Claudia's Reflection Center

Hello! It is now the end of the semester, and it’s time to wrap up Digital Studies. For my final project, I have done something on the web about digital accessibility. More specifically, I created a lesson plan, a lesson walkthrough, and set up the webquest that the lesson plan is talking about! As a future teacher, this seemed to be the best way to show what I learned and do something new for the internet. My video walk through is posted on YouTube, and now my lesson plan will be accessible on the internet! I used real VA SOLs, so this is actually a lesson that could be taught in a US History classroom! Lesson plans and creating lesson materials requires you to be an expert in the materia, so while lesson plans are something I am familiar with, it still took a lot of work to be comfortable putting together a lesson plan. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T6uu2dFHcNItf_olGYjxt48mnQJMUdl5wCuLnAZIUrA/edit?usp=sharing – Link to Lesson Plan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMFZpZvnXY0 – link to youtube video walking through the lesson plan

file:///C:/Users/claud/OneDrive/Documents/Digital%20Accessibility%20Powerpoint.pdf – link to webquest

Above I have attached a picture of my lesson plan, a link to it, a link to my youtube video, a picture and link to the webquest, and a picture of the word bubble I made as an example of step 1 of the webquest.

I used many aspects of the internet; articles, powerpoint, internet, videos, Canvas, chrome extension, simulation, word cloud application, etc. to do something on the internet about the internet. 

I enjoyed doing my final assignment on digital accessibility because this directly relates to my future career in Special Education, but I also think this is something that everyone should learn about, and the simulation especially, can help grow empathy and understanding.

I hope you enjoyed my project of digital accessibility and doing something about the internet on the internet!

I work with a student with autism who loves to draw trains. His resource teacher loves Harry Potter and asked him to draw the train from Harry Potter. This was not a preferred train, so this was not an easy ask. I told him that I would do a Harry Potter art thing with him if he would draw the train. Doing a Harry Potter activity together made this more enjoyable, so this is where this word cloud came from. While I do like Harry Potter, it would not be my first pick for a word cloud, and it brings a new viewpoint when I look at it. I took my time working on it as my student drew the train. I changed the colors, the image it filled, the space, and took some of the words out. I was surprised at how easily I found an online pdf of the story, but it meant that I had to take out the website and publisher info because it was at the end of each page, making it the most repeated word(s), and therefore bigger on the image. Because I was trying to do this at the same time as my student, I had to take a long time so that I wasn’t rushing him by showing that I was done. It forced me to look more into the site and really engage with all of the options it had.

As for the final product, the most repeated words, such as ‘Harry’ and ‘Ron’, make sense. I was surprised at how large words like ‘get’, ‘didn’t’, and ‘free’ were. I have seen jokes about the most repeated words in famous books, and they usually are words that should not be used the most, but it’s still weird to see it visually shown in large text on a castle. I kept the font as it was because no matter what I changed it didn’t look as good as the original. The words it put in cursive font were the perfect words. (I don’t think the computer has a way of picking the words intentionally, but it worked out really well). Harry Potter books do have some classier characters and fancy aspects, and then you have young kids being kids, so I think the mix to the fonts shows that. The colors I chose represent the main colors/houses in the series, and the image it’s in, the castle, refers to the Hogwarts castle. 

I’m not sure what questions this should raise as a reader, but it did raise questions about the application and digital reading. 

When my student finished drawing, I showed him my word cloud. He thought I sat there and typed in every word of the book from memory. He didn’t know how I could type that fast or remember all of those words. I showed him the pdf I used, but he still thought I typed all of the words. It made me think about how crazy it is that I can look up a book, find it, download it or copy the url, paste it into a completely different website, and it reads it and takes out only the information that it needs. How computers work is mind blowing sometimes (and I’m using it to make a castle word cloud of a Harry Potter book). How do people program stuff like that? What is the internet? How does everything connect? Who put a pdf of a print book online for free, and how did they get it onto the computer the way it is? I’m not sure I’ll ever fully understand the internet, but it is cool to think about and use in simple ways.

Digital is the future. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it in my mind. Our society keeps moving forward and making or discovering new things every day. To not move forward with our country’s development would keep you in the past and not culturally in the know. This can affect you socially or with employment depending on your field. It helps make us more efficient, can help us be more creative, and helps us reach more people. For example, having books on an ipad allows a person to access it from their own home, where they might now have gone to the store to buy it before, its convenience and efficiency allowed another person to read it (Mod, 2010). 

