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Writing Journal 11/4 -  Accessibility

7 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about Accessibility and Accessibility guidelines for UX Designers bring the attention to the many different design factors that should be taken into consideration when designing anything for a group of people.  First, in 7 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about Accessibility, Hausler talks about how designing a product, making it widely accessible does not mean that the product cannot be innovative or be boring and ugly.  Next, he goes into detail the many different inaccessibility that people have that you need to account for when designing for a wider audience.  Colorblindness is a major disability that many people can have, and only using color can severely hamper the usability of your product.  For example, using only color to show an error in a text field can make it near impossible for someone who is color blind to figure out that there is an error and that is why the product is not working.  Additionally, little contrast between colors can also make it hard for people to easily follow or distinguish between the text and its background.  The WCAG states that the contrast ratio between a text and its background should be at least 4.5 to 1.  This greatly helps low vision and color blind users as well as people with worsening vision.  The other main concern that needs to be addressed, especially online is people only being able to use keyboards.  Numerous websites are not designed with easy accessibility for keyboard only users.  Additionally, many of the text fields and labels do not make it functional at all if you do not have a mouse.  For example, having to hover over something to get attionaly info or move on, inability to access elements, and options in menus that require a mouse click.  All of these can make navigating a nightmare for anyone who can not use a mouse (Hausler, 2015).

In Accessibility guidelines for UX Designers Kaur goes over similar themes of making things more accessible for people with disabilities or full accessibility.  One should keep their design consistent throughout, making it easier to follow and understand.  Additionally, design to make outside object interactions not the only way to interact.  For example, make it easy to use with and without a mouse.  Also, if there is a touch screen interaction, make sure that there is enough space and the interaction points to not overlap.  Also keep the design clean, with varying contrast and still easy for color blind people to see and use.  Also, do not make unnecessary links that would cause people with motor impairments do more for things they do not want, and also give notice before opening a new tab.  Finally, make sure animations and pictures are not picked up my a website reader and no not induce seizures.  To insure easier accessibility it is important to go through testing of your design and ask for feedback from others which can greatly improve the quality and accessibility of your website (Kaur, 2018).

Overall, this relates a lot to the field of computer science.  A lot of work and care needs to go into designing and coding things for all users.  It can sometimes be difficult to manage ease of use with accessibility and can take a lot of work.  However, good and easy to use programs will be overall useful to anyone who uses it and can greatly benefit everyone.

In this post I use linguistic and visual rhetorical strategies.  I used linguistic to summarize and expand upon the ideas of the articles.  I used visual in the form of a gif that slowly turns colored pencils into a form that color blind people may see.  I used this because it demonstrates how similar colors can be almost identical to color blind people compared to what people can normally see.

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Writing Journal 10/16 - Online Sharing

In the article, Sustaining Critical Literacies In The Digital Information Age: The Rhetoric of Sharing, Prosumerism, And Digital Algorithmic Surveillance, Estee Beck goes over what sharing over social media really means.  Many social media websites mine individuals data to gain profit with advertising revenue.  While many people know this, a more unthought of view is how this affects how people internet.

Beck also describes prosumerism as described by Alvin Toffler in his 1980s book, The Third Wave, which details three separate waves of civilization’s development.  The three waves are described as agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, and information age.  Currently, we are in the third wave, the information age.  During the 1980s a do-it-yourself movement culture started that combined with the evolution of the World Wide Web into the internet in the 1990s has created a culture that uses prosumerism greatly.  Prosumerism refers to the consumer putting in more work to gain the benefits of a product then from previous waves.  For example, self service gas pumps,  build your own furniture from stores like IKEA, and ATMs.  Ultimately, prosumerism is a sharing culture where information is shared much faster due to the rapid development in technology that allows information to be shared much faster.

The development of Web 2.0 lead to a big break through for social media websites.  Many social media services started to be born around this time and many more would follow in later years.  With this creating things like user ID tags were formed to help keep track of the user and wheat they have saved on the websites servers.  This led to many companies using this to collect information on the user that nets them billions in revenue.

The collection of information has led to algorithms that not only collect information but also filters out content based on the user.  This is done in the hopes of giving the user a better experience and allowing them to see more of what they want to see easier.  While this does lead to some good, like being able to really towards a common goal like supporting others turing a time of need after a natural disaster, it also leads to some bad consequences.  For example, a study conducted by Eli Pariser in 2011 showed that websites filtering out content can persuade others.  Praiser took out most of the positive posts on a social media website and it was shown that people tended to contribute less to positive posts after seeing less of them.

