Chris Q.

[loganutep-blog]

Week 4: Reading Response

One of the last readings I did for this summer semester was the “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments” by Mary E. Hocks. This last week was focused on the last presentation we did as a group, and during that presentation we had to present our infograph. This week’s reading had to due with how in present day we use different types of media to present articles and other types of text. When we created our infograph we used a program called piktochart, and due to that program we were able to put our entire community problem report in a visual piece. Without the help of that digital source we would had not been able to create a visual that would have been appealing to the eye of our audience.

The reason I chose this blackboard reading was once again, because I simply love the media. All of this weeks readings had to due with speeches, presentations, and how to give a good impression while trying to demonstrate your work to other people. Such as the CEO of Pepsi, and how her communication skills got her to where she is right now. Those readings were so helpful, and all the knowledge that I acquired with the process of reading the articles, I actually used that knowledge to present my information to the class. As helpful as those articles were, nothing can compare to the media and design to me. I’m glad there was a variety of articles to choose from this week. Even though the class is ending, I will continue to look for articles to read in my own personal time.

Thank you to everyone who’s reading this response, because I had the chance to express my thoughts weekly through the use of Tumblr. I improved in ways that I was not aware that I could, but there’s still much to learn.

[mycsquinones-blog]

I liked your response and it has something to do with what I read as well, which was about design an media. Media is an important part of our lives and society. Most problems that we couldn't have otherwise presented to the public we now can with the use of it. Webpages with news articles, news segments in television channels and even posts on Instagram, Facebook, or other social media.

It even makes us more aware of our politics that before most young people wouldn’t be that interested about. This is also not a very modern way of promoting awareness through visual aids since we can go back all the way to Louis XIV were he would use paintings and construct fancy places made of gold, just to show other empires his power and riches that he had, so he could continue to have them by intimidation. Right now companies also use this to sell products to consumers, so it is arguable if media is completely positive, but the positives surely outweigh all the negatives.

Overall good post. Regards.

[mycsquinones-blog]

Week 4 Reading Response

The reading I did for this weeks is Media/Design and Reflections. It talks about a multimodal formatted writing can make the actual writing better. We are very visual human beings and we like videos, pictures, and music instead of just old plain text. Even by doing memes you can make a joke sound even funnier because of the picture aspect of it. Reflections are an analysis of what the person has done. It shows if the product was as expected, the process it was made, and what can be improved about it. 

If i wan to promote some type of health awareness as a doctor media and design would be really helpful. Making an appealing poster or billboard can make a change in people’s minds when they see it. Reflections can always help me in my career because you always need to make yourself better. You can always help more patients, you can always get better grades, and you can always be a better family member or friend. Reflecting on your life can help you in all of those aspects.

The major assignments that we just did was the infograph and the E-Portfolio. Design and media is basically what we had to do for the infograph, by presenting information about diversity in the most appealing way possible. The E-Portfolio we had to do reflections on our major assignments and readings. Design and media also helped me during the course to do all these Tumblr posts as well.

Some questions that brings up are like “How can I be better?”, “How can I make my work better?”, “Does this meet my expectations?”, “Is this pleasing to see?”, “Does it grab my attention?”.

I chose the first picture because it represents what a reflection mainly consists of, which is making yourself better, faster, stronger, and harder. The GIf of the doctor is just a funny animation of a doctor since I used a doctor for an example. The last GIF of the student working hard at it’s homework is just an animated representation of how I felt when doing all the long assignments that we’ve had to do.

[cnrodz-blog]

Week 3 - Designing Text

This week I will be discussing designing text from the NFG. It shows us how to get an audience to read text using various strategies such as keeping it simple, balanced, consistent, and use colors to your advantage. When designing text we still think about purpose, audience, genre, and stance. This helps us see which route to take when trying to capture audiences attention. Designing text takes creativity and a clear vision on what your trying to accomplish. Everying that is placed on a designed text should have a purpose in order to tie the writing and pictures together. 