The analog revival: Why photographers are returning to film by Garage Staff was an interesting article. While I understand their point, I don’t really like how it was said. Film is beautiful, there is no doubt about it, but digital photographers are also producing art. It takes a different skill. Yes, you can take many different pictures with the hope of one turning out right, whereas you have to be purposeful in film, digital photography still takes skill, has beautiful outcomes, and has many benefits over film. We can appreciate one without putting down another, which is what this article sounded like it was doing. It kept reminding me of that ridiculous excerpt from a story about how an older man a long time ago was mad that people were starting to use paper over stone, or those who argued the typewriter was better than the computer. There is always going to be a new thing, and people who don’t like it. I just thought we would have moved on from that idea by now. Old ways of doing things can still be great and unique, and new ways of doing things are also good.

I do not think analog technology will make a comeback to what it was before. It just doesn’t benefit the masses to do that. I think there is still a place for it in our society, but I don’t think it does us any good to not move forward with digital technology, that has already proven to be an asset, just because analog also works. 

After reading and watching the material for this week, I used a few of the provided sites to search my name. While I knew that some of my information was public, it still surprised me to actually see it. It reminded me of a letter I recently got in the mail. When political ad mail was coming in daily, I would get letters with my full name, mail telling me to tell my neighbors to vote (with their full names, address, and sometimes their phone numbers), and even some telling me their voting “scores.” This is all online information that they are using and sending to other people. 

With all that being said, I do value my privacy. If a store is asking for information, I won’t order from that store. I will only do certains things on my bank website, and I change all of my passwords frequently, but I am also willingly sharing this on a website with my name. I love the internet, and use it every single day, so I just hope that my information isn’t being used for bad, and trust that I am safe while also knowing there is also the possibility that it is not. The video “This is how hackers hack you using simple social engineering” really shows how little information they need to hack you.” It’s one of those calculated risks you have to take, but I think it is important to know what to do if something does go wrong. How can you protect yourself from it happening, or if it happens?

Another issue that has drastically risen with online education, especially for state and college tests, is online proctoring. In order to not be shut down for potential cheating, you have to show a proctor your space, let them watch you as you take a test, and not make any noise and limit movement. If you took a test in a proctored room, you could move, make (limited) noise, and your family could walk around and talk back at home. Nobody would have to see your personal space, so it does seem like a weird new requirement that unnecessarily invades personal privacy – for a test. I think it’s too much.

To offer various opinions and aspects of this topic of digital privacy, I do not believe that technology takes away too much privacy. We, the people who use it, knowingly allow it and agree to it. I could choose to not put my information out there, to not use the technology, and to not agree for my information to be used, but I don’t. On the flipside, I don’t think unauthorized information should be made public. I don’t think my voter history should be public information. If I agreed to that, it wasn’t something that I knew I agreed to. Agreements to public information should be bold and obvious. 

I have differing opinions on this topic, but I do know that I love digital technology, that I do agree to some of my information being public, AND I don’t want all of it public, agreeing to it should be bold and obvious, and precautions should be in place on both sides.

Chapter 1 of Reality Lost, “The Attention Economy”, compares the ways we got information in the past and how we get information now, and the attention that is used when taking in that information. The authors argue that as more information is put out there (through social media and widespread media/news) the less attention space we have to take that information in. While I understand the point, and agree with some of it, I don’t think there’s limited storage. I think that what we want to know, learn more about, and ignore should be taken into account when it comes to our attention. I also think that life and social factors should be taken into account. I have a hard time believing that we, as a society, all have shorter attention spans when it comes to reading and taking in information. It needs to be more generalizable. 

Another factor to this is that how we spread and take in information today is drastically different than it was in the mid 1800s, and I don’t know how accurate or informational it really is to compare them. Yeah people are different, it’s been 200 years. We have no clue what the immediate reaction to information being spread through technology would have been in the 1800s because they didn’t have it. It’s like when our parents tell us that they had to go to the library to do research and we can just use our computers. If they had computers back then, they would have used them. Is the argument here really that it was better when people had to walk forever to get a book or newspaper in order to get information? Ultimately, I think that our society’s decrease in attention is a correlation with taking in information online, not caused by it. IF our attention economy gets worse, it will be due to several social, environmental, and other factors.

In the article “Facebook is having a tougher time managing vaccine misinformation than it is letting on, leaks suggest” talks about the misinformation on social media, but Facebook specifically. It also talks about the ways in which Facebook and Instagram try to tackle this issue. 

