Wikitravel

The goals when using wikitravel is to provide a tour guide description of a place that I am familiar with. It is important to not advertise a place, rather describe the place as if I were to give a tour of my place.  It's more important to describe what you've learned at a place rather then describing what you did, though it is important to include what to do but do not describe your personal experiences with it.  Some important rules to follow is to make the tone of the article to be conversational to the right extent. This means to not talk in complete slang, but also do not be over formal to the point where the writing becomes boring and way more difficult to understand then needed.  Some other important factors to follow would be to avoid cliches, because that is all travelers hear, and they want to hear the truth.
Avoid putting in personal opinions and superlatives to describe certain events, activities, or places. The reason you do not want to do that is because not everyone has the same opinion on certain things, everyone does not enjoy the same things, and people do think all the same food tastes fantastic. The basic guideline wikitravel suggest would be:  1) Get in, which is how to get to this place and where it is located, 2) Get around, which would be if it is easy to travel around this area. 3) See, what is there to do at this location. 4) Eat, everyone loves a good meal, so make some suggestions that would satisfy a range of different foods. 5) Sleep, the location needs to have a place for people to sleep that is comfortable and convenient. These factors are all important for travelers and are the key components to an article. Then after one describes what to do in their location the next step would be to Get Out which is another way to tell the travelers where they could go to next. It is important to include this step because many times when people are traveling they are vacationing for more then then one or a few days, this step helps provide information on what to do next.

Independent Technology Learning Five

As I have been blogging I have noticed that the blogger website doesn't not correct your work as Microsoft Word does. For example I can say the letter "i" without it automatically being capitalized. Then when looking at lynda.com I notice that there was a tutorial for how to go about spell checking and publishing my document. I was able to discover the blogger.com has a spell check similar to Microsoft word. I still am confused when working with lynda.com when the tutorial refers to HTML. Since we do not have to work with the html format, when looking for help on figuring out a problem it only shows examples when working under html format. Should I be using HTML format to be posting and editing my blogs? I feel like I know the basics of blogging, how to post and edit my posts, but I'm concerned that there is not much more to discover. What are we supposed to be learning independently because much of blogging comes with practice. I guess I am wondering is what am I supposed to know how to do with my blog at the end of each project period?

Independent Technology Learning Four

With my clubhouse blog at this point I believe that I am starting to get a feel for how the general things work with blogs. What I am looking to do with my blog, is to make the contents look legitimate. I want to be able to have organization within my blog. I know I am registered for lynda.com but that website alone is difficult to navigate. I found the blogger essential training where I found the most helpful and relevant sections were Formatting Your Posts and Working with Images. These are the fields that I had previously begin to work with, I had hit difficulty with some but worked through the issue. Other parts were easily understood and I was apply to apply them to my blog. The videos attached to the training were a little confusing because I work off of a Mac and the format shown is on a PC. This website is useful just to be able to read all the different things that you can do with blogger.com and then being able to listen to someone explain them to you. I personally do not like listening to the tutorial because it is more time consuming and I think it is easier shown, the tutorial goes to much in depth on simple concepts.

Independent Technology Learning Three

For another one of my blog posts I had decided to attach videos, in order for my readers to fully understand my posts about safety regulations. This is where I began to have problems, attaching videos was some what difficult. The first video I posted I attached the link, and after I had published the post and viewed it on my blog the link was not able to be clicked on. Then for the next video I tried to attach it with the video button on bar above the text box, this button directly loads the video clip to the blog. After the video uploaded I had noticed that the quality of the video was poor, so I didn't want to use this option again. For the next two video clips I wanted to upload I decided to use the link button on the bar above the text box. This button is what I should have used when attaching my first link, because this is how my readers will be able to click on video links and be able to watch them in a separate tabs. This is probably how I will continue to attach videos in future posts.

Independent Technology Learning Two

In one of my posts I had decided to include pictures. I think I will continue to use pictures because I think it is a good visual effect for my readers. With my topic of cheerleading, many people have no idea what cheerleading actually consists of so being able to attach pictures so that they can have an image in their head should be a helpful tool. Attaching the photos was surprisingly easy. I like being able to post pictures to my blogs, because I can include my personal experience and be able to provide actual proof of my participation in my topic. I want to be able to figure out another way to incorporate pictures into my blog, and not only upload them in order to describe something in my text. I may find myself posting pictures of cheerleading to catch the attention of my audience, to draw them in and hopefully want to read some of my posts.

Independent Technology Learning One

I have never maintained a blog so figuring out how to just set up a blog was a little bit confusing. When setting up my clubhouse blog and the About me portion, it took me a good amount of time to figure out that I had to go into my profile of my blogger account to set up the about me, but after I figured it out I had felt achieved and had conquered the first step of many. I have begun to play around with the settings of my clubhouse blog, it's going to take a lot of editing and time consumption I have come to realize. Things I have changed already is the layout and the font of my blog. Things I would still like to figure out or edit are: to change some of the colors in the clubhouse blog to make certain posts more exciting, also I have noticed that some of my posts hold the default font and then switch half way through, usually after I had added in a direct quote of some kind. It's going to take some playing around to do get things how I am imagining. Also I am not sure if I officially like my current layout so my audience might see a change half way through the semester. I hope I am doing well so far, and can't wait to make the blog how I am picturing it.

Summary of The Business of Understanding

The Business of Understanding is written by Richard Wuman, and it begins with the explanation of what an information architect is. Wuman begins to explain an effective information architect differs from an ineffective architect. Effective architects makes the information they are explaining understandable to others. Wuman then states that the key to understanding is to understand what it is like to not understand, and that answering questions is rewarding and asking them is not rewarding. Also that being able to admit when you do not know something, that it will in turn make one able to learn more. Then Wuman introduces the topic of Aesthetic Seductions. He states that seduction is usually linked to sexual appeal, but in fact seduction has always been a part of design. In design seduction is not referred to the meaning of sexual appeal. Next He introduces the concept of LATCH.
Latch stands for location, alphabet, time, category, and hierarchy. Location is described as the natural form to choose when one will attempt to examine and compare information. Alphabet stands for a method in which one can take large groups of information and be able to organize them, examples of this would be a dictionary and a phone book. Time gets put into play when trying to organize information over a set period of time. Category is in relation to organizing good, like how a department store would organize their merchandise. Lastly, hierarchy refers to the organization in magnitude. For example when prices are organized from low to high. Next he introduces vantage points, and how it is important to look at the information from other angles therefore one will be able to examine and assess the information more clearly and creates structure. This also helps one look at the information in terms of opposites. Lastly, Wuman states that there are two parts to solving any problem, the first part being what you want to accomplish, and the second how you are going to go about doing so.