Beck states that the best way to sustain critical literacy in the digital age is to educate others on the effects these algorithms have and how they effect them.  Also, by spreading the word and supporting national non-profit organizations that help give out information unbiasedly.

The video talks about how digital media amplifies the spread of false information.  Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft and founder of the research institute “ Data & Society” describes how this occurs.  First advertising, viral media, and engaging with journalists on social information can lead to the spread of misinformation.   This can lead into the misinformation becoming higher in search engines since it tries to rank what information it has to what would be best suited to your search based off of others as well as you own information it has.  This is becomes many people self-investigate after hearing about it on the news or from somewhere, which leads to the spread of that false information.  Social media websites amplify both the good and the bad of the internet and its information.  Boyd argues that the individual should not take the burden deciding which way the social media platforms should go to in terms of data collection and capitalism.  Also, allowing companies to make the choice will lead to more manipulation.  

Overall, both call for a change in how the internet and social media goes about tracking its users.  I agree with both statements.  I have always felt that tracking and collecting users data online is immoral and should not be done at all.  However, I do enjoy the ease at which I can find more thing I like and how much easier online shopping has become with websites tracking me.

As a computer science major this greatly affects me.  Many of the algorithms and codes are written by computer science majors who have jobs at these companies.  The culture of building things to collect information has been hard planted into working at these companies to gain a “better user experience” while also increasing profits.

In this post I used linguistic and visual rhetorical strategies.  I used linguistic to summarize and expand upon the information form the article and video.  I used visual in the form of a gif/meme.  I used this because it helps to demonstrate how old the World Wide Web is and how long prosumerism has actually been going on and being considered.

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Writing Journal 10/2

In the article, What is Rhetorical About Digital Rhetoric?, Hodgson and Barnett go into detail about digital rhetoric and how enigmatic it can be.  One example they give is how when going through the job listing’s at Indiana, there was only two mentions of “digital rhetoric” in the job listing.  However, since then there has been an increase in the use of the term “digital rhetoric” with more job listings for people specializing in digital rhetoric.  

During the Indiana Digital Rhetoric Symposium, the questions on whether digital rhetoric is different from digital writing or digital humanities and what is rhetorical about digital rhetoric where posed to be answered.  However, no definitive answer was given and not even a general consensus was formed.  During the Symposium, McElroy, Davis, and Lee interviewed participants, the result was that no one could even begin to define digital rhetoric, even if they use it in classes they teach.

The authors analyze multiple different projects and essays about digital rhetoric.  However, besides the term “digital rhetoric” being used, their is no underlying connections between them.

I am surprised that many in the field of digital rhetoric can not but a solid definition to it.  However, I also understand this since it is always evolving and covers such a wise variety of topics.  This is similar to the computer science field where technology is ever evolving and you need to keep up with it constantly as it is being redefined and reinvented constantly.

In this post I used linguistic and visual rhetorical strategies.  I used linguistic to summarize and describe the article as well as explain my own thoughts about it.  I used visual in the form of a gif.  I used this gif because it clearly represents the confusion that people in the digital rhetoric field have about digital rhetoric.

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Writing Journal 9/25

In the book, Rhetoric, Knowledge, and the “Brute Facts of Nature” in Science Research, Graves talks about the use rhetoric and how it was adapted to persuade how scientists use it to back and their findings in research.  Furthermore Graves goes on to describe how some believe that the way they word their ideas also shapes that idea in itself. In other words rhetoric can contribute to the development of new ideas in addition to describing them after research.  For example, in string theory, string theorists uses a metonymy, or the use of substitute of a name for an attribute, to have a singular string stand in for the numerous amounts of string in the universe.  Graves goes on to explain that metonoymy not only substitutes one word for an attribute but actually can create  a more complex meaning behind it (Graves, 2011).

One example of this a experiment run by Macdonald and Tzu.  They creates a pure amorphous silicon nitride films using a different method.  While these were created a referee for Physical Review Letter objected to this and wanted to see evidence that their method actually produced good quality films.  Macdonald and Tzu revised their approach in order to convince the referee that they did, in fact have good quality films.  The first way they did this was revise their approach to a more metonymy approach with more supporting evidence i ht form of conductivity. Also, they  to state clearly that their method did result in good quality films and then defend their stance instead of their original more indecisive approach.  Both of these changes helped lead to Macdonald and Tzu led to the referee agreeing with them.  This example shows that taking a more direct approach with supporting evidence will get your point  across a lot more effective then taking a more indecisive stance (Graves, 2011).

