Author Archives: Nicole

r12: FEMMES

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My Prezi all about FEMMES: Females Excelling More in Math, Engineering and Science, an organization here on campus. We are an educational outreach group that works with 4th-6th grade girls attending Durham Public Schools. The project seeks to be an informative piece, a call to action for future volunteers, a bit of a narrative, and a way to show off how adorable our participants are, all at once. FEMMES has been a big part of my Duke experience and I saw this project as the perfect opportunity to reflect on it and showcase it. My project walks through why we need FEMMES, talks about our three main programs (summer camp, capstone, and after school/Saturday program), offers some testimonials from participants and DPS faculty, as well as describes my personal experience with the organization.

This project came about because our organization frankly needs a new site, and I figured I could kill two birds with one stone. I started collecting interviews with a bunch of girls, and started sifting through the tons of pictures we have from our events. I ended up with a ton of media to work with! I thought that I would really be able to leverage all of this access to media I had to enhance my project; I hoped to really take it “off the page” and turn it into a digital essay.

I decided to work with Prezi because I felt as though my project doesn’t necessarily have a linear flow to it and Prezi is really receptive to that. If a viewer were to look at my home screen, she could easily navigate her way to testimonials, contact information, our programs, and more with a simple click, in any order that you please. I also thought the playfulness of a Prezi was nice, as our organization works with 4th-6th grade girls. I added the sort of random pictures that are interspersed throughout the presentation at the end, and I believe they actually make the site more inviting. How can you say no to these faces?

Don't you just get up and go learn science? (And/or hang out with 4th-6th graders?)

r10: Digital Culture

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Like many of my classmates, I wasn’t quite sure where to begin with this assignment and I turned to the ever-trusty google. I began on Mashable, a site which we’ve already talked about in class, reading an article about social media, but wasn’t sure I had enough to work with. It linked to the article “How the Internet Gets Inside Us” by Adam Gopnik who writes for the New Yorker, claiming “It’s a fantastic read and should be mandatory for anyone in an online industry.” I decided to check it out, thinking that it would probably be pretty useful for future members of Digital Writing. Once I started reading it, I was hooked! It’s written in a really engaging way and does a beautiful job of explaining how we interact with technology and the internet today. It talks about similar revolutionary technological advances in our society’s history and how those affected culture. It even makes Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings references so you know it’s going to be good.

The part I was particularly drawn and that I think the class will appreciate is its classification of internet users into three main parties: the Better-Nevers, the Never-Betters, and the Ever-Wasers. Essentially, this refers to those who are against the movement, those who are think it’s wonderful and unique, and those who see it as a fairly normal progression. I think it will be useful to draw comparisons between Gopnik’s classifications and the classifications of “Digital Natives” vs. “Digital Immigrants.” His article is rife with examples of what sorts of experiences each of his three classifications have with the internet. I think he sums it all up nicely in his concluding paragraph:

“Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them. Our contraptions may shape our consciousness, but it is our consciousness that makes our credos, and we mostly live by those. Toast, as every breakfaster knows, isn’t really about the quality of the bread or how it’s sliced or even the toaster. For man cannot live by toast alone. It’s all about the butter.”

r8: Blog Favorites

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Lindsay’s blog has been one of my favorites to keep up with over the course of this semester, and not just because I’m obligated to like it since she’s my roommate. I’ve thought her “lists” idea was really innovative from the get-go and I’ve been so glad to see that it hasn’t yet gotten bland. While writing a blog of lists gives her the flexibility to write about whatever she wants, all of the posts still fit really well together because she is able to capture the same humorous voice in each one. She maintains an honest though sometimes self-depreciating perspective when writing about the many topics that piqued her interest this semester. It seems as though she could write about anything and still get her readers laughing. I like the way she titled her posts since they always included an amusing alternative title from which you could tell what the slant of her post was going to be. My favorite post is one of her firsts, titled: “A List Revisited, Or How I Ended Up Wearing Dickies to My Eighth Grade Graduation”

“For a couple years, when I was about twelve to fifteen, I decided I wanted to look and act like a total idiot. This was okay, I reasoned, because music was my “life” and all the “punk rock” musicians I liked also looked and acted like idiots. Not everyone totally understood my position – one time while visiting family in Ohio, my mom felt it necessary to explain me to my extended family and basically asked them to send up prayers that my exclusively-red-and-black closet was a phase – so I learned some HTML, made an Angelfire website with the tagline “My awesome site with my awesome interests and some just plain awesome stuff,” and made my first foray into public listing by professing that society simply couldn’t do without punk rock.”

