Writing on the Web: My 2020 Journey

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By Y. Hope Osborn

Sit back, read, view, listen, and enjoy my little journey through my first ever vidblog …

WOW 2020 began as a desire to break into video. I have experience with other forms of multimedia or multimodality, such as photographs (as seen in the vidblog), writing, document design, web sites, and so on. However, with all my experience as undergrad and graduate student, I was afraid to break into video, because speaking in front of people makes me nervous; and therefore dull and uninteresting.

Earlier in the class I noted this lack of video experience when we learned about vidblogs, so I shared with our professor Dr. Londie Martin both my desire to gain experience and my difficulty in doing video. This is my last class as a student before I graduate. I wanted to have it while still under the watchful eye of my professor and peers and to add this to my wheelhouse of expertise for clients. Dr. Martin offered the perfect solution–animoto.com.

I didn’t need to be in the video to create one. I had continuous problems with crashing, but no matter what, animoto saved my project right where I left off. The more and more I got into it the more and more I learned the program the more practice I had to gather, design, message, and apply usability. Not only that but I could combine photos, text, video, and audio within my vidblog to create a layering of media/modalities. The best part for me as a photographer was using my own photos and digital creations. I even knew from coding class where and how to plug in the html code from the vidblog on animoto into WordPress.

Why is all this multimedia/modality or use of all these various elements important?

It uses an often overlooked array of rhetoric as meaning-making symbols used for persuasion, such as audio, video, graphics, photos, design, and even colors that we learned of in our class.

It is historical, in cave drawings and hieroglyphics, and relevant, in emojis and chat or text speak.

Socioculturally we are in a internet boom, especially in this pandemic, of online communications through emails to family, texts to friends, social media posts on creating masks, protests through YouTube, education via applications, and so on. In this class we even used coding to create websites to house other elements of modality.

These are the hieroglyphics of our times–the rhetoric of communication through a multitude of means. We use and reuse and repurpose content in an ongoing, ever-growing cycle on the information highway until content develops into vidblogs, such as WOW 2020.

Works Cited in Sequential Order

Strung Out Violin String Quartet. Dig. Music excerpt.

Osborn, Y. Hope. Drive, 2020. Photo.

Osborn, Y. Hope. Color Choreography and Cosmos, 2020. Digital Manipulated Photos.

Krug, Steve. “Billboard Design 101: Designing for Scanning Not Reading.” Don’t Make Me Think Revisted: A Common Sense Approach to Web and Mobile Usability, New Riders: US, 2014, pp 29.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. “Flow, The Secret to Happiness.” Ted, Feb. 2004. https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare.

Haas, Angela M. “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice.” Studies in American Literature, vol. 19, no. 4, Winter 2007, pp. 77-100.

Applen, J.D. “The Internet and HTML.” Writing for the Web: Composing, Coding, and Constructing Sites, Routledge: New York, 2013, pp. 28-34.

Toptal. “Colorblind Web Page Filter.” https://www.toptal.com/designers/colorfilter/.

Information is Beautiful. “Colours in Cultures.” https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/.

Osborn, Y. Hope. Crag, 2020. Photo.

Osborn, Y. Hope. Rustic Red, Valor, View, and Hidden Valley, 2020. Photos.

Codecademy. “Yvonne ‘Hope’ Osborn.” https://www.codecademy.com/.

Writing on the Web 2020 Graduate Students. “Editorial Philosophy.” https://wowfall2020.londietmartin.com/?page_id=18.

Writing on the Web Fall 2020 Class. “Write Here, Write Now.” WordPress. https://wowfall2020.londietmartin.com/.

Osborn, Y. Hope. “Who Do I Want To Be: Online Identity and Me.” Essay.

Osborn, Y. Hope. Meteor, 2020. Mixed Media Manipulated Photo.

Published by yhosborn

5 Replies to “Writing on the Web: My 2020 Journey”

  1. I enjoyed your animoto video; it’s a good visual reflection of your WOW 2020 journey. Also, I like that you separate your blog paragraphs as blocks with a colored background…it gives it a diary-type feel, as if each block paragraph is a daily record of experience and/or knowledge learned.

  2. Overall Your blog structure is been executed well, I think your subject matter is really important to desired career fields in media and writing. I like the way you took what you learned outside of this class and displayed it in a way that the rest of the class could clearly understand.

  3. I like the color blocking with each paragraphs. It is nice to not just look at white backgrounds all the time. I like how you also added a video to your reflection for Writing on the Web. That is great that your semester went well.

  4. I’m glad to hear that you’ve done what you came for and learned something you struggled with before! I think you’ve done a good job.

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