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My Selection # 1: "Video
Game Road Rage -- Problem or a Pleasure?"
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Steps That Led Me To This Report:
I first began looking for my 459 reports on the
Index Of All Reports
from where I decided to select Generation 7. After I reached the G7
home page, I went through the list of students randomly until I came
upon home pages that caught my attention. Although there were a few interesting
one's, Travis Abe's page
really caught my eye. I decided to bookmark this site and proceeded to
go back and view all the reports by the students. As it turned out Travis's
report on Video Game Road
Rage was the one I really liked. It took me about two hours to go through
all the other G7
reports, but deciding on this one was rather simple.
Report Summary:
Travis Abe's
report consists mainly of four parts: an introduction, an analysis
of five video games ( Carmegeddon, Roadkill, Fatal Racing, Interstate '76,
and Need for Speed 2), an analysis of the topic, and his final thoughts.
He gives a brief synopsis of all the games listed, and describes their
content by stating the amount of blood, gore and violence involved. For
the game Carmegeddon, he even gives a few sample screen
shots to show the reader exactly how gory the game can actually be.
Travis also provides reviews for the games as well as a few download sites
in case the reader wishes to preview them. One of the important points
he brings up is that the ESRB
(Entertainment Software Rating Board) isn't doing a very good job at rating
these games: he suggests that the ESRB
provide perhaps a disclaimer at the beginning of each game. He also brings
up the important fact that many of these games are a very bad influence
for the younger generation because unlike TV shows and movies, games are
interactive, and actually encourage those who play them to act on their
road rage. Thought they may only be on a screen, these playful actions
could actually influence some of these youngsters later on when they drive
in the real world.
Report Critique:
As much as I enjoyed
the originality of this report,
I did find that it lacked a lot of content. I believe that Mr.
Abe could have done some more research on the effect of violent driving
games on youths. I personally would have expanded in this area, and also
would have gone more into detail on the connection between Road Rage and
violent video games, and how they can affect not only youths but older
drivers that play these games as well. I may have also compared these games
with the violence depicted in TV shows and movies. There are unfortunately
too many areas left open to further research. His closing and main body
to the report are quite weak and need much development. Like I mentioned
he brings up many good points, but needs to add more detail to them.
Compared To Other Reports:
I looked at other reports in the generation
and found many interesting ones in my search. There were quite a few with
very appealing designs, but the one I chose still comes out the winner
in my books. I'm sure many of the differences on web design are due to
personal preferences, tastes, creativity and hard work involved in making
them. As for the reports themselves, I'm sure the differences are based
on the same ideas, but the quality of the reports rely more on the amount
of work the person put into them.
My Selection # 2 : "Road
Rage: What it is and How to Deal With it Effectively"
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Why I Chose This Report:
After looking through several generations for a
nice 459 report, I decided to settle on Jeanette
Knutson's coverage of road rage in "Road
Rage: What it is and How to Deal With it Effectively." I suppose one
of the main reasons I chose to do my critique on her report was the fact
that it had a nice layout that was easy on the eyes, no clashing colors
or extensively small fonts! I guess one could say that I am a very visual
person; I tend to chose things based on visual appeal. After I decided
that her home page and report were visually satisfying, I compared it to
a few other pages that were somewhat interesting to me. For some reason
her report seemed to be more interesting to me than the others, perhaps
because of her style of writing, so I finally chose this one .... again,
after a few hours of excruciating research! I was also hoping that I could
learn something about controlling my road rage by reading her report.
Steps That Led Me To This Report:
Once again, I started off with the Index
Of All Reports and decided to look through generations 5
and 6
of the traffic psychology class. After viewing both and book marking those
that I liked, I narrowed my choices down. This again took a good few hours;
though I didn't keep track of exactly how many, I do know that when I finished,
there was no longer any light outside! I looked at the interesting reports
in depth, while I immediately dismissed those that caused any type of strain
on my eyes, or were boring to look at or read, specifically the titles
or introductions. My final pick came down to the report that was easiest
on my eyes and was interesting enough to hold my attention.
Report Summary:
Ms.
Knutson makes the introduction interesting by sharing her feelings
about road rage. She incorporates herself into the discussion by
telling how she feels about the topic and is very concise about what the
report
will contain. Her report contains two other sections, one that discusses
Dr. Driving on the internet, and the other on some of her favorite traffic
psychology resources. First, let's look at the section on Dr. Driving:
Ms. Knutson further divides this into two subsections, the first deals
with links to Dr. Driving's web based tips on driving and handling road
rage as well as of sections of the book Inner
Power at the Wheel by Dr.
James and Dr. Diane Nahl.
