of me, partially because of it’s age). Sometimes it would even happen when I was in the middle of the road, and that was really scary. But after I talked to a friend about my car troubles, he helped me realize that there is a good reason why my car stalls. Similar to “Blue”, before anything can drastically damage my car, my car shuts itself off to protect itself. This helped me put things into perspective, and I wasn’t so scared of my car anymore (although I do have an automatic now).

I was honestly surprised at Annie Murphy Paul’s article on observing how different students from different backgrounds interact with the same granted technology in the local library. Two professors, Susan B. Neuman and Donna C. Celano spent hours observing what they thought would be “leveling the playing field” (granting technology to both sides of Philly - rich and poor, whites and minorities). However, they soon realized that the technology was “un-leveling the playing field”. Different students chose different programs, different ways of gaining knowledge, and Paul called this a “digital divide”. Paul also noted this has something to do with the “Matthew Effect” - the tendency for early advantages to multiply over time (which is harmful to those who don’t have technology advances). Students with different backgrounds and different advantages/disadvantages need different attention. Sometimes the “equal footing” doesn’t help everyone.