Blogging and This Class

In English 4320, during the spring semester, I learned tons of new things about social media networks that were all a mixture of interactive activities and readings. The one thing that I believe was completely centralized during the entire semester was the use of blog posts and publishing. In the beginning of the class I had a lot of questions in my mind about what a blog was supposed to be composed of, after spending a few days in lecture, I learned that blogs aren’t “supposed” to be composed of anything, rather they are completely open to interpretation and molding! A blog is something that you can write in about anything, although, I did learn that writing comes much easier when you are focusing on some main issues and interests, such as feminism, gay rights, immigration…etc. A blogger becomes more powerful when they show interest on main categories and definitely get more traffic when they blog about sensitive issues that are just burning away in someone’s mind. I learned about writing professionally in a blog also, things such as how you structure your sentences, how you present yourself in your writing and what you include really makes a difference if you want people to think that what you are writing about is legit and professional. Using tools such as linking, using the titles of things that you are talking about, along with whoever created it, using references at the bottom of your post, and maybe even including a “More info” website and things that relate to your article. Oh, and it is always important to remember, that when possible, in whatever it is that you are linking, try to set it so that the link opens in a new tab so that the reader doesn’t get distracted and forget about your post. Another important thing that I also learned was paragraph formation, or simply, how your blog post looks. Many readers tend to get turned off when they click onto something that is insanely long. They tend to either navigate away from your page, or just try and skim through to get a glimpse of what it is you have to say, I sometimes even catch myself just reading the comments posted at the bottom of the page to rely on it to tell me the main idea of the post. I think that when it comes to post structure, the length of your paragraphs also matter, if your reader sees long paragraphs they may get lost in them and automatically develop a bad attitude about reading your post and that just ruins the main point for them. Before I enrolled for this class I was expecting something a little more traditional, such as writing essays, but this class gave me more than that, and I loved every minute of it. I was also introduced to wordpress.com in this class and it helped me open my eyes to other places to write besides my notebooks and on the myspace.com blog page.

Collaborative Project Reflection

During this collaborative project, we had to select a non-profit organization and offer to write for them for a totally of about 30 days and that was equivalent to 3,000 words. My partner was Willma Harvey and we chose Aransas Pass for Youth as our non-profit. I contacted them the following day after class and spoke to Rosemary, the person in charge of the Aransas Pass for Youth program. We set up a meeting date with her the following week and anxiously waited for our fun to begin! Once that time came around, we took off to Aransas Pass and sat down to have a meeting with her, she told us what her non-profit was about and made us both very excited to be there, she immediately told us what she wanted to do for her and sent us on our way. Willma worked on the power point that she had asked for us on google docs, then I made one like it on power point, which was the Rosemary’s preferred presentation style. I also wanted us to write a letter to Target asking for their involvement in some way to help Aransas Pass for Youth help the community.

This is just some information about our non-profit:

The Aransas Pass for Youth, Inc. is a 501(c)3 Non-profit organization that was formed in 1996S.  It sponsors a 7-week summer camp for area youth ages 8-13. It runs Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and provides the youth of Aransas Pass, and surrounding areas, the opportunity to learn, grow, socialize and have fun in a safe, supervised and structured environment.  It is an affiliated agency of the United Way of the Coastal Bend. THE MISSION of Aransas Pass for Youth, Inc. (APFY) is:

To provide a safe, supervised summer recreation program for at-risk youth of Aransas Pass and surrounding areas. The APFY Summer Program provides opportunities for children to experience positive individual and group recreation activities that enhance social skills and provide lifelong benefits, including enjoyment of literacy, respect for the environment, and skills to remain drug-free.

We had several difficulties during our time working on our collaborative project, but at the end, I think we really did alright. Some difficulties included the transportation over there (it was 20 minutes away), Rosemary’s busy schedule, Willma and I’s busy schedules, and the pictures that Rosemary wanted on her power point were also too blurry and we received negative criticism in class about them, which made it all the more frustrating. As far as Rosemary’s busy schedule, we couldn’t really do much except call her every day to try and get a hold of her. Willma and I were willing to move things around to make room for this project so that worked out well. I ended up going to Aransas Pass on my own one day to take some better quality pictures of what Rosemary wanted on her power point. I drove around the town for about an hour without a clue of where things were such as the Seaman’s Memorial Tower and Newbury Park, but I did immediately find the Aquatic center, so that made for good pictures. After a while longer I also found the tower and was blown away by its magnitude!

All in all, I really enjoyed writing working with Aransas Pass for Youth. I didn’t know what to expect from this collaborative project, but it was a great experience, and I would definitely choose the same non-profit again. I had the pleasure to get a glimpse of the wonderful things that Aransas Pass for Youth does and how difficult it is to run a non-profit…but at the end of the day the smile that Rosemary always had on when we saw her made me want to run a non-profit on my own someday. The writing experience was also a very enjoyable one, we got the opportunity to learn and build relationships as we helped our community.

Blog Post on Aransas Pass for Youth

I’m beginning to see how difficult it is to keep in contact with someone who is so busy all the time. I’ve really been wanting to get in contact with Rosemary about getting some more information with the program that they have with Best Buy so that I can write a letter to Target about maybe wanting to hop on the same program as well. It’s really difficult, though, because there are a lot of  if’s and but’s, for example, I know that Target is open to volunteer their time to community projects, but i’m not sure that this location (Corpus Christi) will be all too open about helping a city that is about 30 minutes away. Plus, I really don’t want to get Rosemary’s hopes up if Target isn’t open to the relationship that Best Buy has with Aransas Pass for Youth. If anything, the most that I am hoping for Target and our employees to do is offer their time to volunteer for a couple of hours during the summer and during events that Aransas Pass for Youth holds.

