A great innovation

Although I have yet to see one in person, the Samsung K5 is a great innovation in the world of digital media players. The concept of being able to play music through mini speakers is nothing new, but Samsung has combined this feature into the digital media player itself, rather than users having to rely on external speakers that the digital player connects to via the headphone jack. I tink that this innovation will spark similar features from the leading companies in the digital entertainment world.

Photo Day

Once a year, members of every athletic team at Stanford get to participate in their own Sports Illustrated cover shoot. Photo day is always fun for everyone, partly because the picture taken go on the website, poster, and media guide, and also partly because it is fun to show off for the camera. I personally like photo day because I like seeing myself in action on the tennis court, I think most people do. Here are some of my favorites:

We also get to take team photos, which is also fun. One becomes the standard image for our team, where professionalism is stressed. However, we also get to take a "Jimmy V's" photo, which is meant to be silly. Every Stanford team gets to do this, and the photos go up in the popular Jimmy V's Sports Cafe for everyone to see. Lots of thought goes into this photo, and how each person is going to pose. Personally, I stuck with the same pose this year that I did last year.

I am really looking forward to this season, I think our team is very capable of accomplishing the goals we have set for ourselves. It is going to take grit, determination, passion, and focus, and there will be obstacles for us along the way, but in the end it is a journey that is well worth all of the sacrifices. My teammates are some of my best friends, and I can't wait to go to battle with them when we get back to school.

Possible iPods

Final Reflection

--Coming into eRhetoric, I would have stated that I was a very technology aware individual—my major area of interest is consumer electronics. However, I quickly realized that I knew very little about what defines eRhetoric. It was kind of fun to go back and look at my first blog response: “Monday night, just finished first day of sophomore year. I have been up since 6am, since we had morning running. This is my first official assignment, creating a blog, which is kind of fun. To think that this summer I didn't even know what a blog was!” This is not the only example; until about a third of the way through the quarter I did not understand the principle behind a “wiki,” and did not know that Wikipedia was an editable database of information. It was not until we watched the video of the Wikipedia article transformation that I really understood the principle behind the wiki. I quickly found out that my knowledge of new written technology was much more limited than I initially thought.

--However, this has all changed throughout the course of PWR II, as I now have a greater understanding and appreciation for everything that eRhetoric encompasses. As such, this knowledge helped me grow as a writer, because I became more aware of different writing styles and tones for different situations. I was able to see situations where I felt the author did a poor job of this, such as in the Cripps article. I felt that the format of the web page did not match the academic tone that Cripps was employing in his writing. All of the elements have to work together to make a successful piece of writing; if one detracts from the other, it detracts from the whole article.

--In particular, I very much enjoyed our study of Power Point presentations. Ian Parker’s article “Absolute Power Point” was a great read. I did not use Power Point extensively in high school, but I used it enough to be proficient, so I could relate to the material that Parker was referring to. I think it is very important to know how to give an effective presentation, especially because I can foresee myself giving a lot of these types of presentations in the future. Through watching many of my classmates’ presentations, I became very skilled at picking up the rhetorical appeals of logos, pathos, ethos, and kairos. This was something we didn’t really cover in-depth in my PWR I class, so I had a lot to learn. From the presentations I was able to see instances where students were quite successful at this, such as when Nate gave his proposal presentation with no technology and a very informal tone because he was talking about the ways that things like instant messaging were changing modern English. We looked at other successful versus unsuccessful speeches when we examined the contrast between Steve Jobs’ speeches at the Stanford Commencement and the MacWorld convention. These videos showed me the power of ethos, because Jobs had a much different ethos at the Stanford Commencement, where he seemed intimidated and out of place, as opposed to at the Macworld convention, where he was very comfortable and casual talking about Apple’s latest and greatest products.

--I can confidently state that I met all three of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the quarter. Not only did I learn how to keep a blog and improve my knowledge of internet writing, but more importantly I became comfortable working in groups. Looking back, I can now see that the first two of these three goals were very basic—things that would be met just by taking the course. To revise these goals for my future work in writing and presentations, I would add: 1) I would like to become more comfortable giving a Power Point style presentation without having to rely on my speech notes (I would like to be able to have a general idea of what I am going to say and then be able to adapt from there) and 2) I would like to improve my concrete language in my academic papers. These are the two areas I discovered in eRhetoric that I could use the most work on, and I think improving in these areas will benefit me greatly in the business world. Overall my experience in eRhetoric was very worthwhile and enriching, and I am very glad that I was able to take this course.

Presentation response

So far I have thoroughly enjoyed the academic presentations. I have seen great improvement since the proposal presentations in all areas--confidence, material, eye contact, body language, enthusiasm, etc. It has been fun to see how projects have evolved from where students first thought their research would go. I also have enjoyed watching these because they offer a glimpse into the passions of the people presenting--I feel that everyone has chosen a topic that they are interested in, so through the presentations I have been able to learn a little about each. I enjoyed BJs presentation, because we are doing the same topic, so it was fun to see the differences between the two. He went about things in an entirely different way, and had interesting ways to look at the issue of file sharing. I am looking forward to the final round of presentations tomorrow; I think there are some very strong and interesting topics to still be presented.

My friend Sandra...

So I have been promising my friend Sandra that I would write about her in my blog ALL quarter--ever since she broke my heart and transferred out of eRhetoric. Now that the quarter is drawing near to a close, I figured it would be a good time. Plus, I saw her tonight at Pi Phi and she threatened to not be friends with me anymore if I didn't write about her!!! So, I just wanted to take a brief moment and talk about how AWESOME she is, she basically rocks my world. She is smart and funny and nice and beautiful, and I won't even hold it against her that she left the best PWR II in the world. :-) So, Sandra, I hope that we can still be friends...haha.

Wiki article response

I completely agree with both articles regarding the validity of Wikipedia as a source for academic information. I did not hear about Wikipedia until I got to Stanford in the fall of last year, and did not really understand what it was until the fall of this year. Until this quarter, I did not know that it was an "encyclopedia" that could be edited by whomever. This fact alone made me skeptical. However, I have fallen into the "trap" of using Wikipedia as a reliable academic source. On more recent topics, there seems to be little published informaiton, simply because publishing materials is a long and arduous process. So, it is tempting to use the information in Wilipedia as fact, since there is an article concerning just about every topic out there, as well as relevant links. I was tempted to use it as a main source for my project right now, but was warned otherwise by Christine. I have, however, found it useful to utilize the links to other articles, as these can be taken more reliably as "fact." I was astonished to learn about the character defamation in the second article, that kind of thing makes me even more skeptical about the whole process. Not that this information couldn't have been put on the internet already, but the fact that it is on Wikipedia makes the "intent" of the article to be fact based. I enjoyed reading the articles, and was even inspired enough to try my own hand at article editing (although just a simple grammatical error).

Cripps article response

The main element of the Cripps article that I noticed was the language--the diction of the Theory section was very academic, which makes sense given the purpose of the writing. However, it was odd to me to see this type of academic writing in the hypertext context. Meaning: most hypertext writing is more informal, and the diction is much less sophisticated. If there is an academic piece if literature online, it is usually its own page, and is most likely a new window of black text on a white background. This piece, however, is black text with the blue background, and various hyperlinks at the top of the page. There is an artistic design outside of the writing itself, which is uncommon for academic pieces if writing. The writing was a little less formal in the sense that Cripps used parantheses quite often. This is a practice that would be frowned upon in a strictly academic setting; however, since it is on a website, which has a more casual feel, it is ok for the extensive use of parantheses.