Reviewing student portfolios today I am finding a number of truly excellent posts! For instance: annadora’s posterous
This blog includes a number of VERY thoughtful posts! I like especially how the writer’s notes on the Career Day reflects her taking the opportunity of time off from class to attend this special presentation, her identifying three websites of some interest (and including the links in the post!), and the informal, conversational style, and especially her report on a discovery: “I was especially interested in the Trend hypecycle ranking that they introduced to us, since I have never heard of such a ranking before …”
Her Ducks, Fish & Diagrams post includes a very personal account confirming her reflections on what she is learning in her studies of the Data Analysis text, including, testing her learning by discussing her work with her family: “After writing my description about the diagram on page 95 of our Data Analysis Book, I presented my diagram description to my family. While presenting I instantly realized that I was not going follow all of the bullet points I had written down in order. There were many questions that I got asked right away. So I had to change my description to make it more suitable for my audience (my family).”
These anecdotal accounts stand in a complementary relationship to the report on the assigned group topic of The Value Chain, her first post. This report is well-structured, including a definition at the start, a report on a relevant article (using report structures), the identification of an issue (quoting: “our major challenge is …”) as an issue, discussion of that issue, and than a personal reflection on what she learned.
There is a pattern here, a story that is being told, that gives this website coherence as it conveys to the reader a learning process, a workflow as we say, suggesting a commitment both to her own learning and her connecting this learning to conversations with family, friends, and those of us who would visit her website.
Plus, her writing (in English) is very good, and reading it one sees how she has taken the opportunity to craft her sentences carefully, choose images that support her text, experiment with headers and sub-headers to clarify her topic and assist the reader in navigation.
This blog also features a significant expansion of blogging style and identification of interest. Like many others, the author’s first post is a report on the assigned group topic and includes a definition of “e-business” and notes two relevant articles, but without going into them in any detail. In my view, a good, if unremarkable start.
One may read the expansion of style and interest in the third post, following a post featuring a mindmap diagramming her interests, also on the Career Day, where she reports not only on who was there, but reports on the atmosphere and the one thing she found completely new and interesting.
She also found a very nice image to head that post, where four cartoon characters are holding hands in a gesture of mutual support, and one finds the theme of support in her next brief post, including a cartoon and supportive note to me (“don’t worry laptops are sometimes thirsty, too”), and in the following post, illustrated above, where she highlights the topic of open data at top and her interpretation, “sharing”, at the bottom.
I simply love the symmetry of this highlighting, not least because it brings out the movement good paragraphs offer, of bringing the reader from point a to point b, but also because of this particular point, which I would summarize as: “from data to people”. The highlighting, then makes vivid her point, and the point itself represents a profound understanding of Tim Berners-Lee’s argument: she did not need to write page after page to tell us about it: she brought us to this deep meaning using the special, succinct, highly-graphic way that the blog format encourages.
The next two posts repeat such graphical cues and in two interesting ways.
First, her Cab Sense post, a section of which I have illustrated to the left, exhibits what I guess I’d call a block-like symmetry, this time featuring sub-heads that are colored and on separate lines and which easily bring the visitor’s eye from the question of “how does it work?” to “where can we use it?” In her Forestle post one finds a similar formatting-based telescoping leading to the “CO2-neutral” text … she’s got a good system, and she is adapting it to different kinds of emphases.
It also follows closely on what she undoubtedly learned from the Tim Berners-Lee video as it illustrates the sharing of open data in the manner of a mashup to create something socially useful. And like her comment on the video, she balances here interest in sharing with a “how it works” analysis. That is, there is a “logic of pairs” at work in these posts that is helping her decide how much to include and how to structure it, and that within this very limited space — these are posts of just a few lines — she has managed to make one definite point per post (and make good points at that).
Following in my reading immediately after annadora’s posts, I would hazard to suggest a possible next step, another level of complexity, based on her reading of annadora’s reflections: that at some point she might add a third, perhaps more subjective dimension.
Excellent Blog Posts!
Reviewing student portfolios today I am finding a number of truly excellent posts! For instance:
annadora’s posterous
This blog includes a number of VERY thoughtful posts! I like especially how the writer’s notes on the Career Day reflects her taking the opportunity of time off from class to attend this special presentation, her identifying three websites of some interest (and including the links in the post!), and the informal, conversational style, and especially her report on a discovery: “I was especially interested in the Trend hypecycle ranking that they introduced to us, since I have never heard of such a ranking before …”
These anecdotal accounts stand in a complementary relationship to the report on the assigned group topic of The Value Chain, her first post. This report is well-structured, including a definition at the start, a report on a relevant article (using report structures), the identification of an issue (quoting: “our major challenge is …”) as an issue, discussion of that issue, and than a personal reflection on what she learned.
There is a pattern here, a story that is being told, that gives this website coherence as it conveys to the reader a learning process, a workflow as we say, suggesting a commitment both to her own learning and her connecting this learning to conversations with family, friends, and those of us who would visit her website.
Plus, her writing (in English) is very good, and reading it one sees how she has taken the opportunity to craft her sentences carefully, choose images that support her text, experiment with headers and sub-headers to clarify her topic and assist the reader in navigation.
annita’s posterous
This blog also features a significant expansion of blogging style and identification of interest. Like many others, the author’s first post is a report on the assigned group topic and includes a definition of “e-business” and notes two relevant articles, but without going into them in any detail. In my view, a good, if unremarkable start.
One may read the expansion of style and interest in the third post, following a post featuring a mindmap diagramming her interests, also on the Career Day, where she reports not only on who was there, but reports on the atmosphere and the one thing she found completely new and interesting.
She also found a very nice image to head that post, where four cartoon characters are holding hands in a gesture of mutual support, and one finds the theme of support in her next brief post, including a cartoon and supportive note to me (“don’t worry laptops are sometimes thirsty, too”), and in the following post, illustrated above, where she highlights the topic of open data at top and her interpretation, “sharing”, at the bottom.
I simply love the symmetry of this highlighting, not least because it brings out the movement good paragraphs offer, of bringing the reader from point a to point b, but also because of this particular point, which I would summarize as: “from data to people”. The highlighting, then makes vivid her point, and the point itself represents a profound understanding of Tim Berners-Lee’s argument: she did not need to write page after page to tell us about it: she brought us to this deep meaning using the special, succinct, highly-graphic way that the blog format encourages.
First, her Cab Sense post, a section of which I have illustrated to the left, exhibits what I guess I’d call a block-like symmetry, this time featuring sub-heads that are colored and on separate lines and which easily bring the visitor’s eye from the question of “how does it work?” to “where can we use it?” In her Forestle post one finds a similar formatting-based telescoping leading to the “CO2-neutral” text … she’s got a good system, and she is adapting it to different kinds of emphases.
It also follows closely on what she undoubtedly learned from the Tim Berners-Lee video as it illustrates the sharing of open data in the manner of a mashup to create something socially useful. And like her comment on the video, she balances here interest in sharing with a “how it works” analysis. That is, there is a “logic of pairs” at work in these posts that is helping her decide how much to include and how to structure it, and that within this very limited space — these are posts of just a few lines — she has managed to make one definite point per post (and make good points at that).
Following in my reading immediately after annadora’s posts, I would hazard to suggest a possible next step, another level of complexity, based on her reading of annadora’s reflections: that at some point she might add a third, perhaps more subjective dimension.