The second subsection deals with what seems to be replies to postings on
Dr. Driving's newsgroup. It isn't really made very clear. In both subsections,
however, Ms. Knutson makes a concise summary and commentary on every sub
topic that she addresses. Most of the second subsection dealt with other
driver's comments toward Dr. Driving and his advice. Ms Knutson provides
a brief summary of them and comments on them.....or so it seems. It was
at times unclear whether she was the one commenting or she was just summarizing
someone else's comments. The last section was basically just her list of
favorite traffic psychology links. In this part she lists ten links and
gives a brief description of each.
Report Critique:
Although I did like Jeanette
Knutson's report,
I saw some room for improvement. For example, she could have been more
explicative in the description of her two subsections. Instead of just
calling them parts A and B, she should have given them a heading briefly
describing what they were about. Instead the reader wonders exactly how
to categorize what she has written; I still am not sure if what I was reading
in part B was from newsgroup postings or just summaries of them, or what!!
I did however like her section on the traffic psychology links. I believe
these were quite useful and informative.
Compared To Other Reports:
After I looked at other reports in this generation,
as well as others, I came to the conclusion that I liked this report
because of it's ease to read and simple layout. I also liked her home
page, which is what further influenced me to choose this report. There
were many other reports that were too "busy" with profound colors and unnecessary
links to every little section of the page. I found these to be a bit disturbing.
There were some others that had a few things that this report lacked (as
I mentioned earlier), and there were also others that had the simplicity
of this one.
My Selection #3: "How
Does The Web Page Operate?"
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Why I Chose This Report:
I believe that one of the main reasons why
I chose Edward
Sugimoto's "How
Does The Web Operate?", was the fact that it is a very simple
and concise report. It is "clean cut", meaning no unnecessary hoopla, just
the bare facts all laid out in probably the most simple and easy to follow
format I have come across yet! I guess the fact that I recognize the author
of the report also did have some influence on me picking it, but no so
much as the other facts that I brought up. I also wanted to learn more
specifically what Mr. Sugimoto had to say about how the web operates.
Steps That Led Me To This Report:
Well, since I already had a certain criteria for
choosing reports now, I had a somewhat easier time at this point of my
research. I suppose it really helps to have a system down, so that one
doesn't waste countless hours working on this assignment. Never the less,
I started my "mining" with the Index
Of All Reports, and then moved onto the link to generation
4B. Since I had already finished doing my critiques of the traffic
psychology reports, I only had to look at one list now, cyber-psychology.
This, of course, made my searching a lot less stressful because I knew
I wouldn't even have to worry about looking at the other list of reports!
Whew! Anyway, I followed basically the same routine as described above
in my previous reports for selection #1 and #2.
I could repeat them, but then I would probably bore you more than you are
at this point!
Report Summary:
Mr. Sugimoto's report
is very basic. He begins by giving a brief description of HTML, HyperText
Markup Language, and immediately shows the reader an example of what
HTML codes look like by showing the coding for the first two paragraphs
in a table. It is very simple, yet very precise. I guess one could use
the old cliché "a picture is worth a thousand words." What a good
way to show a novice what HTML is. Now, it doesn't explain all the workings
of HTML, but it does give a person new to it a good visual. He further
goes on to compare the net explorer to a driver, one who visits one site,
or city, and then another. Except in this case, the driver doesn't have
to worry about gas or any other obstacles that may prevent a real driver
from visiting all around the world!!! Ed then goes on to explain
the organization of web pages, and provides good examples of sites with
both good and bad structure. He refers to these pages to show link structure,
but I looked into these pages, and they also have good examples of overall
web page structure. He also gives a good reference to a page by Enterprise
Integration Technology that gives a reader more insight on how a web
page works.
Report Critique:
Once again I liked the simplicity of the report.
Mr.
Sugimoto said quite a bit by not saying much at all. The content wasn't
very detailed, but it seemed to get the point across quite well. I personally
would have probably given it a little more depth. One thing I found a bit
humorous was that despite the fact that he focused in part on the structuring
of web page links, and had a nice web page structure himself, the actual
structure of the report wasn't complete. What I mean is that as a report,
it had no introduction, no defined body, nor did it have a conclusion.
This is definitely a place for improvement. With a bit of restructuring
this could have been an excellent report!
Compared To Other Reports:
I originally thought that many of the other student's
home pages wouldn't be very nice, especially since this was one of the
earlier generations. To my surprise, there were quite a few very pleasant
pages. I think as a whole, this class
had better looking sites than most of the others...with the exception
of ours, of coarse!! His reports were comparable to others in appearance,
yet I did prefer Mr.
