Hi guys! Welcome to the site. For this first blog, I wanted
to walk you through some of the choices I made in constructing my blog since on
Monday, you’ll be doing the same.
PLATFORM There are many platforms and when designing this
course, I considered
Wordpress,
Weebly,
Tumblr and our campus-based Canvas. In
the end, I decided to go away from Canvas because, outside of school, you will
encounter a new software system in every work environment you go into. With
that in mind, I think it’s important that you learn not just one system
(Canvas), but how to learn lots of other systems.
In the end, I went with
Blogger because I’ve used it before
much more extensively than the other platforms and, although it is hardly the
most intuitive thing on earth, I feel like I can troubleshoot pretty easily.
LAYOUT I like a very nice, clean, simple layout. For that
reason, I chose one that has navigation links on top (nowhere else) and mostly
just the blog entries. This way, information is chunked and easy to find.
PICTURE Although I usually don’t use profile pictures on
social media sites until I’ve had the account up and running for a while (I’m
an oddly private person for someone who is so interested in blogging that I’m
incorporating it in a class), I wanted one here because I feel it’s important
that you understand there is a real person behind this blog. I want our
conversations online to be as robust as they are in person and making a blog space
feel like a real person’s space goes a long way towards doing this (I’ve
actually read research about this, if you can believe it!)
Also, I chose this particular one, in which I appear to be
bearded, because it’s weird. And in this class, I want you to start looking
closer at things that are weird: Who decides things are weird? Are they weird
for a reason? What can we learn from them?
PROFILE QUOTE I have two quotes in my profile and they’re
at odds with each other. To really understand something, I think it’s important
to understand the flipside. So, to understand the way gay marriage proponents
are successful, it’s important to understand how their opposition categorizes
their dislike of certain bills.
The first is from a couple really awesome scholars that we
might read in class and the second is from an excellent movie called
EmpireRecords which we are not going to watch in class, but you should watch in your
free time. Again, this mix of high (scholarship) and low (popular teen movies)
is going to be a big theme this semester.
COLOR SCHEME Finally I chose the color scheme because black
seems kind of subversive and very early-internet, when
"The Net" was still a
very underground culture. I’ve also heard that light text on a dark background
can be easier on your eyes. But it’s also kind of annoying, so your last task
before Monday is to complete a very complicated survey by clicking this link:
Have a good weekend!