Although designing text is new to us, it has been around for a while. Look at this Coca-Cola advertisement. It shows a Military man drinking coke, which attracts the audence of all men saying Coca-Cola is for Strong men. The stance of this advertisement is that Coca-Cola is great for you, don’t you see the big smile on that man. The Picture is simple and uses the color red to focus on the word “Coca-Cola. 

Until this chapter I never realized how often designing text was used though our daily life. This McDonalds advertisement brings humor ]]and makes the audence was to read the small text. This advertisement uses humor, color and even a good looking burger to attract people to McDonalds. It’s amazing how when designing text is done correctly it can make a huge impact on someone perspective. 

[mycsquinones-blog]

I did something similar to your post, although mine was about pictures, video, and audio. This is still the same concept of the efficacy of propaganda and commercials and the usage of multimedia to influence people’s perspective on a subject.

Humans are very visually oriented. If we see something we like, we get distracted by it. That’s why television, phones, computers, video games, etc have been so successful, because they take advantage of that. Words and letter fonts have that same effect. You can make a word have more meaning if you choose the adequate font with the adequate colors.

That “G” looks way cooler than if i just wrote it normally like in the font I’m doing right now. It does create a whole different meaning to it. Right now you are wondering if that “G” means something or if it symbolizes something, but it doesn’t, I just typed it in a Fire Font generator and it was the first letter that I found.

[mycsquinones-blog]

Week 3 Reading Response

In this week, I chose the reading of chapter 56 from the NFG book called Using Visuals, Incorporating Sound. It talks about the importance of use of colors, sound, pictures, graphs, and video. They all help convey a message and since most of the population consists of visual learners, it helps to grab the audience’s attention. There is a reason why they make commercials and transmit them through televisions across the world now, instead of publishing products in the newspaper with just words and no pictures; people wouldn’t bother to look at them. Also if you make a survey if people prefer to watch the movie or read the book, most of them would say they prefer to watch the movie, because it is faster and requires less effort from your part. 

I’m a college student studying biology, so a lot of my learning comes from textbooks with pictures on them. To understand the anatomy of the human body you need to see it to learn it. An example would be naming a bone of your body like the fibula; the textbook can say in words that it is a long bone that is found in the lower part of both of your legs, which that can be confusing because you have two bones in the lower part of your body. This confusion can be avoided with just a picture.

Right now we are working in an infograph to inform people of an issue. The use of picture and color is essential in trying to get the attention of the audience, and to be able to convey and make them interested in the issue. If we just showed a 10 page essay like our Community Problem Report nobody would bother to read it, besides the professor that has to grade it.

The first GIF represents how television influences us as a society, which almost all of the world watches television. The second picture is to illustrate how a picture can explain something better than words. The last picture represents how aesthetically unpleasing a lot of words look, instead of like a song or video.

[mycsquinones-blog]

Christian Quinones

Ruben Ruiz

[mycsquinones-blog]

Christian Quinones

Ruben Ruiz

[mycsquinones-blog]

[loganutep-blog]

Week 2 Reading Response

Reading about the rhetorical strategies was in fact very informative, and I feel it actually improved my skills. “The goal of a rhetorical analysis is not to analyze what a writer is arguing, but to analyze how the writer is presenting the argument.” In the past I actually did believe I had to analyze what the writer was arguing about, but I found it so interesting how much of a difference it makes to analyze how the writer presents an argument. This perspective definitely improved my writing, and changed my view on articles and how to analyze them with a new strategy. 

An analysis consists of three main rhetorical appeals which are logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos is basically the logic of the argument. How strong or weak the argument really is. How much evidence is there in the creators work or article, and how solid it is. I also included a brief explanation of the argument, and analyzed if the creator was bias. Ethos focused on the credibility of the author, and the sense of future. What the sense of future means is how did the argument affect the author, and if it was hindered or not. 

