My Selection Number 4: Mary Rose Isnec
(G5, 409b)

Why I Chose this Student's Report

I chose this student's report because I liked the newsgroups that she included in her first report. One is about alt.tasteless.jokes and the other is about soc.culture.filipino. I also liked the sub-title that she picked for her first report because the term she used was something I learned from my religion class which is "Yin & Yang." And obviously, because I'm a Filipino, I was interested in what she found out in the soc.culture.filipino newsgroup she joined. I chose her page mainly because of her topics and I like the simplicity of her homepage.

Retracing The Steps That Led Me To This Report

    STEP 1:
    The very first thing I did was to visit the Prior Student's Generations Homepage.
    STEP 2:
    Then, I clicked on the G5 Homepage and Clicked on several students' homepages in search for the perfect homepage that I can include as one of my favorites.
    STEP 3:
    I looked at 5 students' homepages and read the reports they had, to see whether they're of interest to me. That's when I saw Mary Rose Isnec's report about alt.tasteless.jokes and soc.culture.filipino newsgroups. I read through it and I was interested to know more about the newsgroups and about the second report on web architecture.

Description Of The Topic Of This Report

The first report is about the "Social Psychology of USENET Newsgroups." There are five parts in her report which consists of: Introduction, Method of Study, Results of Analysis, Participating, and Annotated Index to Social Forces. For her introduction, she briefly described what she will be talking about for each section in her reports. For "Method of Study," she basically showed us step by step how she found the two newsgroups she chose. She mentioned that she chose Dejanews because it is "very user-friendly." The part, titled "Results of the Analysis," she basically talked about what went on, through her observation, with the two newsgroups she chose. For the alt.tasteless.jokes newsgroup, she described what a typical reply consist of -- it basically consists of an addition to the joke. And for the soc.culture.filipino newsgroup, she said that the replies are usually comments or questions to the writer. She included an article from each newsgroups to show us how people in a newsgroup reply and how the articles look like. In the section she calls "Participating," she talked about what it's like to participate in a newsgroup. She described her feelings by using them as a sub-title to this section -- she said that she laughed, she cried, and she posted. Of the two newsgroups she chose, she mentioned that she was more active in the soc.culture.filipino newsgroup. Finally, the section titled "Annotated Index to Social Forces," for the most part, she talked about how she discovered Dr. John Suler's page where he discusses numerous topics on cyber-psychology. I guess, this is the site where she took most of the informations about cyber-psychology.

For her second report, there are also five parts which is similar to her report #1. In the Introduction, she basically explains to us what we will see and expect in her report such as her inclusion of Mr. Glover's discussion of what a sucky or savvy homepage is all about in the section she calls "Web Designer Principles." In the "Psychological Aspects to Web Design," she included three ideas she took from Dr. James' Social Psychological Principles of Home Page Architecture. The first idea was on "My Home Page is My Other House," where she compared the homepage to a house. Another idea she extrapolated from is "If no one ever clicks a link on a Page, it becomes an unlink in the zone of virtual silence," which means that a homepage has to be accessible and clickable to be an active participant on the net. Finally, the third idea was on "Cyber-space is a representative model of the mental world which means the spiritual world." Unfortunately, she didn't have any comment on this section. The section on "What It's Like to Become a Web Designer," she talked about her experience in designing her homepage last semester when she took 409a. She said that the first time she started building her homepage, she was displacing her anger on the computer, just like most of us are doing right now. She also mentioned that when she was designing her page, she was thinking more about getting a good grade but later on, she realized that she was designing her homepage to make it work. For her "Annotated Index to Web Design," she included four links she referred to when she was doing her homepage. These are: HTML Goodies, Thinking Critically about World Wide Web Resources, Edward Sugimoto's HTML Tutorial, and Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. Most of these sites will help you understand HTML codes and how to actually start building your homepage.


Reaction & Involvement

The very first thing I noticed on Ms. Isnec's homepage is that it's pretty simple. She had a table of contents and icons, but the homepage was not overdecorated by icons. I guess, she really took Mr. Glover's opinion seriously about how a homepage should look like and what it should have. I was really involved with her topic on the soc.culture.filipino because the article she included was something not serious -- it was a topic on whether Dennis Rodman is a Filipino. I just hope that she could have included more articles because I really want to find out what sort of things they talk about in that newsgroup. If I were to talk about a newsgroup such as soc.culture.filipino, I would include something that will say or describe more about this newsgroup so people would have an idea whether it's a worthy newsgroup to join.

I was impressed with the way she presented her topics for each report. She has 5 parts for each one of them and she followed the same format all the way through. I guess, what I'm trying to say is that she's very consistent with her reports. And this is one of the strong points she had in her report and probably an original logic she thought of when she started doing her report. I would probably do the same thing so people will not get confused and to make it easier for them to decide which topic to see first. The only weak content I noticed is she didn't talk much about Dr. James' Social Psychological Principles of Homepage Architecture and why Mr. Glover's page will be useful for first time web designers. I also noticed that the font she used for the reports were way too big as if she's avoiding to write more about the reports, unless of course that's what Dr. James required them to do. Overall, she tackled her reports consistently and intelligently.



Comparing This Report With Others In The Same Generation

To compare her first report to other student in her class, I chose Scott Chang's first report on Newsgroups. I found Scott Chang's report on Newsgroups to be more useful because he defined terms that are often used in Newsgroups such as flaming, spamming, posting, and many more. Unlike Ms. Isnec's report, she did mention those terms but she failed to define them for us. It could have been helpful if we knew what she was talking about when she says "Some jokes are really funny, but those that provoke flaming are those that poke fun at a certain race..." I guess, she already defined the word flaming in that sentence but it would have been better if she had a different section or paragraph where she defines the terms separately like Scott Chang did. The appearance of their homepages were kind of similar because they're both simple and they're not overdecorated with icons. Another thing I found was that the titles of the sections in their reports were similar, I guess, that's part of Dr. James' instructions -- DUHH!?.

For her second report, I compared Rose-Anne Ancog's second report to hers. The very first thing I noticed between the two reports was the length. I found Rose-Anne's second report to be longer and she didn't have to use bigger fonts like Mary Rose did. She also linked Mr. Glover's page to hers, like Mary Rose did, as well as Dr. James' page on Social Psychological Principles of Home Page Architecture. The only difference is that she had more interesting things to say about Dr. James' page. Rose-Anne discussed the Psychological Characteristics of Hypertext Links using the ACS (Affective, Cognitive, Sensorimotor) domain. The other two features she included and briefly discussed were: Informational Content of Home Pages and Stylistic Features of Home Pages. The informational content of home pages is about how you could make your home page easy to follow and transitional. For the Stylistic features of home pages, she said that the style of a homepage is important but if it takes 10 seconds for your page to load -- that's too long and it's not worth waiting for. I also noticed that Rose-Anne wrote more of her experiences in designing her home page than Mary Rose did. But, the titles and the way they presented their reports were somehow similar -- simple and easy to follow.



Mining the Generational Curriculum || My Home Page || My Report 1 on: Psychology of Online Virtual Relationships. || My Report 2 on: Safety Activism. || My Report on the Psychology of Newsgroups || My Bookmarks File || My Icons File || Our G8 Class Home Page || Our G8 Index of All Reports || Dr. Leon James Home Page

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