In conclusion, Graves is describing how science and rhetoric are connected. While some believe that rhetoric may take more importance then the science itself, she goes for a more middle of the road view point.  Both rhetoric and science benefit from each other and both used in conjunction, can lead to the creation of new ideas and research as well as coming of more clear and presenting research in a better way (Graves, 2011).

I agree with Graves conclusion.  I feel that rhetoric and science should be used in conjunction without one being more important then the other.  Both bring benefits that can lead to new and better ideas and hypothesis.  In my field I feel that the use of rhetoric can be used better in order to describe what a programmer needs to make better then what we have now.  I feel that sometimes people can not describe what they want as precise as they want it to come out.  This can leads to frustration for both the programmer and consumer.  Additionally, rhetoric can be used to help describe what an app or program does to a consumer better.

In this journal I used both linguistic and visual rhetorical strategies.  I used linguistic to summarize and elaborate on the chapter from Graves book.  I used visual in the form of a gif that shows off string theory in relation to the universe to show what Graves was getting at with the string theory example.

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Writing Journal - 9/24

The first reading, On Multimodal Composing, goes over the many different ways and requirements for composing using multiple modes.  First, composing requires the use of many different mediums, tools, and interfaces.  While typing and writing might be the most common, there are man other ways you can get out information.  Additionally, writing and typing does not just have to be on paper or in a word doc, you can use sticky notes, smart phones, tablets, ect. to write and compose on that could lend to you writing and composing differently.  Writing also requires the help of others to help expand upon your ideas and come up with better ways to present things.  Furthermore, we tend to write things from experience that relate to us.  So more people can help make it more relatable and allow for more creative minds to work together.  Overall, this article was getting at the fact that more classes need to teach with multimodal composition in mind.  The use of mulitmoldal composition helps others digest and learn more with the use of better examples and can help get your point across.  Many classes devalue the importance of using more then just text on a word doc for every assignment and paper that needs to be done and try to make everything into a single repetitive mode for students and others to follow.

In the second article, Women, Rhetoric, and Politics on Pinterest, Deluca discusses what she has found researching how women posted and talked on Pinterest around the 2012 election as well as what is posted on the site that is typically seen as for women.  First, she how social media is made to garner attention and discussion online.  While liking a post may not seem like contributing to the discussion or using any form of rhetoric, liking it still shows interest and might lead to that person posting more.  It also goes in depth about how people view Pinterest as a place of “silly feminine daydreams” even though that is far from the case.  Many females might share recipes on Pinterest but there is also ongoing political discussion happening on Pinterest as well.  Overall, Deluca is trying to show that just because a social media website might seem like a place for only sharing recipes, it can also contribute greatly to rhetorical discussion online (Deluca).

I agree with both articles.  Multimodal composition should be values and taught more in all aspects of life.  Using only one mode hinders your ability to be creative and express you meaning in the most ways to have people understand.  Also, without using modes many generations will not be able to relevant discourse with the ever changing times.  Additionally, all social media websites should not be considered strictly for women or only for sharing recipes.  Going on to many of the you will find that there is numerous different discourses and uses of rhetoric on them.  Many of which you might not even think would be on their like politics on Pinterest.  

I feel that in the computer science field, working together and using different modes will help programs tremendously.  Not only will their be more ideas but different solutions to get around the same problem.  Also, when programming websites it is important to remember that they will most likely be used for more then just what you expect them to.

I used linguistic and visual stargazes in my post.  I used linguistic to summarize and explain the main points of both articles.  I used visual in the form of a GIF from the show IT Crowd to back up my statement that it is seen as not normal to use many different modes in the classroom.

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Writing Journal 9/20 - Multiliteracies for a digital age

In Multiliteracies For a Digital Age, Selber goes over 3 different levels of literacies you can have, functional, critical, and rhetorical.  In the second chapter of the book Selber goes over functional functional literacy.  Functional literacy in the digital age is having an understand of how to use the computer and technology.  Having a better understand on both the teacher and student side can help students learn and do more with their education.  In order to be functionally literate in computers, a student will have to meet the following requirements, understating the educational goals, social conventions, specialized discourses, management activities, and technological impasses. Overall, students will need to know hot to use technology and computers to meet their educational goals, know the different ways to socially approach different things, how to manage their online world, and be able to get around technological problems that may occur (Selber, 2004).

In chapter 3 of the book, Selber covers critical literacy.  Having a critical literacy in something means that you are able to ask questions and critique the subject you are literate in.  For example, having critical literacy with computers would make it so that you could critique them and try to figure out more ways that they can be useful. Selber describes the four parameters for critical literacy as design cultures, use contexts, institutionalized forces, and popular representations.  Students should be able critique the design of computers and technologies and see if there is better ways to improve the design of technologies.  Furthermore, seek out better ways to create and improve without the use of one person or companies that may influence the technology to be more closed foe a certain group of people. Critical literacy helps people get outside perspectives that are not their own which can help improve their work and lead to something that is overall all better for more people.  This can help make technology or any other things more accessible to more people and more easy to use in the long run (Selber, 2004).

