#rws1301

[roohbn-blog]

Week 4: Media/Design

For this weeks reading response, I chose to read CH. 9 in the NFG book that talked about Media/Design. Media/Design is very important when trying to expose information from one person to another. We can communicate with others by using many types of communication, those being through media, verbally and nonverbally, through body language and well through other forms such as handwriting, print, telephone etc. Some things that the chapter also talks about is how a text’s design affects the way that it is received and understood. For example, pie charts and bar graphs are an easier way to show statistics and data rather than doing it in the form of paragraphs. It offers a much easier visual to the audience, while still containing important information.

Some questions that you should ask yourself when thinking about media are what medium are you using? Print? Electronic? Visual? Also, how does using the medium affect your overall organization? How does it affect the language and modes of expression? These questions are some of the things to keep in mind when making media. However, you must also think of the design. Things like the use of appropriate fonts, visuals, headings, and formats, such as APA or MLA, must also be considered.

The way that this relates to my major is that throughout my academic career, I am going to need to communicate with many people, using different types of communication. As a student that’s going into the medical field, communication is key, not only because you need to effectively communicate with others, but also because there will be many forms in which you will have to communicate by. 

The reason as to why I chose this video is because here we see how Jim Carrey uses different kinds of communication, to “effectively” communicate with others. We see some body language involved, the use of facial expressions and also the use of different sounds he makes. To me this video is hilarious and I believe it shows how we can communicate using different ways, of course, this being by far the weirdest one, but it counts. 

[loganutep-blog]

Week 3: Reading Response

In the NFG book, there was a reading of the design of media, purpose, and catching attention of the viewers. It was very interesting reading about the aspects of design. Personally I have always been a creative individual, and reading through it was very fascinating. How to use the different shapes to catch attention, colors for emotion, and also how to keep the viewers attention through the use of short sentences, and the use of words.

I have always been interested in media design, but besides photography I have never got a chance to actually try it. Through this section of the book, it really helped me understood the different strategies to use media design. We applied the different strategies that the NFG provided for us to the infograph, and it was very fun to apply them.

Photography has always been a passion of mine, and even though the reading didn’t had to do with photography, I related it to photography. The reading of media design explained the use of color, word capacity, sentence structure, picture placement, and shapes. In photography there’s a lot of aspects to look at while editing a picture, and if it fits together in one piece. Things such as brilliance, exposure, highlights, shadows, brightness, contrast, and black point. It’s almost the same strategy while creating an info-graph, because we just had to make sure all the different aspects fitted together, and that all the information required flowed together. It was really fun.

[dvelazquez4utep]

Week 2 Reading Response

This week I chose to do my response on the article on blackboard “It wasn’t me, was it?” Plagiarism and the Web by Danielle DeVoss & Annette C. Rosati. I mainly chose this article because I personally have been accused of plagiarizing, falsely accused but still a scary process. The main idea of this article was to inform people about plagiarism and how some people have no clue if they did in fact plagiarize as they are scared if they did something wrong or forgot to cite a part of their work. 

This gif is perfect to my standard because it is showing “homer” as scared showcasing that’s how most students feel when they plagiarize. The content from the article ties back to my major as I currently attend a University. Most universities take plagiarism very serious and can be a daunting thing to hurt your academic record.  I have been on the other end of the dishonesty policy and while I was falsely accused, it’s still a very scary thing to go through. Plagiarism is no joke and everyone should be careful to not commit such foul especially in college like UTEP. The article gave me a better understanding on how people think plagiarism works and how people are not sure if they indeed plagiarized. I feel like professors should take the time to inform kids of what exactly plagiarism is and what does not fall under that category. The major assignment we are currently working on should be taken with caution as we are dealing with lots of writing, from scholarly, open and multimodal sources. We want to make we provide the correct citations and not forget to cite valuable things as that can land us in potential trouble. Even though Ms. Cisneros is the best I have no doubt she won’t hesitate to assign a zero as plagiarism is a very serious offense. 