I personally found pathos to be the most interesting rhetorical strategy. The other ones were interesting, but there was a feel of firmness, because there were guidelines to follow. Pathos deals with emotion, and is the strategy where we can put more thought into. Hard work goes into writing an analysis, but when it came to this specific rhetorical strategy, it was more open for me to write about. I could describe what each color made the audience feel. How could it affect an individual. I could put my mind into the text, and describe how the author evoked the audience based on my understanding. 

[mycsquinones-blog]

Hey, I found your post very interesting because I also like Pathos as my favorite from all the rhetorical appeals. I believe it is also the most powerful one, since it is made specifically to use one of human kind’s most distinct characteristic, which is emotion. Everyone has that, some people might be lacking in ethics and others might be lacking in logic but never emotion, wether it is negative or positive.

Most advertisements, most politicians and most works of art try to make the viewer convey emotions so that they can get what they want from them, which can be getting their vote, our making them buy their product or give awareness about a situation. It is very powerful because emotions can affect logic and your ethics. If you find a person that you like and the only free time they have to hang out with you is during your class time, you might ditch class and go with her. Was that a good logical choice? Probably not, but it was still affected by Pathos. The girlfriend of your friend is flirting with you, do you go out with her or not? Some people would some people wouldn’t because they consider it unethical but they all thought twice about it.

Emotion can be considered humanities greatest weakness and strength, but for sure it is a very persuasive one.

[mycsquinones-blog]

Week 2 Reading Response

In this week I chose the reading of  “It wasn’t me, was it?” Plagiarism and the Web by Dànielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati. Plagiarism has been practiced for a long time. Even before they called it plagiarism people would steal other people’s work and call it their own. This has affected our education system. It was harder to check for plagiarism in schools before computers and the internet came to the market, because unless you know exactly from what book they got a sentence from it was hard to determine if it was original work or not. Now that we have all of that in our disposition it is easier to plagiarize, but it is also easier to check for plagiarism.

I am in college and this is a strict rule that the college has in not stealing other people’s work. In the best case scenario, the professor would just give me a 0 as a grade for the assignment if I plagiarized. Now they actually can suspend you from the class and even the college and have a bad mark on your record or school resume. 

The reading brings and awareness and also a reminder to myself that plagiarism is serious and affects your education in a negative way, because plagiarizing is basically not doing the work. Right now we are doing a lot of essays with a lot of outside sources and with a small amount of time that citing and referencing gets triky. Many students plagiarize by accident because they don’t know how to cite correctly or they make a mistake when referencing and giving credit, but it is still counted against them, because mistakes do happen.

The reading makes you ask questions like “Why do students plagiarize?” “How can we promote that plagiarism is bad so students won’t do it anymore?” “How does plagiarism affect the learning process?”

I chose the GIF with the books to represent how much books you would have to look through to check if something was plagiarized back when computers didn’t exist. The Batman GIF is a satire of not needing rules to live better, which you do, if not you can get expelled from college for plagiarism and I like Batman too. I put the Steve Harvey picture because even a successful TV host can make a really bad mistake like announcing the wrong winner for Mrs. Universe. 

[mycsquinones-blog]

Christian Quinones

Ruben Ruiz

Isaac Ibarra

[mycsquinones-blog]

Christian Quinones

Ruben Ruiz

Isaac Ibarra

[roohbn-blog]

Week 1: Reading Response

After reading the Activity theory passage by Klein and Wardle, I now have a better understanding of what activity systems are. An activity system is simply people in a group gathering and sharing their motives and finding a way to get to successfully achieve those motives. Something I thought was quite interesting is that the activity theory is useful because it acknowledges the importance of literacy histories, and they can also act as part of an activity system. A way this article has a connection to me is that most of us are working in groups, and well, it is said that people meet social needs by working and learning together over time to achieve particular goal, which is our case, we were set in groups, with the same major or partially identical majors. We also use tools to make our learning much more efficient, such as Bb, e-books and online quizzes. 

