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Declaring my topic for the Cultural Research Project  April 19th, 2014

My Cultural Research Project will be about:

Who is she? Valerie Thomas

Where is she from and how does her culture differ from yours? She was born in Maryland and is an African-American.

What is her technology? Her technology is the invention of a patented illusion transmitter.

When did she live? She was born in May 1943 and is almost 71 years old.

Write about the possibility of interviewing the woman if she is still living. I will try to interview her for this project.

Note which of the research sources listed above in step 3.3 (exploring topic ideas) were the most helpful for you to find your topic:

It was step 1, although I did enjoy the many videos and resources on a wide variety of amazing women in technology.


Week 2: Social Constructions  April 13th, 2014

My initial ideas about this topic for my blog and writing about it are:

1.  It took me a while to figure out how to even get to my blog spot and login, I am learning.

2.  I have now learned to add a new post.  I did also read about settings.  Now I need to create categories for future posts.

3.  This topic will hopefully make me more social and I’ll be able to blog about how I have constructed my blog site.

4.  Keep learning by repeating steps and following instructions.  I have an urge to dwell too much on it, but I think I have to learn more by doing than thinking about it, so that it becomes more familiar.  I think it is like taking baby steps where you just keep getting up after falling down.  The more you practice the more it makes sense and becomes second nature.

5.  On to my “assign it a category” learning, but first I think I need to publish so here goes, I’m hitting the publish button.

6.  Maybe a little soon on the publish button, but it’s nice to know I can update.  Have moved my categories up to under the “update” button, since I think it as close to the publish button as I can be now.  Have added the categories as assigned on the right side.  When I post weekly, the posts will go into one of these categories.  Right now I have only Uncategorized blog posts.  Sidebars categories will appear when I assign my posts a category.  Hitting update, as now I remember the tips say to save and save often.  Then I’m going to home page to see what it looks like.  No more room on this post?  Not exactly, it just keeps scrolling, but for visual, I think I want to keep my posts within about 300 words.

7.  I like that edit button on the view post page.

8.  I redefined the uncategorized post category to say Set Up.  My week 1 blog is now categorized there.  I have to figure out how to get this week’s post to show up there as well.  This is my next task.  Success.  I went to my categories page and found the post, hit edit, unchecked the boxes except for the Set Up box.  This was all done pretty intuitively.  I think I’m beginning to like this blogging technology!  On to adding pages for future projects.

9.  Pages set up.  Time for a break, i.e. fix some food for future brain power to continue these assignments.  Publish at a later blog time, logging out for now.

10.  I chose my theme, Sea Shores, as it suits my style.  But I don’t think it met requirement.  It has two sidebars.  I love the ocean, but I need to find something else.  I settled on a different theme that has only one sidebar.  It is not as pretty, but more basic and should work.  Double checking now.

11. Some things are so obvious, but if you think too literally about the widgets, you might not figure it out. For example, you won’t find a widget labeled links. Professor Van Londen made that clear in her announcement, but until I realized that, I had added two widgets I didn’t need. Also, I thought the meta tab would have a login option. But alas, I think logout, is part of the same widget for login? I hope I’m right on these.

12. I added descriptions to the post categories to define them there.


Writing and Publishing a New Post  April 9th, 2014

A recap of my writing a new post so far, at least I’m in the right spot.

The email signature was not too tough, but then I have already had experience with Google mail at work, so just another way to practice for the school email account.

I do like listening to web pages with my computer’s text-to-speech function, but I am more of a visual learner, so haven’t used it again since figuring it out as part of our assignment.

Time to publish this!