Blog about Blogging

I have learned a lot of things in this class…but most importantly, I have learned HOW to blog. At first I was so fed up with what to write about that I ended up just not writing at all. I spent a few weeks debating on what I should focus my blogging on, and after a while I realized that it doesn’t have to be centralized on what readers want to read, rather, it should be something that I want to write about, something that truly interests me and that I feel strongly about. Not only did I learn about the thoughts behind a blog, but I also gained knowledge on the context thats on it. We learned about making our blogs look professional by seperating them into well written paragraphs, adding links to a page to look attractive and thouroughly written, and always link back to whatever it is that you are talking or writing about..

Update on Collaborative Project

As of today, Willma and I have completed our first assignment given to us by Rosemary, the head of the Aransas Pass for Youth program. We constructed a power point presentation that was about the city of Aransas Pass’s Chamber of Commerce, it ended up being ten slides total and is about the length that she wanted which was 10-15 minutes. At this point I acknowledge that what we did on the power point wasn’t exactly what we expected as far as writing about a non-profit organization, but when it comes down to it, I guess neither I or Willma could say anything about it which is why we continued to do the power point for her. Hope she likes it!

Blog Post #8

In this blog post, I will speak about “Is Facebook Unethical, Clueless or Unlucky?” by Jason Calacanis, “Universe”  by Jonathon Harris “Naked in the Nonopticon” by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Jason Calacanis’s article “Is Facebook Unethical, Clueless or Unlucky?” is insanely brilliant and should grab the attention of all the people of the world who are so obsessed with online social second lives. I believe that every media tool out there has a catch to it, and I can totally agree with Jason in saying that on Myspace, when something new pops up warning me to read the user agreements, I just click out until I get to the page desired. I also definitely think that my generation was brought up to sign things without reading and agree to online contracts without reading the terms of service that we are agreeing on. I honestly think that it is unethical for Facebook to count on the carelessness of its users and take that to their advantage to give them more power through traffic and search engines. After reading Jason Calacanis’s article I am definitely going to change my settings on my myspace page to private.

“Universe”  by Jonathon Harris is a very addictive interactive media tool. I have to admit I spent quite a while playing around and typing different names and words. It seems like it is really centralized on gossip and definitely has a lot of it right off the bat. It reminds me a lot about wefeelfine.org in the way that it is set up and categorized into different ways of viewing what is being searched. The big difference is that on wefeelfine, while searching feelings such as “suicidal”, you get what you asked for.. statements of suicidal thoughts, but when you search the same word on Universe, you get things that are on the news such as suicide bombers and bombings. Another aspect of Universe that is also interesting is the constellations that it forms, you are freely able to link back and forth between the words Hilary Duff and Hilary. It was a little difficult to maneuver at first but after a few minutes of clicking around, it didn’t seem so difficult anymore, and was certainly addicting!

“Naked in the Nonopticon” by Siva Vaidhyanathan is an article about how un-private everything is. Even websites that offer private policies to their viewers are not as impressive as they could be and definitely don’t protect it’s users as well as it should. This article points out that it is not just in the online world that our privacy can be violated, Siva Vaidhyanathan brings out the fact that banks and sometimes even our places of employment know personal things about us such as our credit reports and our emails that are sent to us through the work-place. Some people are so cautious about what they put online and often don’t realize that they should be just as cautious about what they do in person and where they let their information leak out. When applying for jobs, that possible employer also asks for our personal information and that is what is used to determine if you are good enough for the job or not, so you really have no choice but to provide your information. The most indirect gadgets  like yearbooks and cell phones can also give your information out to people that you don’t want it getting to, especially if you have your blue tooth compatibility mode turned on.

This weeks articles and interactive tools definitely opened my eye to see that not everything is safe to be shared on the world-wide web…with that being said, I’m off to set my myspace page to private!

Blog Post #7

“Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance” by Anders Albrechtslund and  “Information Wants to Be Free, My Ass”  by Nicholas Carr were the articles that we are to review for this week. In this blog post, I will write about the possible correlation between the two articles together and about them as individuals.

Information Wants to be Free, My Ass” by Nicholas Carr is a very interesting article and really made me open my eyes to social networking. To be honest, I don’t waste my time paying for anything online, including “wi-fi” or cable because I do live within a student budget, but it is still very interesting to think about how all the informational and education tools are really making you indirectly and directly break the bank. Since I was younger I was brought up to think that the internet was a free source of everything in the world! From school projects, to educational articles and videos, and even for social networking. If you do everything the “Samaritan”  way, you pay for music to download on to your computer,  you pay for Microsoft Office and Works, you pay for programs that you can hook your phone onto, and those are just a few of the add-ons. I have not really opened my eyes to these facts yet because I have never agreed to pay for anything on the internet, but I’m sure that this will come in handy for my family and friends who have definitely let this “free” world grab a hold of them.

“Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance” by Anders Albrechtslund is also a very interesting article about how our social networking can never truly be erased from the public’s eye. Social Net-workers tend to build these friendships with people that they have never met anywhere else but online, I am guilty of this as well, I have only really met about 50 of the people on my social networking website of choice, and most of those 50 (including my lifetime partner) I met online first! It is so funny to think about how this type of thing happens every single day! There is a true fear that one should develop when accessing the internet because online social networking can be just as dangerous as chatting online and deciding to meet somewhere, no matter what your age is. But still, everyone tends to take it very lightly, one thing about the internet world is that it can be mistaken for a virtual reality, and it often is. The internet is its own place where a person can be what they want to be and accept behavior that would be abnormal everywhere else. There are different standards in the online world and just like “A Rape in Cyberspace” by Julian Dibbell, lines tend to be crossed everyday that hopefully that same person would never cross in person. Then there;s that painful fact that often times, a sex offender coming from online has a way better chance of not getting caught compared to if they would do it in person.