Before, I talk about some of the similarities I found in my projects,
let me clarify a point that I don't think came across very clear in my
project 2. When criticizing the museums for spending so much time
apologizing, I was in no way trying to imply that these people don't
deserve apologies. I was deeply moved by their story and I feel ashamed
of what our government did to them (I'm speaking of "A More Perfect
Union"). My criticisms are directed toward the museum because it didn't
seem to me that the designers were sincere in their apologies, more that
they knew that it is currently politically correct to apologize, so they
would include exhibits that follow this trend.
Now, as far as my projects go, I did find an interesting trend,
besides the expected improvement in use of the World-Wide-Web (including
images and links). I noticed that I tend to focus heavily on details in
my descriptions (i.e. my
calculator, the work boots, and construction aspects in project
4). My arguments tend to be centered on ideas that can be backed up
with logical points and concrete facts rather than trying to play to
someone's emotions. Even in the highly emotional project 2 where I
described "A More Perfect Union", I tried to focus on the facts that I
found.
In addition, I've noticed that my tone for the first and last projects
were supportive where the tone for the second and third were critical.
Indeed, I am proud of my HP calculator and was very impressed by the
Greenbelt community. However, my interpretation of both the museum's
intentions and the strategies of the manufacturers of the boots makes me
angry. I feel that the public is being cheated in both instances. With
the museum, I think the designers are just like businessmen and
therefore if the trend
towards this mass apology stops, the museum will probably be inclined to
just remove those types of exhibits and replace them with the latest
trend. And, obviously, you can see how the public gets cheated by paying
more money for a lower quality boot.
I'd like to take this time to say that I am very glad to have gotten
the chance to take a class in the teaching theatre. I took this class as
part of my CORE and really came in here expecting to just get it over
with. However, the WWW really made this class exciting. I'm glad to
have learned how to write HTML and it is definatley something I'll use in
the future. I had never even browsed the Web before this semster.
Learning how made my Grad. school search a lot easier!
One problem I had with this class was the Listserve. I felt that requiring everyone to write once a week just resulted in a lot of repetitive listings. Many times, people didn't really have anything substantial to add, but since the requirement was there, they just said that they agreed with someone's message (probably the last message they had read). Because of this, it took a lot of time to sift through all the "junk" mail. I just feel that it didn't really add much to the class except the agravation of trying to get into the Wam lab that much more often. The work load in this class was already higher than many of my engineering classes because we were learning all of the AMST concepts along with the technical skills to use the Web. The Listserve was just too much on top, especially when the time spent on it was mostly sifting through "junk" mail.