In chapter 4, Selber goes over rhetorical literacy.  Rhetorical literacy means being able to use and produce technology effectively. The four parameters Selber gives to be rhetorically literate are persuasion, deliberation, reflection, and social action.  This means that students should be able to understand both implicit and explicitly that interface designs are built and maintained by the larger forces and structures surrounding it.  They should also know that interface design problems are a constant problem that cannot be fixed simply, rather take constant working and fixing to keep improving.  Finally, they should be able to reflect on their own work and critically assess their actions and see interface design as a social versus technical action (Selber, 2004).

Selber ends his book by describing how multiliteracy programs can be added into schools.  There are many contexts that need to be taken in when considering making one for a school, like technical, pedagogical, curricular, departmental, and institutional.  Out of all of these the most important aspect you need in all is communication.  Overall, there needs to be a lot of work put into bringing everyone up to speed with the ever changing digital age, and we cannot just add or replace software packages or interface changes to support the many different backgrounds and ideals that every student will have.  there should be specialized and supportive staff and technical staff that will help both students and teachers move towards a more multi literate age of schools (Selber, 2004).

Selber’s book really speaks to me as a computer science major.  I feel that schools really are not prepared enough when it comes to teaching students how to properly use computers, especially in high schools.  During my high school career, I was not offered many computer/programming oriented classes to take to pursue my interest in programming.  Most classes just repeated the same old things about how to use the Microsoft office suite and did not go into much detail.  Furthermore, the only programming class I had offered to me was just in scratch, which is nothing close to programming and just involves dropping blocks that do certain things in order to program.  While, ESU does have a lot of great teachers when it comes to the computer science majors, you can even see in certain teachers that their technical expertise has been limited due to the lack of preparedness and preparation of other schools computer classes.

I agree with Selber that more should be done and I feel the outlines and parameters that he has proposed in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age are a great way to help more people become mulitliterate in their understanding of computers and technology as a whole.

In this post I used linguistic and visual strategies to convey the purpose of this book.  I used linguistic to explain Selbers's point and ideas.  I used visual in the form of a meme barbecue I feel it explains what the purpose and advantage of being critically literate means.

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Writing Journal 9/5 - Importance of Writing

In the article, The Primary Care Clinic as Writing Space, the authors, Opel and Hart-Davidson talk about how writing is an important aspect in the care clinic field.  They state that due to some writing process problems there is more stress that make the quality and delivery of the care needed to go down.  Additionally, they state that it also causes the price for the care to go up, leading to the United States having on of the highest prices for health care compared to all other developed countries (Opel and Hart-Davison 2019).

In the book, based on the studies of Latour, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Latour and Woolgar describe how hard it may be to distinguish workers in a clinic.  For example, the divided the hospital into two parts, an “office” part and a “bench” part.  The office part of the clinic obviously does a lot of writing as you would expect.  However, the “bench” part also does a lot of writing.  Many of the “bench” workers spend most of their time reading and writing and also correcting and coding many others writing.  So both sides use most of their time writing (Opel and Hart-Davison 2019).

However, in a similar study done by Schryer a different result occurred.  While observing a veterinary medicine clinic, Schryer discovered the use of problem-oriented veterinary medical records.  These records made a big difference in the work space.  Not only did it sent a precedence for treatment due to past records of treatments from encounters, but it also set up a more defined writing style to be used when writing scientific articles, evaluations, and many other writings used in the field.  While this led to better overall treatment, it also lead to many clinics not being able to clearly communicate with their patients  (Opel and Hart-Davison 2019).

Overall,  the article describes how primary care clinicians do not see their writing as all too important to their job as compared to the other aspects.  They considered their most formal writing to be done electronically with their EMRs.  However, more care should be taken in to account when charting.  Not enough detail, or little mistakes can have a long-lasting permanent effect on the patient or even leave to death.  Clinicians need to improve the way they not only write but communicate in general.  This lack of clarity leads to patients coming back with chronic illnesses and the lack of clarity on how to treat drastically lowers the quality of the healthcare provided (Opel and Hart-Davison 2019).

