Shannen Does Human Factors Work

Sometimes you need to make blog posts for class, so this is where mine end up.

[shannendoescollegework]

Plans Post Pitt

   As my final life goal, I want to be a librarian. My first step is to get my MLIS from grad school here at Pitt. I want to get it from here because the iSchool is currently in the top ten for the degree.

  From there I would like to become a Children's Librarian; hopefully here in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Library. I want this because I like occasionally working with the public, and I love seeing small kids begin their journey with books. 

   This is the dream. I really hope it happens. 

[shannendoescollegework]

Positive and Negative of Prototypes

   One positive of our prototyping is getting a better understanding of what it takes to build a user-friendly website. Before the project, I assumed that the reason the websites were so difficult to use or navigate was that the developers were just lazy, but I learned that it is really quite difficult. What is good for one user, might cause another to have a seizure. It's so much harder than I thought. 

   One negative is that I haven't really looked at the differences between mobile and desktop computing. For this project we were supposed to be making a mobile website, but honestly we didn't really consider what would actually be useful to have on the mobile site. We just went with what would be useful to have on the general site.  

[shannendoescollegework]

Potential Homework 4 Ideas

   I think for homework 4 I am going to discuss early education softwares and how they affect the children later in life. There have been studies (that I will need to re-find) that talk about how these softwares immediately improve test scores, but they also improve children's acceptance of ideas and new ways of thinking. 

   And if that doesn't work, then I will do something similar and just talk about how these educational softwares immediately improve test scores. Which ever works. 

[shannendoescollegework]

Social Media in College Classes

   I think there is a place for social media within the learning environment, but only within certain limits. Blog posts such as the ones we are doing for this class are, I think, I good way to integrate social media. These are long enough to provoke thought, and they are almost guaranteed to need correct grammar and punctuation. 

   Using Facebook or Twitter, on the other hand, seems to be less ideal. There is almost no way that you can have a thought provoking tweet. Those things are too tiny. And asking students to add their academics to their personal Facebook seems rude. You can make a new blog or twitter for these things, but you can really only have one Facebook. 

[shannendoescollegework]

Museums Attended

   Living in Pittsburgh, going to museums is easy and fun, and being a student at the University of Pittsburgh means that many of them are free. I have been to The Mattress Factory, the Carnegie museum of Art and Natural History, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Science Center, the Fort Pitt Museum, and Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Museum. 

   I don't know if it is really obvious, but I enjoy museums. I go because I can never learn too much. My favorite one, though, is The Mattress Factory. It is something new every time I go; the installations change periodically, but the ones that stay can change depending on your current mood. The floor with James Turrell's works has been an eye opening event every time I go.

   All the other museums are fun and informative in their own ways, but I definitely know where I'll be going next time I want to go to one.  

[shannendoescollegework]

My Least Favorite Website

   Until class yesterday, I wasn't even aware that I had a least favorite website, but then my eyes were opened. Weather.com is just awful. Aesthetically, it is just too busy. There are links everywhere to things that are irrelevant. The advertisements are by no means related to weather and their colors tend to clash with the rest of the colors on the site.

   Functionally, weather.com is a nightmare. If you just type weather.com as the url, it takes you to a page that does not exist. What do they want me to type to get to their site? Also, it is not that intuitive working my way through all the different pages. The buttons are clickable even though they have drop down menus, so while I'm waiting for the menu to load I might accidentally tap on my mouse causing it to take me to an entirely different page than I meant to go to.  

   Weather.com is just terrible.

[shannendoescollegework]

My goals for Human Factors

   My name is Shannen and I am a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh. I am technically still undeclared for my major, but I am going to be majoring in Information Science. I will be minoring in Classics, though that might not be all. I want to be a librarian, so learning where systems and people can go wrong seems like it would be beneficial.

    I really want to learn where things go right. As stated in the first class, people don't really notice when things are going exactly as they are planned. Due to this I have ended up with a very negative general view for incorporating new systems into various positions. Like Pitt trying to have it's students log all of their service hours on a new website, but they are already struggling because the people in the system were never given their password. I just want to be given the opportunity to see the good.