The reading helped me understand more in depth the concept of what an activity system illustrates and how it breaks down an idea into multiple parts and how those parts affect that community. Most parts of an activity system are related, for example, motives include an object and an outcome, which then you need tools, to accomplish that objective, which then leads to an outcome. The correlation is pretty straight forward, it’s like a puzzle, you need to gather the info, connect the pieces, then reach the outcome. Of course, then you have the rules and regulations, the type of community, and the division of labor. The reading helped me understand the assignment by allowing me to understand how to use the activity theory to analyze texts used within a particular system of activity. There are things we should look out for such as the formatting, style, and the organization of the text. 

Some questions that are recommended to ask are, what is the long term purpose (outcome)of using this tool and others like it? Why are the people here doing what they're doing? What is motivating them to take the time to use this tool and achieve their short term objectives and long term outcome? It all ties in with the activity system and the activity theory. 

The reason why I chose this gif is because teamwork is one of the greatest factors in working with groups. Working together to accomplish a task is much easier when working in groups, especially when we are all in the same stem field or partially related in some way. To me teamwork is very important and with the energy of multiple brains working, we can reach a goal. 

[mycsquinones-blog]

I agree with everything you said. I also chose Activity Systems as my reading for this week. I also think that cooperation, communication and teamwork are what makes an Activity System work on any level whether it is personal, professional, academic, or civic. 

Like how we worked in a group for the super long essay of 6 pages for like 5 hours straight. All three of us needed full cooperation from each other and teamwork to complete the assignment. I call being Batman in the GIF by the way, you can be Superman lol and Isaac is Flash for sure lol

There is also an organization within an Activity System like you said. That’s why it has many parts. Subject, tools, division of labor, rules, community, motive, objectives and outcomes. All of this takes effort, to be in order takes energy. That’s why the universe has a lot of entropy(level of tendency to have disorder), so it’s impressive that we can go against the laws of nature and the universe. 

[mycsquinones-blog]

In this week, I chose the reading of Activity Systems by Donna Kain and Elizabeth Wardle. Activity systems are all bout working together and in the society we live in it is  almost a necessity to be able to work with others. Everyone lives in a group. Families, friends, romantic relationships.... everyone should have at least one of those three and if you are then activity systems are important to you because you apply them in your daily life. You work? Well there is another activity group there. You got go to school? There is another activity group. We are surrounded by them without even knowing we are. We work with each other, we tolerate each other, we help each other and it all is to reach a goal. Sometimes it could even be the same goal if you have a lot of similarities.

In the field of science and medicine being part of an activity group can lead you to success. Sure you can always be alone in a lab doing experiments and researching but without a mentor and others to brainstorm ideas it becomes more of a difficult task than it has to be. A professor can guide you through your research and even provide you some answers to questions that you might have.

In the medical field, a successful doctor asks for the opinions of other doctors when a patient might have a difficult illness to diagnose. We all have different experiences and therefore have a different knowledge base even if they studied the same career or went to the same school. Knowing what others think and what tools and knowledge they can give you helps everyone at the end.

This helps me be more aware of the people in the communities that I belong to which right now is academic and personal and it helps me have a better understanding or realization of what their role is in my life and what role I am in theirs.

The major assignment we are working on is comparing Activity Systems with Discourse Communities. Which Discourse Communities are basically the people in a group of what is their motives and how they belong in the group and Activity Systems are based more on what their role is in the group.

The reading asks topic questions like “ What are Activity Systems?” “ How are Parts of an Activity System Related?”  “ How do Activity Systems Change?” “What Purposes Does Activity Theory Serve?”  “ How Can You Use Activity Theory to Analyze Texts?”. Which helps in guiding the reader through the text.

I chose the first GIF of How I Met Your Mother because they are all friends and consider themselves as family and work together through tough experiences. The scientists picture is just to illustrate how people would work in a lab. The Grey’s Anatomy Gif is to show that they all are there to graduate medical school and they all share feelings like not knowing what they are doing. The color people picture is just to represent a community, and the last picture is just a visual representation of the essay we are writing, which the essay of our group is like more than 2,000 words.