I think she does a fantastic job of hooking her readers in right away with this introduction as she does in nearly all of her lists. It almost doesn’t even matter what the list itself says (although you should definitely take a look at this one since it’s hilarious). All of her posts had this semi-anecdotal quality to them that connected them all together and made it an enjoyable experience to read.

Another blog I really enjoyed was Shawn’s blog, “Talkin’ Traz.” I too was really excited about Alcatraz and got progressively more and more disappointed as time went on. I particularly liked his blog because of its honesty – it was more than just a guide to the episodes. I liked how he was able to flow from the plot to the themes to his opinions seamlessly. His blog had the potential to be very repetitive (since every episode was basically exactly the same) but he was able to keep it new and different with every post. My favorite part of the blog was probably his titles. I love word play and he clearly had a great time coming up with them! I also really liked how he included an important quote from each episode at the beginning of each post. The site was well organized, and I really enjoyed his character ratings page as well as the links he found to interesting websites so readers can gain other perspectives on the show as well. I think Shawn did a wonderful job of taking advantage of the blog platform. My favorite post is the one about Johnny McKee:

“Great.  Another episode, following the EXACT same plot.  I really don’t understand.  Lost was one of the best shows ever on television (next to 24, in my opinion)… so what happened to J.J. Abrams in the mean time?  Did he go insane?

If you didn’t watch the episode, I can put all 44 minutes into a few sentences.  Johnny McKee turns up, and he uses poison to kill people who bully him (just like he did before he was put inAlcatraz… gasp!).  Hauser, Rebecca, and Doc track him down, eventually apprehending him.  We also find out that Tommy Madsen, Rebecca’s grandfather, used to always be in the infirmary having blood drawn and having tests run on him.  That’s it.”

I like Shawn’s writing style because, as I mentioned, of its honesty. He’s not trying to draw out the plot and tantalize his readers. It’s somewhat sarcastic, but also sums up the episode pretty succinctly. This particular post, although probably the one where Shawn is the most frustrated, actually to me demonstrates that he’s allowing himself to have fun with it. He’s giving himself the liberty to truly express his opinion in an amusing way while still maintaining the integrity of his blog.

Digital Essay: FEMMES at Duke

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Subject and slant: I have been involved with FEMMES (Females Excelling More in Math, Engineering, and Science) since my sophomore year at Duke. I’m in charge of the program this year and we’ve been having some problems with our current website. I’d like to use this project as a way to create a new site for our organization. The goal of this essay is to inform people, both parents of participants (we work with 4th-6th grade girls) and students at Duke who want to get involved, about what we do and who we are.

Format: I think I’m going to create a Prezi. This will be useful because the information I’d like to present isn’t going to be presented in a linear way. There will be certain areas to go to if you’re a student and different areas if you’re a parent.

Materials: I’d like this site to be full of a lot of media to make it really engaging to those who visit. I plan to record myself talking a bit about the organization and my journey with it as well as a few other executive board members about their experiences. Additionally, I’ve interviewed a few of the girls during experiments to demonstrate what types of activities we work on and what they’re learning about. (Don’t worry – there’s a clause in the legal release their parents sign that says we could take pictures / videos of them and put them online for the purposes of advertising our organization!)

Questions: At this point, I’m mostly worried about how I could make my work a true “essay.” I see in my head more as different sections of information and am trying to figure out how I could make it more creative and engaging, as well as how to make it have more of a flow. Maybe I could have a section of some anecdotes or something? I also need to play around with Prezi more and figure out if/how I could post documents (i.e. registration forms) to be downloaded to make the site useful for parents.

r7: Wikipedia and Beyond: Jimmy Wales’ Sprawling Vision

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I particularly liked this article because I am an ardent supporter of Wikipedia. I think it raised a really important question about the way we transmit and receive information in the age of the internet. What is the importance of credentials and authority? Is “collective intelligence” just as valuable? Based on Wikipedia’s success, I personally tend to think it is. While people against Wikipedia try to discredit it because they worry it might have some sort of slant or bias, I believe that “collective intelligence” actually prevents this (or at least limits this) from happening. I think a key point to keep in mind when thinking about the site is that Wikipedia is mostly creating a taskforce to collect the knowledge, not create it. Ultimately, the information on the site should still be coming from those same authorities and experts, but it is being communicated to us in a way that is easily understandable and nonbiased because thousands of people are working to make it that way.