I do agree with the argument that disinformation is more rampant due to social media. While it is extremely likely that disinformation was spread in various ways, possibly widespread, before social media -now information can be spread world wide. You can make a post and within 2 minutes hundreds of thousands of people have seen it. While it’s still only 1 person spreading it, like there might have been before, now that 1 person can quickly spread to hundreds of thousands, whereas before social media you couldn’t. This reminds of the game “Bad News” where we had to use tweets and a website to gain followers and spread misinformation. 

Hendricks V.F., Vestergaard M. (2019) The Attention Economy. In: Reality Lost. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00813-0_1

O’Sullivan, Donie, et al. “Facebook Is Having a Tougher Time Managing Vaccine Misinformation than It Is Letting on, Leaks Suggest.” CNN, Cable News Network, 27 Oct. 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/26/tech/facebook-covid-vaccine-misinformation/index.html.

#DGST101

“Bad News” is a strange game, and playing it was a very strange experience. There were several main thoughts that continuously went through my head as I played it. My first instinct and reactions never changed, the information it gave was scary, and that the game set up seemed simple. 

From the very beginning I wanted to know why this game was even made (it seems to have been for survey/research purposes). It was hard to not go with my first instinct – which is to not be a hateful and deceitful person- and do what I needed to in order to “win” the game. They even set up the questions and responses to force you to pick worse answers. It got to the point where it was hard to know what to pick because, to me, they were all evil and negative, but the system had obviously rated the answers. No matter how long I played the game, it still felt wrong. I still questioned what I was expected to choose. It never got easier to pick the evil answer. Also, the answer choices it gave became more “evil” as the game went on, as if I should’ve gotten used to the idea of the game by then. Overall, I never got used to the idea of the game, or the answers I was expected to give. 

Secondly, the information, tweets, and “help” it gave was scary. This should be a far off pretend play game – but it’s not. This could very easily be a real game. It just brings to surface how terrifying it is that people like this actually exist. People who make it their purpose to lie, scare people, and ultimately put others in danger. In the game, we got someone to lie about a plane crash to the point that the person in charge of the plane company stepped down. Obviously this was a made up scenario, but I could really see this happening. 

Finally, to the more general aspect of the game set up, it seemed very simple. Read, click an answer, repeat. However, I played this game before I attempted creating my own. I now have a new respect for every single game maker, even the person who made this. There is obviously a lot that goes into making games – time, attention to detail, patience, creativity. Even an idea as simple as ‘choose an answer’ takes a lot more than what I am willing to give.

Now, to the prompt question. Are online games an effective tool for social change? I don’t think the answer is black and white. I think they can be when they are used correctly. They must have a clear purpose and intent. I think that if I read an explanation of the purpose of this game, it would make sense. However, to me it was just a frustrating and scary experience that I wouldn’t do again. I also don’t make a point to share false information and gain a social following. Was the point to show unreliable sources? How to spot false information? I just feel like if it’s going to be an effective tool, I should be able to tell what it was trying to show or shed light on. Maybe I just completely missed the point. 

I don’t know anyone who likes reading the terms of service. Let’s be honest, they are very boring, and most of the time they don’t contain anything that will immediately impact us.

The more I think about this topic, the more I have to say about this. Before I get into our readings, I want to bring in some of our past readings. In “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Carr talks about how people have a hard time reading longer passages, and that’s exactly what terms of services are, lengthy passages. I also think there is a lack of digital reading and navigation education to build student knowledge of how to read online, what you should look for, what’s important, and how to keep yourself and your internet identity safe.

Both the TikTok and Medium terms of service were long and confusing. Even if I did read the whole thing, I still don’t think I would know what I was agreeing to. For this reason, I really liked tosdr.org because it simplifies it for you. Why hasn’t anyone shown this before! I think it’s a great solution to wanting people to at least understand what they are agreeing to.

Finally, the parody of TOS in the NPR article was super funny. It does really feel like I could be agreeing to give away my first born child when I agree to them in order to use an app. You never know! I remember reading a story about someone who did actually read all of the terms of service for an app and found out that the company wrote in their TOS that they would give a cash prize to anyone who had read to that part of it, so he literaly was paid to read the whole thing. I still don’t think that I will read entire TOS agreements in the future though.

