Digital Literacy Narrative Evaluations

Scannell's narrative about her writing roots mimicked a documentary style: cycling through interviews, original videos, and panning across images that relate to the narration. It got a bit long and over-detailed, to the point that I began wondering when it would end.

Eww. Didn't like Andfull's video. She stumbled through her narration which could have used some spicing up (I stopped counting the number of times she said she "luuuhved ____ book" after 6), and the images she chose were low quality. Even though her sequence and concept were pretty good, these features distracted me enough to reject her video; to me, it just conveyed a lack of editing or refining, which is important when telling a story (making sure the medium doesn't distract from the message).

The author of this video chose a unique style to tell a story, giving "Words, Magic" by Truaman a much different feel than the others; the transparency of its recording and prompt, as well as the impression that the interview is completely impromptu, generate a sense of genuineness. The sounds of hubbub in the background also add to this effect.

Peyton's narrative used fun music that established a fun pace with his videos and text, and he used a variety of views to convey his story. The blurriness in his cell phone shots definitely took away from the overall quality of the video, but it was cute, concise, and exaggerated enough to keep a smirk on my face through the whole clip.

Though Eric Wooten used the smallest variety of media, he had the most effective narrative (IMO). His captions were short, witty, and displayed with enough time on each picture to absorb both the words and the image.  The narrative had a clear intro, climax, and resolution, and his pictures were comical and endearing. However, I wish he would have done something more creative with his captions.

So what should we look at when evaluating literacy narratives?
I believe these things are pretty important:

• Quality of the story -- diction, plot, narration/text, readability
• Use of video/pictures -- image quality, composition, how it fits with the rest of the video
• Text -- are we given enough time to process the words as well as the images they accompany? Color, placement
• Music, special effects (ie: transitions) -- do they distract from the message?
• Editing!

Our Websites Are Done!!

Having struggled all the way through this project myself and with Professor Arola canceling class in the spirit of our class's exhaustion, it comes from a place of utmost sincerity when I say

THANK GOD THIS PROJECT IS DONE (for now)

...and congratulations to my classmates for designing some pretty impressive sites. 
My favorite web text is probably Cassie's or Tai's. Cassie's is very clean and navigation is a breeze; Tai has great style with his graphics and links.

I furthered my knowledge of what makes an effective text during my research before and experimentation during this project, as well as through the texts that some of my classmates put forth.

Kristen Parton uses her web space to analyze the effectiveness of different video streaming sites. While her analysis is critical, concise, and specific, I found myself in want of a more user-friendly menu system -- one placed at the top of the page instead of the bottom, perhaps, since it took me while to find it -- and some proofreading errors distracted me from her message. I learned what made each specific site effective or not, but without a page of her own concluding/summarizing thoughts or analysis within each page explaining the relation between each site I had to interpret on my own. Her main stressor was the importance of layout and color in directing the viewer's eye and attention.

Ariel Popp's website analyzes web comics, specifically those based on real life. Her slideshow of (awesome!!) hand-made comics progress in a story-book fashion, with an intro and a conclusion and details in the middle that hit all the major points. Her visually appealing format makes it a pleasure to learn that the effectiveness of a based-on-real-life comic has to do with relatability; in other words, an comic is funny if the reader doesn't need a lot of context to understand the humor. In addition, web sites about based-on-real-life comics have to follow a format that allows the viewer to navigate easily and without too much distracting content on the sides (ie. ads).

AJ Robertson wrote his site to analyze ... well, I think it's to analyze websites about various video games... wiki's, I presume. Without an introduction or a conclusion, the site is a collection of pages that individually analyze one site at a time in a very orderly format. His parallel format throughout helps me link ideas together, and he addresses the established genre convention that each site does or does not follow. That being said, I understand what wikis are, but I am still not really sure why the texts are ultimately more or less effective after reading through his site.