Revising the assignments now was actually helpful, because I've had some time to forget about what I wrote, so I could read the assignments with fresh eyes. This really helped when I was revising the essay because I remember being extremely frustrated by it, and almost sick of reading it. After revising it, I felt satisfied because I made some changes that I probably wouldn't have made earlier in the semester. I followed Grete's directions when I revised my Research Proposal, I had a lot of formatting and headings issues, so that was not hard to revise. The essay was more open-ended and that gave me more room to find creative solutions to the problems in the essay. I didn't have to fix-up my initiating action project much. I chose to include blog-writing about my initiating action project because I never actually wrote much about it in the portfolio, so I used my blog posts to describe the project and show how the idea evolved into a sketch and into the final product.
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I was really happy with my poster presentation and the feedback that I got was mostly positive. I think that the only negative comments that I received dealt with the font-size of the text. It probably was hard to read, but I had to fit all of the information in the small space. Also, I didn't know how I could blow up all of those images and make it bigger. I designed the website with the assumption that it would be viewed on a computer screen, and that's why the font was so small. People commented positively on the design and layout, and most especially on the reminder/email system that I proposed. I really wanted the "Participate" page to be the core of the webpage and people who saw the poster felt the same way. The reminder feature is an important part of the webpage and I'm glad that people thought that the idea was creative and useful.
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So I was on youtube.com this morning, and I saw an awesome channel called "project report." It has a lot of videos and a lot of them seem like initiating action projects, whether its putting bicycles in Washington D.C. or cleaning up the plastic bag problem. Here's a link: Project Report
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The sections of my website are Home, About, Participate, Gallery, and Contact. The home page is designed to give a pitch: Why should you join the effort? also it gives the visitors immediately important information, such as news and upcoming events. The About page has information about the Special Olympics organization and its history. The Participate page has a list of upcoming events, a newsletter sign up page, and a link to the full competition calendar. The upcoming events have links beside them that allows the visitor to set-up email reminders or add the event to Google Calendar. The Gallery page would have pictures from events which should give people a glimpse of the things that happen at various events. The contact page has information about who they can call or email if they have questions. It also has the address so that they can go visit the office in Blacksburg. There is also a form that people can fill out to write quick messages to the organization called "Quick Contact."
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I would first like to say, thank you for trudging through my essay. I apologize for my verb tense usage, but I will definitely put some time and effort in to fix that. Mrs. Scott, you gave great suggestions to add to the persuasiveness of the essay, and that is to include counterarguments. Its all well and good that I'm asking people to spend time and help the Special Olympics, but these are student athletes that we're talking about, people who have to juggle schoolwork and sport commitments. I think that the time commitment is an important point to address, and it will complement my essay well.
In response to your suggestion of including more student athlete testimonies, what I really meant was that it would be nice if I could include more of that. There has only been one event during which the Special Olympics and Virginia Tech has gotten involved with each other, and I covered that event in my essay. I do want to address the fact that I didn't give reasons why it is important for student athletes to contribute their time. One of the reasons is that they serve as role models, especially in the Blacksburg area, which consists of Virginia Tech, essentially. Furthermore, student athletes understand what sports can do for a person, and this is a chance to share that experience. They may even get a different perspective by seeing the way sport affects the Special Olympians. Lastly, student athletes are great volunteers because they can help teach the sport to other people and act as coaches, and in Unified Sports Leagues they can play their sport side-by-side with the Special Olympians. I guess I didn't make these points as obvious as I could have, but those were the key ideas addressing importance of student athletes.
I definitely need to work on my conclusion, because, I agree, it seems "rushed and insincere." I don't think that is the message I want to portray to my audience. Again, Mrs. Scott, thank you for reading my essay and this feedback, you've been a great help. Seeing the response in letter form, defintely leaves the changes up to me, and is similar to the comparison of the flexibility of the essay and the more rigid research proposal.
