English 388 - Writing for the internet is a course at UW-Stout that helps students investigate writer and audience interaction online. Students gain exposure to different web technologies and learn topics such as rhetorical analysis, visual analysis, content strategy, information architecture, design, usability, weblogs, and social media.
Over the course of this class we worked on several projects based around the content we were learning. We curated content, created bots, analyzed content, gave pecha kucha presentations, designed one sheet handouts and so much more. I will be providing an overview of some of our big projects over the semester. The following projects are where I feel I learned the most over the semester and I found something valuable in it. |
Curation Project
The Curation Project took place over the entirety of the semester, we had to choose a topic of online content that we could curate and present new carefully selected information each week. With that in mind I chose to begin a blog where I could curate my content and present it in an interesting and appealing way. My blog is called "This Week in Space" my blog is located on my site, astronautbydesign.weebly.com. Each week I gathered content from some of the astronauts in space as well as looking for relevant content about the new and exciting things happening in space each week. I curated content from different platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and different space agencies blogs and websites. With each post Included 5 different topics I wanted to highlight or discuss each week, anything from what the astronauts had for dinner to a running commentary about the entire launch or landing event. I posted once a week, usually on Monday nights so I could make sure to be able to talk about some of the large live events that happened so often on Mondays.
A few of my blog posts from the semester. This project was by far my favorite of the semester, I learned a lot about writing, curating, and staying consistent on my blog. I also learned so much more about space than I already knew which I found fascinating. I was pretty sad to see this project end, who knows maybe "Astronaut by Design" will have life once again in the future.
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Twitter Bot
In the Twitter Bot project we had to create a twitter account that automatically tweets out content on it's own. We had to set up these bots to tweet on their own, these bots also had to have some sort of theme or usefulness to them that made sense as to why we were making these bots. In class we talked about the ethics around bots and how to even go about creating them. I struggled with coming up with an idea at first but in the end I came up with a bot that I find rather adorable. I took a lot of inspiration from similar bots such as @tiny_cityscapes, and @tiny_astro_naut and I created @The_Tiny_Zoo.
In this project I learned a lot about how to code a twitter bot, I struggled with finding tutorials about how to do things I wanted to do and it took a lot of practice tweets before I got it right the way I wanted it! I was able to figure out a way for the bot to even tweet back when someone tweets to it. I thought a lot about how the user interacts with the bot even though they really don't need to. I wanted the user to have some sort of content replied back incase they did try and tweet at the bot because others like it did not do that. I also wanted to to have a lot of variety within the content so I organized the bot to have an overall similar shape but the animals would change within. There were many challenges in learning how to make one but in the end I was pretty happy with the results. My bot has now reached over 200 tweets on the account, I am sure it won't be long before it surpasses my own tweet count.
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Content strategy Analysis
In the content strategy analysis project we chose a website to analyze. We analyzed all of the content within these sites, such as the written language, user interactions, and accessibility. I chose to analyze Huge Inc. I began by analyzing the home page and moving through the main navigation menu. I took an inventory of each page and the content within and went back and analyzed that content even further by exploring the good and bad user interactions and coming up with ways to push it further.
Overall Huge had a wonderful website and their user interactions were well thought out so I felt I had a difficult time trying to analyze the content and finding the flaws because they have already been worked out. In the end I learned a very valuable lesson in that you should always back up your content because you never know what will happen because re-writing under pressure is also quite stressful.
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Adios, Tschüss, Goodbye
This course taught me a lot about writing and content on the internet. I really enjoyed writing my blog posts over the course of the semester and I am really happy with how my twitter bot turned out. This course showed me a slightly different side of understanding the user, it has helped me to realize that I should put more importance on the written content within a site as well as creating smart user interactions paired with well designed content.
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