Journal#4: Project Plan

Site Title: "What is the Electoral College?"

Developer:  Walter Shu

Focus: The Electoral College is a division of the federal government that decides every presidential election. The President and Vice President are not elected directly by the voters. Instead, they are elected by "electors" who are chosen by popular vote on a state-by-state basis (Wikipedia 2014). This means that our votes for the presidential candidates does not directly decide elections, instead our votes goes to the state electors, where they will decide who will get the state's electoral votes, based of the number of popular votes in each state. This project will focus on the functions and history of the Electoral College and the reasons why the electoral college exists in this country.

The Main Features
-Multiple chapters
-Interactive features, including videos and games
-Timeline of the electoral college
-In-depth descriptions about the electoral college
-Discussion groups
-Links to valuable resources

Content & Wireframe
Planned chapters of this project:
Chapter 1 - Introduction
Chapter 2 - How the electoral college works and how it decides presidential elections
Chapter 3 - The history of the electoral college 
Chapter 4 - The pros and cons of the electoral college
Chapter 5 - When a president wins the popular vote, but still loses the election
Chapter 6 - The future of the electoral college - should we keep it or eliminate it?
Chapter 7 - Conclusion

Target Audience
Late high school teens (11th and 12th graders) because most California districts offer American government courses in grades 11 and 12 and is one of the courses that is required for graduation and college admittance. It will also prepare them to learn how to vote in elections when they turn 18 years old (the national minimum voting age).

Design Considerations
The design goals of this project are to better understand how the process of elections work and the importance of choosing a leader of the United States through our democratic system. Most Americans do not have much understanding about the electoral process, including the electoral college and we should learn more about the subject, because of the importance to this nation.

Limiting Factors
The limiting factor is the complex nature of the subject. I will try to simplify the subject matter as much as possible, in order to make it easier to understand for its target audience, without leaving out the most important components of electoral college.

Journal Entry#3

Commercial Concerns on Social Websites (2010)

This article criticizes the intended purpose of social networks for educators, as being over-commercialized by putting advertisers above the interests of educators.

Thanks to advances of web 2.0 technology, social networks are supposed to bring students and teachers closer. Social networking allows teachers and students to communicate online when they are not in class and to provide each student with customized lessons and homework assignments. However, most social networking services, like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, and Google are more interested in pleasing advertisers than students because these sites earn a large amount of money from advertising. Most of those sites serve advertisements and in some cases customized advertisements, based on the visitor’s activities and preferences.

According to the article, if anyone visits a social networking site for any purpose, they will see many advertisements on the page they visit, meaning that they will see a lot of corporate logos, for the purposes of selling products. Some will find this as a distraction because the main purposes of social networking for educators are to learn and connect and that seeing too many advertisements can affect their experience. Some sites, like Facebook, will even customize the advertisements when you visit that site in order to improve the user experience and to increase revenue for advertisers. At the end of article, the author stated that there is a major conflict between interests of educators and advertisers when they visit social networking sites.

I agree with the author that social networking is over-commercialized and that most social networking sites are more concerned about revenue than interests of educators. While some may not care about the over-commercialization of social networking because they use these sites primarily to meet friends, but for educators, too much advertisements can defeat the intended purpose of creating new learning opportunities.

Link to Article Here

Questions

1.    Since 2010, when the article was first posted online, how much has social networking has changed?
Answer: Social networking has been increasing in popularity. By 2013, 73% of all Americans use social media. In addition, more and more students and teachers are using social media while in school. This means that commercial concerns on social websites has increased has more and more people join Facebook, Twitter, Google and etc.

2. What actions can social networking sites take to make more pleasing for educators?
Answer: Social networking sites can offer special, ad-free subscriptions for educators, either for free for current students and teachers or for an annual fee as one way to make social networks more pleasing to educators. Another option is to find social networking sites that are designed specifically for educators, such as Lynda and Edmodo.   

Assignment #2 - Digg Reader & Affinity Groups

The Digg reader is an RSS application that can search for millions of news, magazine, and online articles on demand, with continuously updated news feeds and easy to use search features. Some entries even include shorter versions of full page articles. There are also additional features for Facebook and Twitter users to share their stories with other friends. Using Digg was a new experience for me because I never used the application before and normally used regular search engines to find news articles.

My Digg stream is very broad because I have many different interests, including news, business, science, television, movies, and etc. The three topics that I pay the most attention and look up the most are: history, technology, and the internet. When I want to focus on a specific subject for my projects, like computers and smartphones, I can choose the sources that are specifically devoted on the particular subject or topic and read articles that are related to the selected topic. If I want research on many different subjects or topics, I can select all of the most popular stories right now on Digg.

I find that using the Digg reader to find news stories and articles on the internet easier and more efficient than with any internet search engine. Once I got the hang of it, it is easy to use and a lot of fun.

My affinity group that I selected is the Southern California Historical Society. The reason I chose this group is my interest in studying about the cultural history of the Los Angeles region and how the region was like in the past, whether it is 100 years back or during the time that I was born. I believe there are many stories of L.A.'s past that are left untold or forgotten and we should try to find those stores and preserve it for future generations.

Questions

1.    What are the unique features of the Digg reader?

Answer: The unique features of Digg reader include: the ability to choose your favorite topics, save the article of your choice, narrow results by popularity, topic, interest, and etc. and social media sharing, such as uploading to users on Facebook or Twitter.

2.    How does the Digg reader and other RSS applications work?

Answer: The Digg reader, like other RSS (Rich Site Summary) applications operate by searching many different websites to find updated information and then displays a summary of the updates at one place. This can include news, blog entries, web videos, and audio.