I believe there are other benefits to Wikipedia as opposed to an encyclopedia that the article addresses well. I thought the part discussing the benefits of instant gratification, as in the ability to fix an error immediately and thoroughly which is not possible with a book, was particularly relevant to our culture today. We have come to expect everything instantaneously and I think Wikipedia is helping to make that a reality. It is allowing us to increase our efficiency. That is not to say that this means we should immediately accept what we see on Wikipedia, but rather, as Jimmy Wales suggests, use Wikipedia as a springboard to launch us into other, more specific pieces of information. Collective intelligence has to be drawn from somewhere, and if Wikipedia pages are properly cited this allows us to still be able to access the works of all of the authorities and experts that will ultimately help us to understand what we’re looking to.

A final interesting point about the article was its long discussion of “Wikia.” This was published in 2007 and I am yet to hear of what Wikia is, so I’m assuming that it hasn’t blown up and become the dream Jimmy had hoped. Regardless, he’s still incredibly influential and Wikipedia is still flourishing. It seems that the author’s claim that heroes need to keep topping themselves isn’t true in this case, but I’m still pretty curious about what happened to Wikia. I guess I’ll have to Wikipedia it…

r6: The Eight Net-Gen Norms

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Since I found myself scrutinizing the majority of this book and feel as though the majority of it is out of date, I think it’s appropriate that I give a brief discussion on the article which specifically mentions “scrutiny” as a norm ingrained into my generation. I actually enjoyed the majority of this article and found Tapscott’s eight norms – freedom, customization, scrutiny, integrity, collaboration, entertainment, speed, and innovation – to be fairly, well, normal. Initially, I wasn’t sure that these terms were all direct outcomes of being a part of the so-called “net gen” with our constant internet access, but as I thought about it more, it seemed that even if the internet itself didn’t propel us towards valuing these ideas, it definitely helped.

There were a couple of these norms that really stuck out to me as worth being discussed further. Freedom, to me, is the most obvious example of a norm of our generation that’s well supported by the boom of the internet. As a young person with access to the internet, in the United States you can find basically anything you want. You could learn about things your parents or teachers might not tell you about (for better or for worse), you could chat with your friends, and so much more. This idea goes hand in hand with scrutiny – many times the information you’re seeking is to confirm whether or not your parents or teacher are really telling you the whole truth about a certain topic.

Another two of the terms which I automatically coupled in my head were integrity and collaboration. Tapscott tries to make the more noble point that our generation is setting higher standards of integrity for the people and companies we interact with, but I worry that our generation is taking advantage of the pure magnitude of information that’s on the internet – it’s easy to steal someone else’s idea without crediting them for an assignment with a good chance that nobody will ever know. This could further extend to the idea of collaboration. The internet is doing incredible things for collaborative efforts – take, for example, the googledoc. You could update a doc in real-time with people who you aren’t with. It’s a great way to get something done if you don’t feel like leaving the comforts of your apartment (which I rarely feel like doing.) On the other hand, because of the inherently collaborative nature of the internet, you could very easily end up in a gray area when it comes to intellectual property and things like that.

I believe Don Tapscott’s essay does a nice job of honing in on how the internet has influenced the way the “net gen” thinks about and faces the world.

r5: Digital Essay

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I found myself exploring the VuVox website we were talking about in class last week. It was an interesting platform I had never seen before, and I think it does a really nice job of combining pictures, videos, and texts. While it’s a little frustrating to navigate these essays at time (sometimes the scrolling feature isn’t quite as cooperative as I’d like it to be), but when I saw this I had to share it. I think it tells a compelling story through through words, pictures, and videos. I particularly found the part with the “military lingo” to be really interesting and displayed in a nonlinear way – it allowed me to learn about terms I didn’t know, but I could just scroll through once I got bored.

r4: Do they really think differently?

