Within the first minute of the Scratch video, I had already stopped it so I could start blogging because I was so intrigued by the idea of being able to create your own video games or animated stories! I like to think of myself as somewhat Internet savvy but I’ve quickly learned I am not as advanced as I thought I was. I’m also not artistic or creative but by having samples and examples, I worked off of those to create an interesting picture! It amazed me how many possibilities there were, they were endless! Not only did I like Scratch for myself, I emailed the link to my family so my little brother could try it out! There’s not many things that are appropriate and interactive for all ages, but fortunately, this is one! Not only was it fun when I created my animation of a man falling into the white house and a cat chasing after him trying to save him, HAHA, but it would also be useful for a project that did not have specific guidelines instead of using PowerPoint all the time as we discussed in class. I got sidetracked by making up drawings and trying to design a game that I realized 30 minutes had passed without even noticing it! This will be the next app that I will spend majority of my time on!

Instead of picking a certain article/tool to blog about, this week I chose to blog about multiple ones briefly. I started off with wordle and although it caught my eye due to the colors and sizes, all in all, I didn’t find it very useful, more just for fun and interesting to look at. As we discussed in class, I think it would be more useful if you could put these words into a specific shape that represents meaning behind the words.

I then explored TIME magazine database and researched deeper into my topic of how society has changed body image, specifically in beauty pageants such as Miss America. An interesting article I found was talking about the Miss America winner of 1926, Norma Smallwood. I then googled images of her and as I suspected, she was a voluptuous and curvy.

In 2002, however, Miss America winner, Katie Harman, had a completely different body structure since at that point in time society pushes women to show their bones and it is bad to be anything bigger than a size 0 or have meat on their body.

On the contrary, I am not saying neither Norma Smallwood nor Katie Harman necessarily looks “better”. My focus is more on finding out the reasons behind why there was this change in what is considered a beautiful body image.

Although I believe PowerPoint is overrated to some extent, I think Edward Tufte is taking the his criticism to extreme. PowerPoints are extremely reliable in terms of learning information in school that will more than likely be given in a multiple choice context. This type of test does not require sentences and full sentences would do nothing besides take up space with a few filler words. It is easier, in a business setting and school setting, to keep one’s attention by continuously changing the information by switching slides rather than to stare at an essay format document for a long period of time with an immense amount of information. What Mr. Tufte thinks is “good”, I disagree with. Personally, I would not pay a bit of attention to that slide. It is bland and just has a lot of meaningless numbers. The slide he considers “bad” however, grabs my attention with the different colors and types of charts. It expresses the information in multiple ways leaving the audience to decide which way they can interpret and comprehend the information better.

With my opinion on PowerPoint stated above, this does not mean I do not believe essays, reports, and full sentences should never be used. Journalism, English, and other majors or careers that require full sentences and depth should not rely on PowerPoint since it is irrelevant to their job, as it obviously is to Tufte’s since he is a blogger and needs that depth and full sentences over bullet points. On the contrary, science and math majors don’t really use details and essays regularly. Most of their information comes from charts, tables, and information that cannot be distorted and interpreted in more than one way; Powerpoint is an extremely useful tool for these people to memorize information. In all, I agree with Tufte in his reasoning that PowerPoint is used as a substitute instead of supplementing information but in some fields, I believe that is the best learning technique.