On Final Reflections

Wow. It has been quite a long journey it since I began writing for this blog!

The process of creating this weblog had been adventurous and enlightening. This is the first time I am writing a blog therefore I can say I have acquired some skills in designing for the online media. What I have learn is not limited only to designing but also to applications. I learn how to apply design theories in certain issues and learn a bout a lot of issues faced by web designers.

What did I learn?

In the beginning, I had no idea what a blog was, how to maintain it and was so clueless about the functions in the blog but eventually with the guidance of Miss Jenny Heng and my coursemates, I managed to familiarize myself with intertextuality of weblogging besides incorporating good writing skills and applying publishing and design theories into my blog.

Along the process of blogging, I learned that as sensible web-users, moral and ethics should always be applied to my work. Web-users should always be considerate of others feelings and personal space(Patterson & Wilkinson 2005)Ethics is one code of conduct all internet sites, bloggers and even publishers for print media must follow. In simple words, everyone must be ethical. For instance, content in a blog should always be neutral and not biased or racist towards anyone. This is proven by Walsh (2006) when she says "the way we interpret new text, whether words or images, will then produce new interpretations, new responses and new meanings".

Thus, different people will interpret a content differently or have different viewpoints of an issue or topic.As users of the web, we need to consider the implications of what we write or post online to the general society before we publish something online as for exmaple if the content is too sedicious or racist or biased towards certain people, it might offend them. Therefore, document designers should be considerate of others feelings.

According to Leeuwen (2006), images alone are too polysemous to stand alone as an image may mean a thousand meanings. (Walsh, 2006).Schriver(1997) on the other hand states that text and images complement each other in a document where both coexist together to convey a message to the audience and to enhance the clarity and understanding of a message the audience. Therefore, besides words, I included images into my blog posts as well, with captions (if necessary) and the source under the image to explain the menaing of the picture and also the source to avoid any copyright issues. Walsh (2006, p. 30-31) stated that multimodality of a document helps strengthen the message intended to be conveyed across to the audience. Consequesntly, there are multimodal modes in my blog. For instance, there is the usage of hyperlinks connecting my blog to other relevant links.

Credibility and accuracy of information in a useful website as stressed by Lannon (2006, p. 468), is an essential element thus, all acedemic citations are properly referenced.

Conclusion

Blogging has expanded to be one of the largest phenomenon in today's modern society (Tremayne 2007, p. 3), therefore, I do believe that blogging is a skill that everyone must equip themselves with. But,they must do it the right way. This blog has not only been an enlightening educational opportunity, it has also opened my eyes to a whole new world. The world of blogging. I am now one of the many people who blog and am able to fully appreciate blogs. It will definitely be something I spend more time and effort in from now on.

References

Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T 2006, Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design, Routledge, London.

Lannon, JM 2006, 'Technical Communication', 10th Edition, Pearson Education, USA

Patterson, P & Wilkins L 2005, 'Media Ethics: Issues and Cases', McGraw-Hill Higher Education, New York

Schriver, KA 1997, 'Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text For Readers', Wiley Computer Publisher, New York

Walsh, M 2006, 'Textual Shifts: Examining The Reading Process With Print, Visual and Multimodal Text', Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, p. 24-37