I have never considered creating my own website. However, learning that websites offer simplified ways to do this and also learning some design tips puts it on my radar. Here are a three the design tips I will incorporate when I do make my own website.

1. Keep the user oriented! Use multiple “you are here markers.” The Web Style Guide recommends highlighting navigation items in a menu that appears in the same place on all pages. Another backup marker could be a highlighted tab. The organizational and section titles also serve this purpose. This is especially important for users who may have landed haphazardly on your website’s middle. (I was actually finding I was getting annoyed with the “Web Style Guide: Interface Design Section” because I was not sure where I was in the guide and there was no obvious indication of how many pages were there. This is partly because I did not “land” on the important Table of Contents which would have let me know not to read every single page I encountered.) So case in point, make it single, double, or even triple obvious to the user where they are within your website!

2. Always tell the reader who created the content and what institution they are associated with. I tend to shy away from wanting to associate my name publicly with my work, but I suppose it is a necessary evil. The world wide web is so faceless that it makes sense people need to be able to know who the source author is and what affiliation he or she is representing.

3. You need a menu list and search box to support the two kinds of users. Make search available on any site with more than a few pages and users expect to see it in a certain place. That is true! I always look in the upper right hand corner for a search box. Although, I did not know that I was sometimes searching the whole internet and not just the website I was in!

Power Points can enhance or distract from any presentation you are asked to give. How can you make sure yours is an ENHANCER?

I asked myself the same thing while reading some advice from experts Garr Reynolds and David Epstein. Here is what I learned:

1. Ask yourself what three things you would want your audience to remember, if they could only remember three things about your presentation. Sometimes the message gets lost in the creation of the Power Point. Asking this question before you design your Power Point will help you plan a clear message. Asking it again afterwards will help you see whether or not the goal of your presentation will be met.

2. Tell a story that is personal, relevant, and memorable. The information that I find important needs to come across to my audience in a way that feels just as important to them. I think the best way to do this is to try to get in the audience’s head and make the information relatable.

3. Make the slides last. I had never heard this, but I will try it next time. The idea is that you write the presentation, rehearse and time it, then make the slides. This will ensure the Power Point enhances your presentation and that the message is in your speech.

Now, go present!

It is always good to have an updated resume on hand. And since I am in school, it seems I have needed more custom resumes for my side jobs than ever before. I found some helpful tips on writing resumes and other career-oriented things on the resources listed on our class assignment page.

The most helpful resource for me had nothing to do with resumes, coincidentally. I found a free GRE prep class at our own university on the University Career Center’s web site! I did not know our school offered those! Unfortunately, it was too late for me to sign up, but I will be on the lookout for more like this.

As far as this resume assignment goes, I will use many of the tips I found on “44 Resume Writing Tips.” My three big takeaways were:

1. Make the purpose of the resume to land an interview (not to get the job).

2. List achievements, not responsibilities.

3. Identify the difficulties the company may have and illustrate how my skills can help solve them.

Off to resume land now!

Call me crazy, but I am glad to be getting some experience with APA format. APA is the style I will encounter and use in my field, so I was anxious to trade in APA for MLA while writing papers in previous semesters. The citing is definitely different than MLA. First of all, it is interesting to only use the first initial of the author’s name instead of the full first and last name. My psychology professor, M. Hrabic, said that this is to avoid gender discrimination when reading scientific articles (2015). Do you like how I did that? 😉 Second, putting the url, or I think they call it DOI on the GSU tutorial, is new to me. Since we will be increasingly using online sources, my references pages may look like a list of urls (with some other stuff, of course). Last, the date of retrieval always tripped me up on MLA if I forgot to write it down the day I found a source. In APA though, I need to go a step further and make sure the date I retrieved the source is on the website, or still list it on my references page. Is that the correct interpretation of that rule in your opinion?