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A website is a piece of electronic media that can contain images, videos, text, and animations. They are usually accessed through the internet and are written in a language called HTML (hypertext markup language). There are several types of websites out there: personal, business, government, and non-profit organizations. Besides being a website, there are certain characteristics that my website will have that may be similar to others. My website is designed to inform students at Virginia Tech to get involved in the Special Olympics community, especially the student athletes. This will be accomplished through text and images explaining the goals and programs that the organization has. Also, since a newsletter is sent out to everyone who signs up on the website, information is passed to the audience by that means. I want my website to be organized into the following categories, or webpages: Home, History, Calendar, Gallery, Contact, and Participate. Many websites use separate webpages in order to help the users find the information they need, by going to the category that the information they may be looking for lies under. I think that a great example of a website that I can get ideas from is the Relay for life website.
There are so many types of websites, so the genre is very flexible and they are easily created by many different people. They make websites in order to address a large audience and some find that websites are easy to maintain, edit, and update. There is so much freedom when it comes to layout, content, and different levels of control (there are sites that help you make sites, or people make websites from the ground up)
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The purpose of my initiating action project would be to get Virginia Tech athletes to get involved with the Special Olympics programs in the Blacksburg area. Since, the audience that I'm addressing makes extensive use of the computer and the internet, I'm going to use them as the primary medium for my initiating action project.
Website
If I were to design a website it would have a place to sign-up for a newsletter and notifications about local events that student-athletes can get involved with. Also the website will have an up-to-date calendar that will show athletes the different opportunities that there are for them to get involved. Instead of a website, I could use a facebook group and invite as many athletes and anyone else that might be interested to join.
Fliers
Since this is a college campus, I must put up fliers and advertise the Special Olympics that way. If I had a website up the flier could just tell them to visit the website for more information. I think that the website will make it more convenient for people because they just need to memorize the URL instead of dates/times/addresses/etc.
EMail
After talking to Bradley in the 10:10 class, I got the idea of using emails to get people aware of the volunteer opportunities that are available. Virginia Tech has a great LISTSERV system would be a great way to spread the word about the Special Olympics. In the email I would include a pitch, a small list of upcoming events, and a link to the website that they can go to for more information.
I'm not that great at putting a website together but I am pretty good with a program called Photoshop. So, I can probably mock up a design for a website, but not actually get it online and functioning. The website will be Virginia Tech oriented so it will be themed in that way, also the main components of the website include: a calendar, event-signup, newsletter sign-up, and contacts section. For the fliers I will use some of the same logos that I'm using for the website and will include the URL for the website on the flier so that people can visit the site when they can. I plan on putting the fliers in dining halls, residence halls, and in Squires. Also, someone told me about the little info cards that are distributed at dining centers, so that's another option. Included is a sketch of what the website might look like, I am going to take this sketch and recreate it in Photoshop (adding color, rearranging sections, etc.) I plan on using the New Media Center in Torgersen Hall to do the Photoshop work.
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Ubiquity
My first example is a computer program that was made by a company called Mozilla. The program was designed to enable users to integrate web-based services such as Google Maps, Twitter, GMail, facebook, digg, etc. The is able to call commands to the browser using natural language and is more intuitive than the state of the web browser currently. The project is presented by Aza Raskin in a slideshow/video/demonstration style and he uses important "buzz words", as I would like to call them, to convey his point. You'll see what I mean if you watch the video.
Ubiquity by Mozilla Labs
Gap Minder
The second example of an initiating action project is the project called Gap Minder that the Swedish statistician, Hans Rosling started. He analyzes data from the United Nations and was employed to study the hunger crisis in Africa. He gives a talk explaining the power of data and how world can be painted through data, statistics, and trends. He raises the point that the data that they accessed is not publicly available for viewing or analyzing, but he thinks that the data should be so that more and more people can get their hands on it and make models and predictions based on it. His goal is create public access databases and a program that can portray that data to be easily viewed and studied. That project is called Gap Minder.
TED Talk: Hans Rosling, The Best Stats You've Ever Seen
Gap Minder
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After reading Thomas' letter in response to my essay about the Special Olympics, I was reassured that the essay was going in the direction that I intended. I am actually glad that Thomas read my essay because he is the type of audience that I am trying to address, athletes at Virginia Tech. Some of the things that he liked were the relations to sports, and the testimony from a basketball player that struck a chord with him. Thomas understands what it feels like to help the less fortunate, so he knew how important organizations like the Special Olympics are for people who need the help.
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