Sugimoto's short and "to the point" style. His added humor eventually
won me over though! So, have you guys joined Dr.
James' fan club yet????
My Selection #4 : "My
Learning To Use Web Search Engines"
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Why I Chose This Report:
The main reason I chose this report
by Ross
Takara was because of the topic seemed to be interesting to me. At
first I thought it was just another report on learning to use the search
engines, but when I realized that it contained some information on stress
and meditation, so I decided to use it. As for the layout it wasn't anything
too spectacular, but it was simple and easy on the eyes, which also contributed
to me picking it.
Steps That Led Me To This Report:
By this point I had gone through just about everyone's
reports, in the Index
of All Reports and seen as much I would have liked to. At first I stumbled
upon this page and I thought, "Great, another one that looks just like
the others!" The title was very simple, but not anything too attractive
to me at this point. I had found a few with very nice titles, but the files
themselves were missing! That was quite depressing to me, so I decided
to just go ahead and scan through the rest of the titles. When I came upon
Mr.
Takara's report, "My
Learning To Use Web Search Engines," I started to read the introduction
paragraph and noticed that it had absolutely nothing to do with the title!
This completely threw me off because the heading for it said "Stressed."
I thought maybe I had either come across the wrong report or that perhaps
the student was stressed from doing this particular report! It aroused
my curiosity enough to make me browse over the report a little more in
depth. This is when I realized that this report was not only about Mr.
Takara's voyage in using search engines, but more specifically his use
of them to find information on stress and meditation. This is what sold
me on this report, since I was curious to find out what information he
could offer me on these subjects.
Report Summary:
Mr.
Takara's report
is based on his experience with searching for the subject of meditation
on the Yahoo web search engine. He chooses this particular engine because
of his familiarity with it and because it claims to be the most up to date
search engine of them all. He provides a detailed account of his experience
learning how to use the options on the search engine and how he browses
through the links already provided by Yahoo. He then explores deeper into
his first link, Health, only to find that the links he was exploring weren't
giving him any good leads into his original topic, meditation. Thus he
decides to exploit the use of typing in keywords to narrow down his search.
I believe that his detailed account of his journey through the search engines
gives the reader a good idea of what to expect to have to go through when
searching for a particular topic. He then proceeds to do an evaluation
of his research, one that is very similar to the ones we do after every
exercise. After this he gives the reader a brief but enlightening, no pun
intended, explanation of mantra meditation along with many useful links.
This section is divided into sub sections in which he covers the basis
and explanation of mantra meditation, methods of performing it, other's
experiences with it, products associated with it, and it's involvement
with other religions. I think this section was very well thought out because
it not only shows links to other web sites but also to usenet newsgroups.
This would be useful for those interested in finding out more about meditation
as well as for those interested in getting familiar with exploring web
sites and usenet.
Report Critique:
I thought that Ross
Takara's report, "My
Learning To Use Web Search Engines," was very nicely laid out. It had
good content and structure. His use of insightful details was quite informative
to the reader. It gave a good description of his exploration of web search
engines, and this information can be quite useful for the beginner. It
also gave a good explanation of his results from his searches on Yahoo.
His use of dividing up all the links into separate categories was also
a very good idea. I think had he just clumped them all together, the reader
may have been discouraged to look through all of them trying to figure
out what they were about. His introduction was nice because it caught me
off guard and made me look at the paper twice, to see what I was reading
about, but it did make me more interested in reading it though. He also
had a very nice conclusion that I noticed many papers lacked. He could
have made a more appealing title to his report though, because what he
used is quite boring.
Compared To Other Reports:
I looked at many other students reports in generation
3A R2, but I didn't really get to look at the one's I really wanted
to because the links were dead. Mr.
Takara's report
was definitely not the first one on my list, but after reading it, it looked
rather nice compared to the others, in terms of content and the ease of
readability. By this I mean it was easy to follow, and not too detailed
that I fell asleep on my computer as I did with many others. The layout
was simple and comparable to others, but the graphics were nothing spectacular,
but perhaps slightly above average.
Compared To Others In This Class:
I'll wait to finish this section when everyone in
my class is done with this exercise.......
Suggestions For Future Generations:
The first thing I would suggest to future generations
is for them to get a head start on this exercise and not procrastinate.
This is probably the best advice I have for them. Next I would advise them
to develop a method for looking at reports, otherwise they will probably
bore themselves to death looking through each and every report. I suggest
weeding out reports that possibly bore you from a first glance, or perhaps
those that cause an eyesore. It is really up to the student, but this technique
was quite useful for me. Good luck!.....and don't wait till the last minute!!!