#Dgst101

I knew exactly what I wanted this project to look like, but actually drawing it out was much harder than I anticipated. It makes sense in my head, but is a lot once it’s all physically out there. I think of the internet as being in the sky. I don’t even try to understand how the internet really works, so this is how it makes sense to me. To me the internet is vast, interconnected system that works hoever we want when called upon. How I drew this in the picture was if it was interconnected elevators and electric walkways. We each how our own internet category. When I log in to Google, Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, etc, I am logging in to my internet where I can start from where I left off the last time I logged into any device. The “elevator” brings down whichever category of the internet I am accessing. The elevator brings down Amazon to my phone and Google Suites to my computer. The electric walkways come in when I’m using Google Suites for example. I am now connected to someone else using the internet and we communicate between eachother quickly. I hope the way I’m eplaining it makes sense and that my drawing portrays that!

#dgst101

What is the internet? This is a much harder question to answer than I expected. The internet is the computer systems that are connected outside of the computer. For example, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint are not the internet because they’re specific to the computer. You can only access them if it’s an application on your computer. However, Google Suite (Docs, Slides, Drive, etc) is part of the internet. Even though Word and Docs and PowerPoint and Slides have the same function, the apps connected to Google Suite can be accessed across various computers, phones, etc – any device that has access to the internet. It is not device specific. 

In my opinion there is only 1 internet because everything is connected. There might be subsections of functions or types, but it’s all connected as one. The internet is becoming bigger, and with that comes new great things, but also negative effects. The fact that I can look up anything I want whenever I want is amazing. I know the most random facts because of questions I looked up as soon as they came to mind. It also lets us grow and expand our imagination and knowledge. It allows us a different mode for academics and art, different ways to be creative, and different ways to connect and communicate. However, the negative to this is that anyone can post whatever they want if they know how to. There also isn’t someone going through making sure that everything that’s posted is factual. This leads to easy access to wrong/not factual information which isn’t helpful. While the internet is a great way to communicate with people, it also makes it easier to fight, argue, be cruel to others, and receive hate. It makes it easier to create a divide. It also makes it easier to come together, so there really are plenty of pros and cons.

I love being able to use the internet to find whatever I want. As I said before, I have random questions that I love being able to look up and immediately find answers to. It’s also easy to go deeper than surface answers and really research topics in seconds. I love being able to see others’ pictures, hear fun stories, know what’s happening across the world, and staying in the know socially and culturally. I am scared though, especially with events in the past 2 years, about how easy it is to spread hate, and bring people together from all over the country – and possibly the world – to spread hate and hurt people. It gives them more power than they would have individually. Now, we could go back and forth and say that it’s also used to bring people together to do really amazing things that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, but hate spreads more aggressively, especially when they find people who agree with them. 

I really love the internet, and, to connect it to our two readings, there are plenty of pros and cons. Is it making us smarter or dumber? Well, it depends on which aspects you’re looking at and who you’re talking to. I think it should be seen as an asset, and more education should be focused on using it correctly. Use it to your advantage, not just something that people should use less of or stay away from.

Reflection for “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”

When I first got to the webpage for this reading, I looked through it and kept thinking how old it looked. I hadn’t looked at any of the published dates, or even how old the book was (which now makes a lot of sense). It’s colors are old, the set up is old – it’s uneventful. However, for the early 2000s, this makes a lot of sense. It fits that time fram perfectly. I can’t even fully put it into words, but just how certain clothes give off ’90’s vibes’, this gives of early 2000s vibes. The layout, common colors, and our ideas of what’s modern has changed drastically, in my opinion. I didn’t see any of the ads that our professor mentioned as vadalism on the site, but I do find the idea of someone ‘vandalising’ an old website very interesting. It does have a strong connection to “There Will Come Soft Rain” in that even when humans leave/ aren’t controlling it, technology lives on.

What I found most interesting, though, is that even though the layout and colors were very outdated, (and before I looked at any of the publish dates) I couldn’t tell when the book was written until it noted that the author was writing a part of this shortly after 9/11. So, while how we use the internet/websites/our domains change in formats and functionality, what we actualy write and put in them (the information) doesn’t really.

The artifact I chose to represent the web 20 years ago is an old website that was published in 1998. I chose this because it has been left up solely for entertainment and historical purposes, it connects to our reading this week by also being an old -kind of- abandonded website, and it shows some of the belief of internet evil. It uses way too many repeated images and GIFs, has a weird layout, and just seems to not use all the advantages of having a website that we see most people using now. It is attention grabbing though.

http://toastytech.com/evil/

This website’s purpose is to show the author’s hatred for Internet Explorer, which I think is hilarious because I think a lot of people have that opinion still today. But, it’s also obviously very old, and has been kept up for the purposes mentioned above.