How has your colleague's experience differed from yours? And how do you know?

Our very first task, called what's in your bag, was an About Me ice breaker. As classmates, we each had a different bag, and likewise we each brought our baggage of life's experiences to the course. With regards to the course, we have each interpreted the given tasks in our own fashion. In fact, I had not realized how open-ended our assignments were until I visited the blogs of my fellow classmates!

 

What web authoring tool have they chosen to manifest their work?

I have seen Wix, the UBC Word Press, and Weebly used to present personal sites.  

 

How does their tool differ from yours in the ways in which it allows content-authoring and end-user interface?

I wonder if the mandate for co-authoring is a remnant idea from a previous iteration of the course. I noticed that some previous ETEC540 classes included a class blog site. This would have allowed for more textual interactions amongst the classmates. For this course iteration, the only means of coauthoring was via comments. The main differences I noticed with our chosen tools were in the availability of the comment box. As with the Inyerface program, certain sites made it easier or more difficult to post a comment.

The easiest comment boxes were where you would expect them! I think that the UBC blog site has a very standard layout, so those of us using that WordPress style had an easy access to blog comments. With Weebly and Wix, the comment boxes are available when the website author places them. Someone had mentioned that about ten years ago, users would mix blue and red for text and backgrounds  as soon as they had free choice. The results may have been pretty for that user but less than ideal for visitors. In this case, finding the location of the comment box was a similar statement of personal preference.

 

My user profile is a big factor in answering the question about end-user interface. I am often on the go and I have poor eyesight, so I use the text-to-speech function to listen to my classmates' blogs on my cellphone. I chose to limit my internet usage and opted for a cellphone plan without data. This means I download and then listen to entire pages. Hypertext does not work in my case. The read-more button and menus and are obstacles. I need to download all of the connected pages in order to be able to get the full story. The more information on one page, the easier it is for me to read and understand a blog or a comment. I have skipped he blogs of certain classmates simply because it takes too much time to access the site!

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Universal accessibility in the creation of websites and amenable user-experience comes to mind as I try to navigate with my set of user needs.

 

 

What literacies does their site privilege or deny in comparison and contrast to yours?

Jessica McAllister and Helen-Marie had set up blog notifications and so theirs were always the first blogs I would read. If I were to try this again, I would incorporate a notification as they had done! This was a great automatic feature as I had to use the links to personal sites on our Discussion module as my hub for visiting the other classmate blogs.

 

One event I noticed in this course is evolution. Each of us had set up a blog, and then evolved it over time. Menus, hyperlinks, and page rearrangements happened as we visited one another’s pages, and perhaps also as we became more familiar with our web tools. This plasticity in our sites made for a great evolutionary progression to experience!

 

Certain sites were more difficult to access than others. For example, the more multi purpose sites such as those of Brogan and Amanda required a direct link to the current blog or else I got lost in the multiple themes. This was great when I had time – they are great writers and I have learned more about body building than I ever thought I would. Helen-Marie's Gnook Gnome was very cute but once again had many click through menus in order to access the content. This made it more frustrating and less likely for me to visit her site. This evolved over the course and now her landing page is a gallery of blogs that is easy to navigate. With all of our links. I appreciated Katie's site for its straight-forwardness – I found out during a class conversation that she had gone for the standard setup!

 

 

What theoretical underpinnings are evident in your/your colleague's textual architecture and how does this affect one's experience of the work?

I feel that all of our sites needed to be made for both desktop computers and mobile devices. The Wix site allows us to view and adjust for the two surfing methods. The UBC blog was automatic. I am not sure about Weebly.

 

Reading on a mobile device is akin to using a continuous scroll as in the olden days. The menu is like a codex, with each page like the pages of a book that you can turn as needed. Reading on the desktop can feel like perusing a gallery exhibit. The small tools for flow that I take for granted I learned to incorporate as I compared my blogs to those of the others. A top menu, shortened passages with links to read more, and vertical versus horizontal placements have been some of the aspects of site building that I have learned to use.

 

I noticed that most of us incorporated menus by the final weeks of our course. This definitely helps in perusing the blogs, especially as we each started “shopping” for class links to add to our sites!

 

 

How do the constraints of the course design manifest in your architectural choices? How have you responded to the pedagogical underpinnings of this course design in your own web space?  

I enjoy providing a visual lay out that I can manipulate in WYSIWYG fashion. Because of this, I chose to use the Wix site to display my task, and the private UBC site for comments between my classmates and I.

 

The UBC blog appeared to have some set backs, namely in audio files and html. I noticed that a few classmates used YouTube and Wix to include the extra media in their task assignments.

 

Although I enjoyed all of the task set up on us throughout the course there was something that I found lacking. I would have liked to have more common discussions perhaps in the town square instead of one on one discussions in somebody's blog as a comment. I noticed that not all comments are answered, and if they are answered, I wonder how many commenters see the responses. The idea is that automatic notifications helps keep the wheel of the web turning, whereas the need to manually visit sites makes us miss the next text.

 

This final task was given to us in the second week of our course yet I did not really start it up until we each had a number of blogs up and available for linking. I wonder if it would have been possible to create a commentary of links or threads from our links to personal spaces page on our Canvas, to engage more back and forth conversations between classmates.

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Read up on my links here

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