Any tutorial that starts with snoring is fine with me! ZZZzzzzz. Okay, now to wake up and opinionate… The tutorial brought up a good point that I wish I had seen before I made the mistake. To explain, I have definitely lost the source of something I wanted to use in a paper. I learned the hard way that I should always immediately document my sources just in case. This is especially true when you are doing a lot of research and not exactly sure what direction your project or paper is headed in. I have been using Diigo.com to document online sources since this course had us think about such things, and I am loving it! Not only are my online sources documented, but so is my date of access. It is too easy to go back and check a site and realize that it is not exactly as it was when you initially accessed it. Getting those dates of access documented are just as important as the source itself. Also, I did not know that I have my own personal librarian. Is that true for GSU too?

I am supposed to research and read past posts to an online group once I join? Wait, what? Just kidding, that makes sense, actually. I just did not realize that it was internet RUDE to post a question without looking to see if it had already been answered. However, on sites where more interaction with current members is encouraged, I can see how this rule should be overlooked. For example, on MyFitnessPal.com, users can exist in friend groups while still being mostly anonymous. In order to create more friendships and therefore more interaction with the site, posting without looking back is probably better. Those who would be annoyed will not look and sort-of-new-users can share their recently gained knowledge with brand-new users.

Taking Spanish? Italian? Any language? Here is Duolingo to the rescue!

Visit https://www.duolingo.com and then download onto your phone to practice your foreign language in playful way. Use the games to practice reading, writing, speaking, and listening. If you do well, earn points. If you don’t, lose lives. Connect with friends on the app and monitor each other’s progress for motivation. It is completely free and a great way to get your practice in when you might be playing Candy Crush instead. It is available for iOS, Windows Phone, and Android. I definitely thought it made my semester of Spanish more enjoyable!

Do you have a long commute and wish you could review that lecture? Voice Record Pro 2.8.5 let’s you do just that.

CRAAP Test for justfacts.com

Currency

The information on justfacts.com is published to reflect the release of new research. For example, the first article that appears on the website’s homepage under “Latest Research,” was published in January of this year and revised in April. Moreover, the website has a functional link to its own “Just Facts Daily.” Here, researches can find information that was published as recently as a week ago. According to the website, it has been in operation since 1997.

Relevance

The information found on justfacts.com when researching the “causes of global warming” is relevant. However, the breadth and detail of such a narrowed down topic is lacking. The links within the page only take the researcher around within the walled garden of the site. A good, solid fact might be found here, but otherwise the information is uninspiring for a researcher. It would only serve the researcher to look here if they know exactly what they want to look up. The information is presented in such a way that only an expert researcher would be able to sift through all of the hard, dry facts in order to find a lead to continue on with.

Authority

The producers of justfacts.com are named and their credentials are listed. For example, James D. Agresti is the president and primary researcher of the website. His credentials include a degree in Mechanical Engineering; professional experience in jet design, sales, and helicopter firm chief engineer; and a book on the factual evidence of the Bible. His contact information is not provided, but he can supposedly be reached via the website’s email operation. The site is a 501(c)3 organization run by a group claiming to be conservative/libertarian in nature but dedicated to providing all facts without bias. They ask for donations to support their site but do not provide information on where past funding has come from. The URL does match what the site claims to be.

Accuracy (see A Comparison in Accuracy under CRAAP Test for factcheck.org)

Purpose

According to justfacts.com, their purpose is “to research and publish verifiable facts about the leading public policy issues of our time,” according to their own standards of credibility. While there is no traditional advertising on the site, a list of educational and public-good companies is listed on the homepage. A skeptic might determine that this supposed list of customers is in fact the sponsor list. However, since most of these are known, reputable sources, if the list is accurate it is more likely that they are indeed customers or users of the site.

CRAAP Test for factcheck.org

Currency

Factcheck.org appears to have been an operational website since 2004. Articles were posted as recently as a couple of days ago. Even so, I did not see any updates on the articles I encountered while exploring the site. The links I encountered, however, were functional.

Relevance

The information on factcheck.org when researching the causes of global warming is mixed with relevant and unnecessary details. For instance, most of the articles on the topic are in response to a politician’s claims. The articles then lead the reader through the facts and details of the topic that was spoken about correctly or incorrectly. Therefore, there is breadth and depth regarding the topic, but perhaps unneeded media coverage on politician’s claims. The information encompasses the necessary information at the heart of the matter. In addition, it is presented in a format that is easily accessible to the college student’s level of understanding.