I chose this gif because I feel that it shows a sort of punishment comes to the student who decides to copy work without properly citing the original author. Trust me, this punishment is much better than the actual punishments Universities assign. Ultimately, the article prompts me to ask what can we possibly do to inform students on what is plagiarism and what is not considered and how we can encourage students to not plagiarize but to do their own work. Those questions are the ones that popped up into my head when I first read the article. 

[dmp451-blog]

Week 3 Reading Response

I chose my to do my reading response on chapter 56, “Using Visuals, Incorporating Sound” from the NFG. This chapter discusses how visual elements like: Photographs, Videos, Graphs et., can help persuade issues and arguments. The visuals can help get the attention of the audience. It helps to support the issue more by letting the audience resonate what’s being addressed. In order to be effective, the media sources have to match what is being said. Color, text, subject and type of source being used are things to consider when applying them to a project. I find this reading to be very useful because majoring in Digital Media Production, attributes like this are very important in the movie/ film industry. These are fundamentals that I have to be familiar with to promote advertisement, purpose, and idea. And if I want to apply it to actually making a movie or commercial, animation plays a big part along with style. Lighting sets the mood, color sets an effect. Reading this chapter helps a lot with being able to do a hands-on assignment like the “info graph” because I can have a better understanding of things to consider and an idea of how to be more effective later on in life as I pursue my career.

[brandonramirez9-blog]

Week 1: Reading Response

The best way i can interpret the article is basically, Activity theories are used to understand how people interact, and engage learning in all kinds of activities. It does it in three major steps, 1) Accounting for aspects 2) Analyzing how it works 3) Isolating problems to develop solutions. Activity Theory is basically used as lens to directly analyze an Activity Theory, which is a group of people working together to achieve a common goal. 

An activity system always consists on a who, what, when, where, why, and how. It also always has a series of conventions. Activity systems are always adapting, as people are constantly working together move forward, innovating, and promoting change. 

Activity theories can be directly tied down to the field i am currently directed in (Medical Field). Surgeons often work together during operations to save a patients life. Surgeons are also divided into different fields, in order to be more effective when treating patients. Surgeons are also required to renew their licenses, by attending training sessions, in which they learn new techniques and procedures developed by surgeons themselves, in order to treat wounds more effectively, and combat infections more thoroughly. Medical researchers also work side to side with doctors, as they are always working together to discover new cures for diseases, treatments, and antidotes. Nurses also play a very critical role in the medical field, as they are basically the surgeons handyman. Society often discriminates nurses, often not considering them important, however it is thanks to them that surgeons are able to remain focused and getting the job done effectively. Like an Activity System, medicine is all about working together, and moving forward as a whole 

[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. 

[roohbn-blog]

Week 3: Designing Text

This week I decided to read over design text in the NFG book. What it primarily talks about is how to grab the audience's attention and how to help it achieve a purpose, depending on what is being presented. The chapter also talks about some principles of design, some of which are recommended to keep in mind while working on a specific design. Those principles are to keep the design simple, be consistent, keep it balanced, use color and contrast carefully, and be creative! It also talks about fonts may affect the audience, for example, if it's hard to read or not, and also briefly talks of ways that font provokes a certain tone to your presentation.

The way this reading relates to me is by keeping everything simple and chill. Some people fake who they are just to fit in into today's society, but I say just be you and don't care what others think. To me, the simpler the better. I want to be creative with my life and have some color in it. keep it balanced and consistent! In fact, life can be seen as a design if you think about it. It is up to you to structure that design and make it unique! This reading helped me understand how to make a good design on the current Infographic we are working on and offered some tips on how to do so.

The reason as to why I chose this gif is simply because, like I stated before, our lives are like our own personalized design, we are able to make what we want from it, add color to it, set a tone to it, keep it balanced, consistent, and primarily, keep it simple. If you guys don’t know who Baby Groot is, well there you have him, and I think that he is an exact representation of what I mean by our lives being like a design. I myself enjoy keeping it cool and simple, don't like being too fancy, but I also like to have fun, have some color in my life and keep it consistent. I believe this gif also represents me, because even during bad times, I’m always having fun and enjoying the moment!

[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.