Presentation project thoughts

I have invested a lot of thought into my presentation but I'm still coming up short. Obvious choices for me would be doing a knitting instructional or some sort of crafty thing, simply because it's familiar information to me BUT I desperately want to keep a theme running though my projects and I would like that theme to be library oriented. I'd love to do something with banned books, seeing as Banned Books Week was this month but I'm at a loss as to what I can teach. I have been kicking around an idea for a publishing project- I'd like to do a sort of 'rebel's toolkit' that includes fliers, t-shirt transfers, and pamphlets for anyone who wants to express their interest in the free flow of ideas. This still doesn't help me with my presentation project. Maybe I could do a Jeopardy game with a censorship theme. But that opens up a whole can of worms: Which age group should I target, how do I keep people's attention, how do I avoid sounding preachy, how do a preserve a neutral point of view to allow gamers to make up their own minds, etc. I think I just may have to do these projects out of order and mess around with Publisher for a while. Gods, give me some sort of inspiration!

More thoughts on my website...

Since I was able to get this blog up and running, I am seriously thinking about re-vamping my website, my motivation being to use it as a portfolio to show potential employers. I downloaded a couple of free templates to see if I can figure them out. I also downloaded SeaMonkey, even though I'd rather do the editing in Notepad, if I can. At first glance, I can already see I'm going to have to do a lot of research regarding code. There are a couple of things I think I recognize when I open the templates in Notepad but there is a lot I'd like to customize and the trial-and-error process would take years. I think I may have to just admit my weakness and rely on SeaMonkey for now and just flip back and forth from the html page, just so I can get an idea of how coding works.

There is No Way I'm giving up my little chipmunk theme, though. I will remain true to my chipmunky history. I wonder if this would encourage or discourage employers...

A blogger is born...

Why does one write what is in one's thoughts, except for others to read them? In my case, that is my exact purpose. I intend to use this blog as a record of my forays into the world of technology, thanks to my graduate studies in Preparing Instructional Media. As someone who has been traditionally against blogging, facebook and other internet activities which seem to encourage immaturity and disinformation, I'm looking forward to the process of discovery because these same activities can be used to educate and inform. If ever there was a safeplace for democracy, it is in the internet, where widespread censorship is still difficult to enact. So, while this blog remains singular in its purpose to record my work and study processes in LIS 6603, I believe it will also help me track and examine my own technological process.

For my first major assignment, I was instructed to post a webpage to showcase the different instructional media I would create in the course of this semester. I have never posted a webpage in my life, nor have I ever been particularly internet oriented, except for shopping or research purposes. The idea of posting a website was singularly frightening. I had always felt that there were the Internet-Savvy and the Inter-Nots. I was decidedly an Inter-Not and, frankly, quite happy to remain so. Until I started re-typing the code to build a bare-bones website. Something about working with the code itself both made sense and was fun to do. It was like sculpting and I immediately felt that I wanted to work directly with the media and go through a software program designed to keep users away from code. I worked directly in notebook, tinkering and testing until I go a basic idea of how everything was set up. I ended up posted three different pages- there was one modelled off of a template that I simply couldn't get working correctly but in my spare moments, I delete and cut and paste, hoping to figure it out. The end result of all my tinkering is...well...nothing amazing at first glance. But I am immensely proud of it! I had originally posted my website and was happy with it until I noticed that once you viewed the page in Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, all of the text ended up shoved to one side and my links were a mess- not good at all. I veiwed the source for the website from both Internet Explorer and Firefox and I immediately spotted the difference- a line of code at the very beginning spoke to Firefox but not to Internet Explorer and through trial and error, I re-worked the page until it functioned as I wanted.
Another challenge was my cute little chipmunk image, which originally was an image of my dog, Sobek, an eerily intellegent but lazy golden retriever chow mix. I had taken a picture of Sobek when he was a pup two years agao and the image was beautiful...and enormous. I tried, with an extreme amount of help from my roommate, to crop the image but to no avail. I couldn't find a way to resize the image AND reduce the size of the file so that it would post on the internet, rather than showing up as a broken image. Finally, I decided to stick with my chipmunk theme and I found an appropriate image- both in size and in the pensive quality of the chipmunk. All in all, I am happy with my little pink chipmunk website! I definitely learned a great deal tooling around. I always feel in my element when I am trying to figure out how things work.