Blogging.
I liked blogging. I think I might keep it up after the class is over. It is fun to have kind of a soapbox. I think it was good for turning in assignments especially; it would have been a pain to bring assignments like the ones from the blog to class every week. I have enjoyed reading my peers' blogs a lot. I always get good ideas from them, and they are just fun to read in general. Blogs are great! : ) And so was the class, for the most part : )
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
I'm a student, I'm a friend, I love sports, my name is Alex Rasmussen, and I'm a Mormon.
It seems like with websites, less is more when it comes to written words. I chose to analyze Mormon.org and it does a really good job of letting the pictures do the talking. The main page of Mormon.org features some menus on the top and bottom of the page, giving visitors some choices, but that is not what our eyes are drawn to first. The biggest part of the main page is taken up by pictures of people. These pictures of people pull us right in and invite us to learn more about them. With words, things get confusing and it takes time to read them all, but with a picture we take it all in immediately. Pictures are not only worth a thousand words, they also give us those thousand words in a much shorter amount of time than it would take to read a thousand words. There is just enough of a caption by the pictures that we can form a positive composite image of who the people are that we're seeing and it invites us in with the promise of telling us more of their story. Different options are set in different places and with different colors on the screen. The name of the church is there but doesn't call undue attention to itself. It's separated from the menu items that it's next to by being colored black instead of white, letting us know that it falls in a different category than those other words. The white menu options on top stand out without being obnoxious. They seem to say "Hey, we're here if you want to check us out, but no pressure. You just do your thing and go at your own pace" which works on some people's view of Mormons as pushy about their religion. The menu options on the bottom of the screen are a little more specific, but have to be scrolled down to, again giving the message that the viewer is in control of this experience and that the website is just there to be as helpful as possible. The focus on the people in the pictures shares the message that the best way to learn about Mormonism is to know a Mormon. We're invited to see how normal these people are and we see just how their faith has affected their lives, which is very instructional since, to a lot of people, much of Mormonism is shrouded in myth and misconception. Most of these messages are communicated subconsciously which makes them even more effective. All-in-all, a good website, which makes it awesome for SHARING! Check it out if you haven't.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Prompt for Wed.
So first off, I think the vending machines on campus are super funny. There are WAY too many choices. All you would need to add is a toilet paper vending machine and you'd be able to live at BYU for a whole semester, while shopping only at vending machines. I also love that there are microwaves at all the vending machines, because it opens up awesome possibilities for lunch. Leftovers? Yep! Oatmeal? Easy! Corn dogs? Oh yeah!
Now that I'm finished with lunch (chicken and rice - delicious!), on to the actual post.
The biggest thing for me in my paper is poor organization. I didn't give my research the attention it deserved before I started writing, so when it came to the actual writing I was working way harder than I would have had to if I had done my research right the first time. I would have gotten more sleep too. I also wrote originally just trying to get all my thoughts on paper and back them up with good sources and that is pretty much how it came out. So to fix it, I am going to revise my introduction and thesis statement to pull everything together. The research ended up coming out alright but just took hours and hours longer than it should have. Everyone's time management suggestions on my last post were awesome and much appreciated! I am excited to try them. Next time. Because procrastination is one of my strongest natural talents : P
And now, websites. First, here are four that are pretty effective at doing what they aim to do.
Here are four that are ineffective, for various reasons.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
This will be a pithy blog post:
Myths have lost their original meaning; what once were dogmas that formed the foundation of other cultures are now to us simple tales lacking any relationship to reality. Unfortunately, what has been lost is exactly what makes myths the basis of so much study.
With the issues paper, I have mostly struggled planning out enough time to complete the research and writing process. How have ya'll been able to plan and limit the time you spend working on it?
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Library Instruction: A Well Thought Out Paragraph on the Merits and Lessons of Library Research Instruction with Additional Comments
Additional comments first: the iPads I could take or leave, but those library desks were awesome!!! Natalie, I think you should pull some strings and get those for our classroom. They would be so convenient for mixing up groups or passing papers around. We could take fun five-minute breaks and do things like bumper cars, desk tag, or sharks and minnows. We could even take field trips without having to get up, but we would still be getting exercise from using our legs to maneuver. We already have a pretty great class, but if anything were to make it even better, it would be getting those desks in our classroom.