This writing relates to my field as a programmer as well.  There are numerous ways to code and everyone has their own preferences and style.  This can lead to code becoming hard to read and follow which leads to errors taking way longer to fix and codes not being implemented correctly when more then one person works on it.  While commenting on your lines of code is heavily encouraged, especially while in college classes, most programmers see it as a nuisance and try to avoid it at all costs.  This leads to overall a breakdown in communications between two coders who have two different styles.  Additionally, I see the need to improve my own writing as well with this article. Writing more clearly always helps your writing be more accessible to more people.  

I chose linguistic and visual rhetorical strategies in this post.  I used linguistic in order to convey the message that the article is trying to make an explain how ti relates back to me and others.  I used a gif to show how the confusion that arises in communication in the primary care filed can lead to serious long term effects or death in others.

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Writing Journal 9/4: Modes and Rhetoric

The main ideas presented by both the Multimodal Guide (University of Mississippi, 2019) and the authors of Understanding Rhetoric (Losh, Alexander, Cannon, Cannon, 2017) is that composition can take many forms,or modes. Multimodal composition allows the writer to get there argument across to the audience by many other forms then just written text. These forms can include pictures, videos, aural arguments, etc.. Losh et al (2017) also present the three rhetorical appeals to their audience which include ethos, logos, and pathos. These rhetorical appeals allow the writer to better communicate their ideas to their respective audience by appealing to their emotions (pathos), logic (logos), and or establishing credibility (ethos). 

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I agree, ethos, pathos, and logos can really help when it comes to client and programmer relations.  You really need a lot of credibility for people to trust you with their information.  I feel that using these will be a great way to effectively communicate and establish credibility in the workplace as programmers.

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Rhetoric and Multi-modal Composition

In the book, Understanding Rhetoric, Losh, Alexander, Cannon, and Cannon discuss using rhetoric when writing to help speak to your audience.  Also, they describe three main components that can be used to help establish and expand your writing.  As shown in the Gif below, using rhetoric will help you speak more clearly and more towards your audience, which is important in any situation you want to communicate (Losh, Alexander, Cannon, Cannon, 2016).

The first one component, ethos, deals with ethics and credibility.  This can be established by having a good background in what you are talking about.   For example, a professional in the subject matter or having extensive knowledge of the topic will give you more credibility when talking to someone.  Next, pathos is the use of emotions.  Pathos can be used in many different ways but is most commonly used in correlation with visual aides such as pictures and videos.  Finally, logos appeals to the logical side of arguments.  Well thought out responses will lend to better ideas and will make it easier for others to support your reasoning.  All of these are important in my major of Computer Science, having an extensive background will lend to more credibility when designing and programming codes.  Additionally, some codes may have ethical choices that need to be made with the use of some logic.  For example, a debate is going on whether a self driving car should prioritize its passenger over any pedestrians in the case of unavoidable accidents.  A well thought out reason over what course of action to take would be invaluable to the discussion (Losh, Alexander, Cannon, Cannon 2016).

The website, https://rhetoric.olemiss.edu/student/multimodal/, goes more into detail of how the use of many modes to help expand your idea and cater towards your audience.  Not only does it help your idea expand, it will also help solidify your idea to both you and your audience by giving different ways to present and remember the content.  The four modes that are covered are videos, websites, audio, and graphic design.  Using a combination of these modes will help your ideas and points become more clear.(The University of Mississippi, 2019).

I used linguistic and visual modes in this post.  The gif I used summarizes what Understanding Rhetoric was going for, in that it is important to communicate in many different ways and to tailor towards your audience  (Losh, Alexander, Cannon, Cannon 2016). I also used linguistic to summarize and elaborate on the ideas of both the comic and the website towards using different ways to communicate to others  (Losh, Alexander, Cannon, Cannon 2016 & The University of Mississippi, 2019).

Overall, I think the use of ethos, logos, and pathos is important when it comes to my major.  You need to establish credibility to be able to work on higher level programs and projects.  Also, you have to be able to effectively communicate and convey what you want to do and how you will do it to your boss and co-workers when coding.  Also, using different modes to do it will help other understand you better and can be used in addition to codes for users to get a better understanding as well.  Finally, using mulitmodal composition and ethos, logos, and pathos has helped increasing my writing potential and be able to communicate more clearly to others in both my writing and in everyday life.

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Introduction to Me

Hello! I am a Computer Science and Computer Security dual major in my sophomore year.  

However, I also enjoy other classes like gym and history. When i’m not doing schoolwork I spend most of my time hanging out with my friends and playing video games.

I am currently watching American Vandal on Netflix. I also watch a lot of stuff on youtube.  Some of thing I watch Buzzfeed unsolved, Fact Fiend and much more. My favorite artist at the moment is Yung Gravy.  But I listen to all kinds of music.