My Selection Number 1
Dana Rho - PSY 409 - Generation 7 - Report 1
Selection Process
I chose Dana Rho's report because she was the person who recommended this class to me. I was impressed by her creativity, simplicity in color, and average length of paragraphs.
Dana's report was one of the first reports I looked at. I felt comfortable looking at the report of a student I knew. I spent about 3-4 minutes looking for the generation she was in. I knew it was my final pick when I finally found it.
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Description of report
The topic of the report was the online attitudes in newsgroup messages. Dana looked at newsgroups, the attitudes formed, moral crises, and wrapped everything up with a conclusion. In general, she found that attitudes are similar in newsgroups as in regular relationships. She also noted that attitudes were contagious in newsgroups - i.e. one negative comment could turn the whole discussion negative.
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Discussion of Report
I was impressed by Dana's report. There were nice colors, good use of icons to break up the text, and a very conversational style of writing. I feel I would be able to do repeat the design of the web page, but it would require the many hours of lab time I know Dana spent on her report.
I believe her report was just a little too long at times. It seemed as she used more words than she needed to fill the report. However, I find that to be the situation in almost all the reports. Also, many of her links did not work.
I would advance the topic and its logic by re-writing the outline of the report and cutting out a lot of the unnecessary information. I believe reports on the internet should be straightforward and concise, not long and drawn out like traditional reports. I would also make sure all the links were working in the report.
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Report Comparison
I compared Dana's report to other reports of her generation. There was one report with red lettering - definitely a design tragedy. I also found another report that used frames, which made for slightly easier viewing. All in all, most of the reports looked similar in style and in length.
The differences were probably due to the amount of experience each student had on the internet. I am sure that the ones with frames were a lot more advanced than those with all red letter reports.
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My Selection Number 2
Robert Nakagawa - PSY 409 - Generation 8a - Report 1
Selection Process
I was browsing through the generation 8 home pages and I came across Robert's name three times in three different classes. I remembered he was the crazy one who took all three of Dr. James' classes last semester. I decided to take a look at his 409a page as it seemed like the most simple designed. It took me about 15 minutes to finally pick this report.
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Description of report
First, Robert talks about online virtual relationships and gives a few basic terms regarding these relationships. These phrases include false identities, support groups, interactions, expectations, and internet addictions.
He then discusses a work done by Mr. Quentin Jones that discusses communities on the web. In this section, Robert nicely sections off each section to avoid long drawn out paragraphs. These sections include coming to terms with virtual communities, defining & characterizing virtual settlements, and cyber archeology.
Next, Robert looks at a few of the previous generation's work, as we are doing in this report. He reviews Leslie Francis, Asako Shinagawa, and Marini Singh's reports individually. He then gives his comments on each report.
Finally, Robert wraps up with an evaluation and summary of his report and how it compares to the other reports in his class.
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Discussion of Report
I really liked the style and colors Robert used. The layout of the page was thought out and well done. Although lengthy, the paragraphs were broken into easy to read chunks of information. I want to use that approach as I do all my reports for this class. A nice touch was the use of alternating colors in the review of past generations.
The main weaknesses I found was that the paragraphs were not spread out. A space between each paragraph would make the report much easier to read and information much easier to gather. I would advance the topic and logic by using a little better layout scheme.
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Report Comparison
I compared Robert's report to those of others in his generation. I found reports that ranged from lengthy, almost mini-thesis - to shorter, more precise reports. This is probably due to the differences in writing styles. However, lengthy reports tended to over do the content, thereby making it harder to grasp and retain.
I also found a variety of color schemes. Some were easy to red, while others were downright horrible. I came to the conclusion that some students used their favorite colors instead of what made the web page readable.
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My Selection Number 3
Jenica Guerra - PSY 459 - Generation 6 - Report 1
Selection Process
I chose Jenica Guerra's report because it was short! I finally found a report that I could read fairly easily and gather information quickly.
I needed to find reports from other generations and other classes. I looked at about four reports before I found this one. I spent about 20 minutes looking through the other pages, but when I found this report I knew I had found the right one.
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Description of report
Jenica discusses a driving make over, which is a process of changing driving behavior through self-observation. She describes how it is done, then actually describes her own driving make over. This process involves an initial self-witnessing, then a self-witnessing with a change in behavior. Finally, there is and evaluation of progress in driving attitudes.