[mycsquinones-blog]

Christian Quinones

Ruben Ruiz

Isaac Ibarra

[mycsquinones-blog]

Introduction

Hi, 

My name is Christian. I’m a student at The University of Texas at El Paso. I was born here in El Paso and moved for a while to Juarez and then I came back. I used to have a pet turtle for 15 years until today. I’m a vocational nurse but I didn’t really like nursing so my major right now is Biology not nursing. And this is me not liking nursing....

I like all types of music. I’ll listen from Taylor Swift to hard rock like Slipknot or Metallica or Disturbed and I’ve actually seen them live.

I also want to go to medical school and hopefully be a physician, which was the reason I actually went to nursing. I wanted to build my resume just for being able to get accepted into medical school. I think the human body is really interesting. We go on and search for other life on other planets and we study other galaxies and stars that are very far away when we don’t even know our own bodies %100. I am also a health freak myself, I don’t eat junk food and I exercise when I can. Which there was a time were I would be the complete opposite of that.

I also like doing funny stuff and taking risks which was the case for my final project for English were I did this video.(Take in consideration that I was a freshman in high school during this video) The assignment was that we needed to make a video that represented us using a poem and well....

I was also a volunteer at Cima Hospice for some time, until I got really busy with school. I was also in a basketball team until I got stuck in the same height and that started giving me a huge disadvantage. I went from being a center to a point guard in a couple of years, but I still play pick up games once in a while in the Recreation Center and with my friends. 

I’m also a big fan of boxing and I box regularly. Every one thinks boxing is just throwing punches but there is an art and skill to it, and I’m a big Floyd Mayweather fan.

I’m also a very competitive person. What I think is that winning is not everything, it is the only thing. Even if it is a game of checkers or Monopoly I take it very seriously. Games ruin friendships lol

[audreyfay]

#Week 1: Intro

Happy Spring Everyone! My name is Audrey, I am your instructor and I’m excited to get to know all of you. This Intro Post assignment is the first step in that direction and here’s a chance for you to get to know a little about me as well.

I’m an El Paso native, born and raised in EPT/Ciudad Juarez, and I love it here. I have a son—Daniel, who is the smartest, kindest, sweetest, funniest, most handsome thing to arrive on planet earth. Through him, I’ve also learned that the best kind of entertainment is the kind you get when people think no one is watching. For example…

Much of my life surrounds school and Danny—aka Peanut. (He acts like he hates that I call him that, but I know he loves it). But I try and make space for me: I run regularly and lift often.

I salsa! #Salsera #Dancetilyoudrop

And I love soccer. Liga MX, La Liga, English Premier League, Champions League, Bundesliga, Serie A, MLS, and so on and so on and so on.

I strive to achieve life GOALS, estilo Neymar Jr.

I have a BA in Political Science, an MA in Rhetoric and Writing, a Graduate Certificate in Intelligence and National Security, and I’m wrapping up my PhD in Rhetoric and Composition.

My humanitarian and activists efforts center on freedom and justice for Palestine. #EndTheOccupation #PeaceforPalestine

In my time here as a PhD student, I have focused on rhetoric and resistance. I’m currently researching big data and social impact—think Twitter conversations and what they mean to society, people, governments, and social movements. I argue that the discourse happening on social media gives us the chance to understand real people, real desires, and can offer lots of opportunities for shared knowledge and lead the way to diplomatic, counterinsurgency, and peace building efforts worldwide. So I’m basically trying to be this guy.

I’m also researching issues of diversity and disparity among marginalized populations in various ways, like diversity among minorities and women in Higher Education. I ask questions like who’s in power, where is our voice, our place in our fields, in our jobs, in our societies, and why does it all matter?

Soon you too will have some new insight into the current state of minorities in your fields in higher education. Why do YOU think researching a topic like this matters?

[audreyfay]

Audrey’s Intro! Week 1

[audreyfay]

Mrs. Cisneros’ Intro is LIT, if I do say so myself. 

[audreyfay]

My Intro, again. Also, check out the required #hashtags. (semester, course, week#, theme) #CAKE

[mycsquinones-blog]

Christian Quinones : mycsquinones