Journal Entries

Journal Entry #1: Compare Jakob Nielsen's "The End of Web Design" to David Siegel's passage from his book Creating Killer Web Sites to appreciate how Web design is a kind of conversation between the cultures of engineering and design.

Where would you locate yourself in this conversation between the engineer and the designer? Where do your sympathies lie? What does the "other side" need to understand better? Where do you want to take this conversation?

Journal Entry 2: Believing, Doubting and Thinking (Pierre Levy)
For the Analytical Essay Project, you'll be using sources from the Trend book that you may agree or disagree with (or feel disengaged from).

1. In his book Writing Without Teachers, Peter Elbow considers the role of (dis)belief in the "intellectual enterprise," which I summarize on the page The Believing and Doubting Games.

2. Let's try this our using our reading for this evening, Pierre Levy's "Collective Intelligence" on page 253. Find an sentence/idea/passage from Levy that you find yourself resisting or doubting. Then find another sentence/idea/passage to which you feel yourself responding positively or believing. In the Webx discussion "Journal 2: Levy (3/12)," write a short paragraph about each item (2 short paragraphs altogether) using Elbow's analysis of the believing and doubting games:

• one paragraph in which you quote or paraphrase the passage, cite the page number, and then think through your own resistence to this idea from Levy. How does it help you "locate" yourself, to suggest where you're coming from or where you're going (culturally, politically, ideologically, etc.)? Why are you invested emotionally or intellectually in doubting this idea?
• one paragraph in which you quote or paraphrase (and cite the page number of) the passage you found yourself responding to or liking: again, how does this situate you among the issues. Where does the sense of emotional investment come from that you feel toward this idea?

3. Finally, read over some of the postings by your classmates and respond to one, comparing your response to his/hers and pointing out the connections or contrasts. Be engaged but not aggressive, positive but not blandly "nice."

Journal #3: The Weather Channel and the Body / Writing Dialectical Paragraphs
In preparation for completing the Analytical Essay I assignment, we'll work with some "Dialectical Paragraphs" from previous student work.

Then I'll ask you to visit The Weather Channel's Web site to begin putting together a similar dialectical encounter between specific features of that site and the ideas of "the body vs. virtuality," including Pierre Levy's ideas of "anthropological space" presented in his essay "Collective Intelligence" (Trend 253).

For instance, can you find specific details and elements of The Weather Channel site that "call up" the virtual visitor's identity:

• on "earth," represented by our name and placing us "within an ancestral line" (256)
• in "territorial space," expressed in an "address, which serves to represent us within the territory of residents and taxpayers" (256)
• in "commodity space," represented by our role or status in the economy, and typically indicated by our profession (position in the commodity space)" (257)

Send a message to the Webx discussion "The Weather Channel and The Body (Journal #3, 4/2)," recording your observation of some details from the site and commenting, dialectically, on how these details call up our bodily identities in one of Levy's "anthropological" spaces.

Journal Entry #4: Lists for Client Project