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Discussion of Report
I enjoyed reading this report. Jenica used both conversational and scientific styles of writing. It would take a lot of planning in order to do the same quality job that was done on this page. It was short, yet long enough to convey the information needed to provide a complete report.
I do not think there is much wrong with this report. If there was anything to do to advance the topic, it would be the use of more links. This is one of the best reports I have read thus far.
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Report Comparison
I reviewed some of the other reports in this generation. I came across a page that had links to separate pages for the report. Each link was a little section of the report. It was a case study report, so this format worked well. This generation had a lot of good ideas in blending content and design. However, there were some long paragraphed sections with poor choices of colors. Back to Top
My selection Number 4
Shane Cobb-Adams - PSY 459 - Generation 4 - Report 1
Selection Process
I chose an older generation to see what web pages looked like a few years ago. I chose Shane Cobb-Adams' report because of the directness in his report.
I looked through some of the Generation 5 pages. I looked through some of the reports and found that many students used larger fonts. This made reading difficult and information harder to find. After 20-30 minutes of browsing, I found Shane Cobb-Adams' report. The directness of his report led me to choose it.
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Description of report
Shane first looked at other students' definition of Traffic Psychology. He then wrote a very scientific discussion of Traffic Psychology. Finally, he wrote a down-to-earth personable definition of Traffic psychology and the need for it in every person's life.
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Discussion of Report
I feel I could have done the same thing. The design of the web page seems a little rough and the larger fonts make it harder to read. However, I liked the use of bullets and the precise manner in which Shane conveyed his points. Perhaps he could have broken up paragraphs a bit more to make the information more easily digestible.
I would advance the topic and logic of the report by changing the font to a more readable font. I would also have broken down the review of the previous generations in order to have more clarity of the information.
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Report Comparison
I looked at some of the other reports in this Generation. I found that many reports use the larger type fonts. The content ranges from short and sweet, to drawn out and lengthy. All of the reports provided mounds of information on the topic of traffic psychology.
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Comparison with Classmates
As of Thursday Afternoon, no one else has e-mailed regarding the posting of the generational drafts. Only Ms. Lee has posted her Generational draft. Her report is well written and informational. It took me a while to grasp the information she had written, due to the length. It seems as though you can get caught up in writing these reports. I have caught myself writing a long paragraph that I had to break up.
One of the things I remember when writing for my high school newspaper is to use short, direct paragraphs. Readers want to know the meat of the topic. I feel this is true for web pages. Who wants to spend two seconds downloading a file, then a whole hour trying to read and gain information from it.
Perhaps Dr. James would like to disagree with me. I understand from a scholastic standpoint the importance of well thought out information. I have no arguments there. This is just another chapter to the growing phenomena of cyber-psychology.
I have just updated my page and I have looked at the different reports up. One thing that concerns me is th plagerizing that occurs on the internet. One of my friends who took this class also shared with me that she encountered this problem. I am shocked to find that under the code of honor for attending this school, students still need to plagerize.
Aside from the plagerized pages, the rest of my classmates pages look good. Some classmates have not finished their work, but I look forward to seeing their web page creations. Hopefully they do not need to plagerize from another page to do so.
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Suggestions for Future Generations
I would suggest that students approach this course as being part knowledge, part exploration, and part designing. We know the knowledge, we can search the net, but designing takes experience and many trials. I am still trying to find a good design for my web page. As student, we need to be able to keep up with the technology, the knowledge, and the current trends in web design.
Think of when you were in high school. When the teacher passed out assignments or handouts on that awful purple paper, didn't it make you want to throw it away? As such, in this computer age, we need to make the information easily accessible and understandable. Longer sections of information only scare away the netizen from the web page.
I feel as though I have learned a lot from the pages of other generations. I was thinking of that word - Generation. Each generation needs to continue improving over the generations previous. I can only imagine the creativity the next generations will have. The technology, accessibility, and popularity of the internet is growing every day. I feel as though the forerunners of this class have done their part. Now it's our turn to take on the challenges of the internet age.
As I wrote above, some people were plagerizing . I am not too sure why they needed to do that, but I suggest to the future generations to start early so you won't need to copy other people's pages.
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