I thought the library research instruction was very enlightening. I did not know that I could chat with a librarian, or that there are so many great search engines available to help me find scholarly articles and other academically sound sources. I thought it was cool that we all had iPads so we could follow along, although a few times I got distracted looking things up and missed some of the teaching. I found a couple sources for my paper that should help me with my research. I wasn't really confused about anything. It makes sense that we can use encyclopedias in our research but not as sources. It also makes sense that we want to use the work of experts to strengthen our papers' appeals to ethos. I'm glad we are working on this right now; I have a research paper that I am working on for a different class at the same time, and I feel like what I learn in Writing will help me to do a quality job on my other paper.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Popping the question, research paper style (research paper proposal. hahaha)
For as long as I can remember, I have loved playing sports. Growing up, I played a lot of youth sports. I consider myself a sports purist--I value good sportsmanship, playing for a love of the game, and being competitive and intense but keeping things in their proper perspective. In every sport at every level, in varying degrees of severity, there will be contaminants that creep in to the game. These could have the form of a parent banking their child's college education on an athletic scholarship, and pushing their child so hard to excel that all enjoyment in playing sports is lost. These could have the form of a coach picking favorites over skill, work ethic, and fair opportunity when choosing a team because he is friends with some of the children's parents but not others'. These could have the form of an organization that withholds opportunities to participate from some children because they are poor. For lack of a more specialized term, these detracting outside influences are often referred to as politics. When framed this way, politics in sports are negative by definition. For the purpose of the article I propose to write, this definition would be expanded to include possible positive influences as well, such as a coach's use of sports to teach important life lessons or to keep kids off the street and out of gangs. Anything outside of playing sports for nothing but the sake of the game will be classed under the term politics.
This seems like a broad topic, but more than arguing the efficacy of specific examples of politics in sports, I propose to argue the concept as a whole, and use specific examples to support it when such examples would lend clarity to the argument or illustrate an essential point. Elements of the concept of sports politics to be argued would include their developmental effects on children, and whether these effects vindicate, justify, or condemn the presence of politics. They would also include a look into why these influences are introduced into youth sports and where they often come from. Finally, based on the conclusions I will draw from the thorough research I will do, I intend to argue what steps ought to be taken to maximize the positive effects of sports politics on child and adolescent development.
Preliminary research I have conducted consists of quick internet searches that yielded enough recent information to convince me that this topic is a timely one. Based on both the articles I read and my own experience, my initial stance is that politics in sports play a significant role in the psychological development of children and adolescents, and that these effects are negative more often than they are positive. I am excited about this topic because I love sports and feel like they are a very uniquely effective medium for teaching and learning on many different levels, from concepts of hard work and mental toughness to inter-personal relationships to ethics and morals. Like any form of teaching, sports and their accompanying politics are neither inherently good or bad and it matters how they are used, because by affecting the minds, morals, and perceptions of children, they influence the future in a very significant way, and the future, as a result of choices made now, has consequences for all of us.
Monday, February 27, 2012
20 Ideas!
Ok. I hope this list of 20 things does not have to be completely made up of issues-paper-ready issues. Because mine probably won't be : )
1. History of sports
2. Politics in sports
3. Sports in general
4. Old books
5. History of religion
6. History of how religion is practiced
7. Relationships between people
8. Animals
9. History of the United States
10. History of art
11. Physics
12. Exploration
13. Behavioral psychology
14. Efficiency
15. Writing
16. Reading
17. Learning
18. Influence
19. Modern technology
20. Family
There we go! A list of 20 things I am interested in. It's definitely not comprehensive. Hopefully I will be able to pick something to write about from this. The brainstorming I did while making this list did help me think of some possibilities that I hadn't thought of before.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)