Wring 235 was a course in which we studied and examined writing in the modern computer driven age. We started the semester in January by writing on clay. By examining ancient mediums for writing, we were better able to understand the impact of modern. The class moved from one electronic environment to another. Our first project focusing on it was the message environment project. The assignment was to interact within our class and another section on the topic of hate speech. We were to debate the issues involved, such as censorship and the first amendment. A topic such as that can give way to flaming and possibly begin to cause trouble within the discussion group. The board however managed to stay predominantly on topic and gave us a good experience of the environment.
I personally thought that of the three projects focusing on the electronic environment, this was the weakest. Interaction between groups of people is present on the internet. However I see this as more of an advancement of social debate and interaction. One problem I saw with the discussion was the lack of diversity within the participants. The discussion was supposed to be about hate speech and its impact, but the classes probably were not diverse enough to evoke enough experience and varied opinion to compelling. Many of the threads revolved around the same topic, this topic being censorship and free speech. Even threads with a different topic slowly became discussions of the idea of censorship versus freedom of speech.
Our next project was to build a web bibliography. We were assigned to but together a series of good websites which would address a particular topic. This topic taught us how to properly decide the credibility of a website and thus, distinguish the good sites from the bad ones. We discussed the levels of internet use; basic, advanced, and critical. A basic user was described as someone who just needs quick information, so they input a topic into Google and get results that way. A more advanced user is someone who does things to get better results out of their web search. Examples of this could be Boolean strings or looking at the suffix of a website to ascertain its purpose. They could also simply look whether or not the site itself looks professional or not. A critical intent user is going to look for more information from a traditional source. They may take the information they got from using the internet, and go to the library to look up more information using what they recently learned. This project allowed us to learn to be critical users of the internet, as we needed to find the best sites possible for our lists.
I liked this project as we were able to learn to use the internet better, and that skill will help us in other facets of our lives beyond this class. I like it when I am able to apply things I learned in one class to other classes. I also like being able to apply these skills to other things in my life which they originally were not originally intended for. This class fulfilled that wish, as I was able to use my increased research skills for both other classes and learning about things I am personally interested in.
Writing 235’s fourth project was the production of our own personal website. The topic for these sites had to be related to hate speech as in the previous two projects. My particular site focused on supporting the teaching tolerance rather than cracking down on internet hate speech through censorship. This project focused on giving us rudimentary web publishing skills. We were taught what a good design for a web site looks like and what a bad design looks like. We were taught to focus on concepts such as alignment and repetition. These are website elements that all web designers look at and integrate when publishing a site.
Having some previous experience with designing websites, I enjoyed this project. I liked putting together a site, going from my early builds and color schemes, to the finished project which I see as something I am happy with. I liked how we were able to put together the site from the ground up. We did not use software generally tasked with publishing websites. Because of this we did not work out of templates, which gave the sites a more individual feel. On my site, I took what other people said about and used this to my advantage. I liked the fact that people were able to critique other’s websites, because I think this leads to a better final product. I generally like having someone else look at it because they may see something I missed. They may also be able to tell me if something worked or not. On my website I thought that my color scheme was easily readable, but learned that other people had a harder time picking up the yellow off of the blue. It was things like that which I thought showed how peer review is critical in any task a person is undertaking.
My writing in this class has progressed in my opinion. I see it as more focused. Also, my writing is becoming more professional and easy to read. I think that I have been flowing better, with transitional sentences setting up the next paragraph while closing out the preceding one. I have also seen a few of the things we learned about the electronic environment help me. I was able to find and use better sources for papers outside of this class because of the discussions we had on the level of internet literacy. I believe at this point I have progressed from being an advanced user to a critical user. I look more deeply into websites than I have before. I look to see who is putting the information out and make sure they do not have a way of benefiting from this information being fabricated. I also have gained some confidence in my web publishing skills and am now considering trying to put together some sort of website. This class has given me more self confidence in all facets of my writing, along with more confidence operating in the electronic environment. I am extremely happy that I chose this course as I think I got more out of it than I would have in a more traditional writing course. I found the work to be generally interesting, and was thus compelled to do better. It may have been the most influential and important classes I took all year, as the lessons I learned here will translate into all parts of my life.
