Ning Project Reflective Post #3

On Thursday during class we peer reviewed another group's project. When we got our peer review back the only main comments were that our welcome note seemed too upbeat for our topic and that we needed music. We also needed to add a link from our facebook cause page back to the ning page. These seemed like easy fixes. I took out the exclamation points in the welcome note and made it seem more mellow. Together, we linked the cause page back to ning. When we tried to add the music, however, we came across problems. On my laptop, the music from itunes did not come up as mp3. The professor also has difficulties so we are all going to just keep trying. I've tried again today but it was the same problem. Other than the music, our project is complete and I really like our finished product. I think I enjoyed this project more than the other ones.

Ning Project Reflective Post #2

We've created our site and even found events. We split up the blog post ideas as well. So far, my group is working really well together. We communicate through sakai and finish a lot of work during class. We have added pictures and even a video. We also came up with our welcome note and mission statement. I'm finding some difficulties figuring out what music to use for the main page and for my page.

Ning Project Reflective Post #1

When I first went on the Ning website I felt confused. I didn't really like the search engine and couldn't find anything that related to my topic (Flooding). After some explaination in class, I figured out how to create our site. We named it: Flooding in Rhode Island. We plan to focus on Preparation/Precautions, History, and FEMA. I really like my group and think that this project will be fun.

NING

After creating an account on NING, I tried to find something about flooding, since that is my group's topic. I thought it was kind of confusing how to find and look at a page. I felt like the titles to things weren't very explanatory. I tried searching for it on the search bar at the top, but still found nothing. I also think that each actual ning page is pretty confusing. There's so much going on and it's difficult for me to focus on one thing. I suppose I will keeping poking around and get used to it.

Social Network Sites

When I first opened this article, my immediate thoughts were that of facebook and how addicted so many people are to it. Social network sites can appeal to such a variety of people; I know people in middle school that use them and even some people's grandparents use them! It's a great way to connect with people from around the world and share/enjoy things of personal interest. The authors of this article categorize the SNS as a 'phenomenon' which I think is entirely appropriate. Only a few years ago, I did not know what facebook was. Now, I'm completely involved in facebook and find it distracting me with all its constant news and interesting features. People can access SNS on their mobile phones, which is crazy. It's interesting to see the launch dates of the SNS. I remember when I used LiveJournal and MySpace, but I haven't even heard of most of the others. I think that SNS are a good thing and bad thing; they allow such great connections to be made and sharing of interests, however, I do see how it is distracting to real life and it might limit real growth with social skills.

Issues/Causes

5 issues or causes that I would like to raise awareness about might be...

1. Adopt a pet
2. Go Green
3. Recycle
4. Economy/federal debt
5. Difficulties of surviving off minimum wage jobs

Website Redesign Reflective Post #3

So, when my group sat down in class together to actually create the site, we began panicking because we have literally no information about the Scandinavian Tanning Salon. Not having our original website to refer to is making this project seemingly impossible. We concluded that we should take information from other tanning salons' websites because the point of this project is not about the information, its about how we recreate and design the actual site. I threw the professor an email to check if this was alright, just in case. I think the project is due tomorrow and I do not feel confident about our website. Our homepage is extremely simple and each of our pages aren't anything particularly awesome. At least the colors look better and the font is a bit more interesting. I've done pretty much all that I can in making this project work so now I'll just see what happens and hope for the best.