I have learned a lot from taking this class. Some concepts that really resonated with me and helped me succeed with my final digital resource project was accessibility, design, and circulation. Circulation is present in my project through forums. This is a way that readers of my website can have a platform available to debate to topics of interest. The way design is implemented throughout this final project is through the home page background and the key moments’ use of large font size. The home page background a picture of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James insists that the topic is on the NBA greats before readers even have the chance to review the website at hand. The key moments of the players’ career is in a large font size because it emphasizes the importance those key moments had on their career and their case for the greatest basketball player of all time.

Before this assignment, when I thought about remixes I only thought about it in a musically sense. Artists today are constantly taking songs from other current artists or artists from years past and putting their own twist on it. After reading Dustin Edwards’s article, “Framing Remix Rhetorically” I can know identify remix as a rhetorical tool. People can make their own remixes and it’s not only in music, but with writing as well.

My podcast assignment will represent a viral meme, which is a prime example of a remix.

“Similarly, remix has come to represent an expansive range of meaning in computers and writing scholarship.”

-Dustin Edwards

This quote describes how perfectly the word “remix” is portrayed. Its broad in its meaning and could be mean many things.

In class, we have talked much about usability and accessibiity when addressing certain digitial texts. “The Center of Universal Design”, given to us by the NC State, basically explains to readers what universal design is and what principles derive from the meaning. Universal Design is described as the following, “The design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design“. Also Usuability.gov gives detailed guidelines when it comes to this kind of design and accessability. As a group we are now required to complete an analysis of the usability and accessibility of USAJOBS using what we have learned from class lectures, discussions and digital text. USA Jobs is an excellent website to analyze because it is easily accessible, but also has some negatives, which allows us to make ideal recommendations.

“Memes are always out of context, a snapshot of a moment in time designed to be remixed and reappropriated and mutated by participants in internet culture around the globe. That gets messy when people start putting the meme back into context, by, say, reenacting it in the same location.”

– Emma Grey Ellis

Emma Grey Ellis’ article “Joker Stairs’ and the Problem With Meme Tourism”, confronts the issue of instagrammers/tourists coming to places only to take pictures of the location of a famous movie scene, rather than care about the actual town as a whole. Memes often go viral and are digitally spread across multiple platforms. Circulation is crucial when it comes to this issue of the memes. Circulation is most widely defined as a way to theorize how texts and discourses move through time and space. Any kind of media or platform can be circulated. I agree with the Bronx natives in the article. I wouldn’t want my city to be ridiculed or mocked because of a movie scene.

“Thus we see that for Swales, the concept of “discourse commu- nity” is useful to explain how a social group employs discourse to coordinate complex activities, to work together on very large, long-term projects.”

-Patricia Bizzel

Bizzel backs up this statement with Swales’ six criteria that makes a discourse community. The first 3 mentions that they must share a common goal within the community, there must me a forum involved and the group must work towards the common goal with providing information and feedback. The last 3 mentions that the group must develop a shared genre of some sort, shared specialized terminology, and there must be experts in the group to properly help novices of the group accomplish the common goal of the discourse community. I agree that these 6 things make a group specialized as a discourse community.

Through describing the rhetorical functions of interface design—particularly MySpace and Facebook—this paper argues that, in a Web 2.0 world, composition teachers need to engage, along with our students, the work of design.

– Kristin Arola

The quote above is from Kristin L. Arola’s “The Design of Web 2.0: The Rise of the Template, The Fall of Design”. From readings such as this and from class discussions, I completely agree that Design is extremely important and crucial to the success of digital writing. Teachers should advise to students to pay more attention to design because most of the time it’s not just about what is said or seen in a picture. It’s more about the attention to detail using rhetorical functions to properly display it to the audience in the way it’s supposed to be.

For my first blog I’d like readers to get a basic understanding of my background both as a person and as a writer. I’m from Laplata, MD. I’m a senior here at Salisbury University and will be graduating in may. My major is Interdisciplinary studies with a minor in Information Systems. I was also a student-athlete at Salisbury, playing lacrosse. I have had some experiences in the past with multimodal or digital writing. I have listened to podcasts and took part of some sort of writing on blogs and websites. This semester I would like to learn more about all types of digital writing and become a better writer.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.