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Prensky’s essay immediately called to mind a memory of my now 11 (and a half) year old cousin. Several years ago, when she was about 8 or 9, she told me how she had been assigned her first “research paper.” I tried to recall the experience of writing my first paper – I remember going to the library, writing notecards, and feeling quite important with an encyclopedia in my hand. I was eager to hear how she had fared so the next time I saw her, I asked her how the dinosaur paper was coming and whether or not she had trouble finding books. She looked at me as though I was a dinosaur and told me she “googled it,” and that was that. While it seems like it wouldn’t be quite as rewarding, it definitely is a much more efficient method and one that we all employ today.

The technologies we grow up with and have access to definitely affect the way we interact with the world and therefore the way we think about things and approach problems. I wonder though, if learning through “digital game-based learning” is a way to bridge the gap between the current, non-technologically integrated (for the most part) education system and the students who are oversaturated with exposure to technology in nearly every other aspect of their life. The essay makes the argument that this method will work because it is what children are interested in. Haven’t teachers been trying to make learning “fun” forever though? Educational board games have been tricking kids into learning for as long as I’ve been educated – we were always playing matching games, cards games, math games (24!), Scrabble (!!!!), and many, many more. I think that going over similar math and reading concepts in a Playstation game, is really not anything special, but rather just an expensive solution to the age-old problem of how to keep a young child engaged in an academic environment.

That being said, I think the part about the US Military is interesting. Using simulators and video games to simulate experiences rather than just teaching basic concepts can actually add value in a new and unique way. When I read this essay, I immediately thought of was an article I had read for another class about video games and virtual reality being used as a treatment for PTSD for returning soldiers. It is used in “exposure therapy.” You can learn more about that here. Exposure therapy is all about dulling the emotional stress associated with a traumatic event by repeating it over and over again in a safe environment. I wonder if using video games as a tool to teach us how to make decisions and function in the world would similarly desensitize us from the feelings of experiencing such things in real life, or rather, would it actually be a valuable resource allowing our brain to simulate the consequences of taking different actions based on these “learned outcomes.”

Children today are experiencing the world with much easier access to information and technology than generations past. “Digital game-based learning” might offer us usefulness in teaching concepts (and simulating experiences) in ways we were unable to in the past.

r3: Micromessage

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I posted my micromessage on a NYTimes blog post about Amazon potentially opening a storefront. I tried to start off by connecting with the readers and the post by establishing that I am someone to whom Amazon is very relevant and important. I tried to be very clear in my position that I don’t think this is the best move for the company by drawing from examples and “evoking specific situations.” I tried to use the metaphor of comparing the interactions of the customers with each other to a community, which I hoped would create a picture in the reader’s mind of why Amazon is great just the way it is.

r2: Microstyle

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Throughout the first half of Microstyle, Johnson often uses newspaper headlines and article titles as examples of where his techniques can be employed in an incredibly effective manner. I came across an opinion article of the NY Times today that I think demonstrates a nice use of several of Johnson’s suggestions. It’s called “Saving Freshman Ryan.” The author is using metonymy and relying on his readers to make the inferential and referential connections between the plight of UConn’s freshman basketball player, Ryan Boatright, and the epic war movie, Saving Private Ryan. Before even knowing what the article is referring to, the title allows readers to infer a story. It conjures images of battles, fighting, and immense sadness and loss. It encourages readers to sympathize with Boatright right off the bat, and implies that there is some evil entity from which he needs to be saved. Upon reading the article, it is clear that this evil stems from the NCAA who suspended the poor guy based only on suspicions and did some pretty invasive investigations. The article is interesting and well-written, but were it not for the title, I might have never learned of this scandal.

In my blog, I attempt to employ some of Microstyle’s techniques to entice readers to explore the site by using the following tagline: “A taste of second semester senior life.” With my use of the word “taste,” I am trying to be intentionally ambiguous, as Johnson suggests can only be done well under particular circumstances. I think it is effective because it flows fairly naturally and doesn’t seem forced in either situation. It refers first to the idea that this blog will be recounting adventures I have as I wrap up my time in college, but only a “taste” because my life is not the main focus of the blog. The more subtle meaning (but still obvious enough so as to not be lost on readers) refers to the more mainstream definition of taste which refers to the sensations around food, drink, and how we enjoy them. This more literal interpretation of my tagline reminds readers that this blog is about food and the experiences that come with enjoying a meal or drinks with friends.