Authority

The site originally intended to publish information by a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania. The directors’, editors’, and writers’ credentials are listed on the site. To specify, many of the contributors have a degree in journalism, and have professional experience beyond the University of Pennsylvania. This small detour from their original founding mission actually portrays them as open minded, and thus, reliable. On the contrary, the only way to contact anyone from the site it through the website’s email option. A financial disclosure appears to develop trust with the reader and prove that they have been dependable for others who have contributed in the past. The largest donation comes from the Annenberg Foundation, a family organization that has been operational since 1989 and is dedicated to “worldwide community through its grantmaking, technical assistance and direct charitable activities” (Anneberg Foundation). Factcheck.org claims to refuse funds from corporations, unions, partisan organizations, and advocacy groups. The URL of the site matches what the site claims to be.

Accuracy (see A Comparison in Accuracy under CRAAP Test for factcheck.org)

Purpose

The producers of factcheck.org claim that they are “a nonpartisan, nonprofit ““consumer advocate”” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” They try to determine whether political claims are accurate in order to provide public knowledge and improve understanding. Advertising does not appear on the website and therefore is not the main objective of its presence.

A Comparison in Accuracy

Researching the causes of the global warming on both sites returns very different presentations of information. Factcheck.org focuses on determining the accuracy of statements made by known persons of influence such as Sarah Palin and Jeb Bush in an article. The website authors conclude that global warming is likely to be caused from human activity and cites an IPPC report. On the other hand, justfacts.com presents its findings in bulleted points. They too quote an IPPC report. However, justfacts.com does not directly relate their findings to claims made by particular persons. On the whole, both provide similar factual information, but in very different ways.

I was struggling to find the number of minutes students at a particular high school spent doing PE for another class and decided to use this assignment to see if I had better results. In the end, I never got my answer and had to change my topic, but I did get to compare results of typing in Eau Gallie High School Physical Education Minutes (not in bold) amongst 6 search engines.

From the individual search engines Bing, Google, and Yahoo, as well as the meta search engines Webcrawler, Dogpile, and Zoo.com, I got some similarities and differences. All six returned the school’s home page on edline.net as the first result.

Two of each type of search engine returned the school’s athletics page on edline.net as the 2nd result, and the other 2 had it as the third.

Now, here is where things got a little more interesting. The reason I was searching this particular school was to learn more about teacher Barbara Berry’s physical education program. The original webpage that I found her on came up next on four out of the six search engines. On Google, she was fifth to appear, and on Webcrawler, second!

Mapquest’s link to the school was popular for the fourth and fifth spots, but Google was the only engine to return an article from Shape.org about Barbara Berry. Similarly, Webcrawler was alone in producing a Pakistani news page about Eau Gallie’s recent football win. Less eventful, Yahoo returned a yellowpages.com link to the school.

In summary, it seems the most relevant information appeared in results 1-3 on all six search engines. Google returned something relevant the others did not. The other five all returned a generic directory-type link within the first five results. Google wins again. 

Online classes can be very convenient. However, they take a lot of motivation and require some planning! Here is my advice to help you succeed:

#1 Plan, plan, plan. Consider this just like you would any other class. It IS convenient because you can decide when to work on it, but make that decision. Put it in your weekly planner like a normal class, but whenever YOU WANT TO!

     #2 Now, this might sound odd, but STAND UP WHEN YOU DO YOUR ONLINE CLASS. When we use computers for leisure we are usually sitting at a table, or even the couch. Standing up will remind you that you need to focus within a specific amount of time and not get lost surfing on Zappos.com for new shoes! Not only that, but don’t students have to sit enough? Your posture will thank you for a break! To learn more on stand up desk-ing at home click here.

  #3 Last, tell your children, spouse, boyfriend/girlfriend, roommate, cat, dog, and nosy neighbor when you are NOT TO BE DISTURBED. Chances are, they will understand when you tell them that you “have class” from ____ to ____ on ____ and that you need to focus. If they don’t, then maybe get new friends. Just kidding! Seriously though, go somewhere where no one knows you, if you must.