Critique of Documentation.

Leave a reply

I went to Wikihow to get a step by step on how to make a saline solution, I chose method 2 of 2.  Step 1 is to mix one cup of water and ½ a teaspoon of salt into a pan; it does ask to make sure the salt is iodized.  Step 2 is to cover the pan for 15 minutes and to allow the solution to come to a boil, within those 15 minutes it is recommended that you to prepare a vessel (jar or a neti pot) to hold the solution once it is done.  One detail that would have been appreciated for step 2 is how high I do set the temperature of the stove because too low and it might take longer than 15 minutes to bring the water to a boil.  In the final step your saline solution is ready for use; I plan to use it for a sore throat so I added lemon juice to the solution.  This walk-through does capture the process, the only critique I have is that the directions should be written in a more detailed manner.

Review of today, and reading/blogging for Wednesday, April 29

Leave a reply

Today we discussed styles and standards for documentation & citation. You created your own citation styles by identifying the most important parts of a citation. Several elements were common to most: author, title, date, and source. On Wednesday we’ll return to process documentation. Please read Badke Ch. 9 and browse Purdue OWL’s APA and MLA Style sections. Write one process documentation blog post in response to this prompt:

 Irene Edge describes process documentation as “a thorough conveyance of thoughts and processes.” Select one example of process documentation in any format, read it, and write one 100-word blog post in which you describe, summarize and critique it. Does it document thoroughly and completely the process that it claims to document? If you choose a video, please embed the video into your blog post so that we can all view it easily.

Be prepared to discuss your example in class. Instructions for embedding a video into a blog post on the OpenLab are here. You may find it helpful to review the Edge and Robinson articles to guide your selection of a good quality example of process documentation. Questions about this final blogging assignment? Get in touch.

On Wednesday I’ll distribute final research paper guidelines.

~Prof. Leonard

Google, reading response.

Leave a reply

According to James Grimmelmann, “Whoever controls search engines has enormous influence on us all.” As I started reading The Google Dilemma, that sentence immediately reminded me of earlier in the class when Gatekeeping was discussed.  Throughout the semester we tried different search engines, yet they all seemed to keep track of what we searched.  The Talentless Hack section of the article goes into detail about this.  It also mentions Google’s system, which is called PageRank that goes around the web counting links where the pages with the most links will be displayed higher in its results.  This was accidentally discovered by a college student named Adam Mathes.  He then wrote a blog discovering a technique he called Googlebombing, which I found very interesting.

Hauptman, reading response.

Leave a reply

According to Bugeja and Dimitrova, “It would take five years for half of the online citations in journals to decay.”  Prior to reading these articles I was unaware of this, and some other useful tips that the authors shared.  What I also thought was interesting was the article saying, “Different online domains may be more stable than others.” So depending on whether a website ends in .org, .net, .edu, or .gov, the authors say some were more stable for online citations than others were.  I thought that this would be useful to know, especially since there are papers that require this and the semester is coming to a close.

Summary of today, and assignment for Monday, April 27

Leave a reply

Today we discussed practical applications of documentation, including process documentation.  We quickly reviewed the Edge and Robinson articles, and we’ll return to them next week for the process documentation blogging assignment (details next week)

The draft of your research paper is due on Monday, April 27, emailed to me as a draft by the beginning of class. I’ll distribute guidelines for the final paper on Monday and post them to the OpenLab.

Good luck, everyone!

~Prof. Leonard

comment

Leave a reply

I agree with you in what you said; moreover, google has tools of utmost importance in searching which are fast and easy to edit.
Generally, dealing with google is straightforward from the first time since no programming or database skills needed, no software installation required, and make search results available from the most popular to least popular.
Google search engine is so good in “ordering” the most relevant sites at the top of the results list by rating sites based on how many other sites link to it with the capability to Integrate with Google apps.
Once again, I agree with your statement that, “Google has a lot of tools that people probably don’t even know about”.

Summary of today, and reading/blogging for Wednesday, April 22

Leave a reply

Today we discussed documentation and citation from the book excerpts by Hauptman and by  Bugeja and Dimitrova, and also reviewed the research paper writing process. We watched a video on how to use the Notebook feature of EasyBib. More EasyBib tutorials are available here.

On Wednesday we’ll continue our documentation discussion, moving into the practical applications of documentation. Please read the following 2 articles:
Edge, “Write it Down!”
Robinson, “Documentation Dilemmas”
Your blogging assignment is to comment on one or 2 of your classmates’ blog posts totaling at least 100 words. The research paper draft is due by 10 a.m. on Monday, April 27 and the research paper final is due by 10 a.m. on Monday, May 11.

~Prof. Leonard

documentation and sources

Leave a reply

Both articles are very interesting and informative. ‘Vanishing Act’ describe the problem with lifetime of sources for magazines and ‘Documentation’ explain the importance of source citing and commenting in a way of better understanding and presentation for readers and authors. The fact that internet source live for so short period of time force me to be grateful that Wayback Machine is already exist. From the other side, historical explanation of collaboration experience not helping to fight with plagiarism, as far , as I understand  Hauptman, the auditorium always should be smarter and more erudition then the author, otherwise they will be mocked.

 

Disappearing internet content

1 Reply

This Article appears to cover how the internet isn’t 100% reliable when it comes to citations. This is of no surprise to me on an honest level as its man-made and bound to have some type of flaw to its work. One example is with sites like the Wayback machine. It might have a decent way of getting the images of how sites appeared at one point but it still has limits as it lacks the amount of servers to get every single website on the internet. I personally do not see this as ever possible however as the internet is an environment that is constantly expanding to no end. This just goes to show that nothing is limitless in our world.

Footnotes Vanishing:William Maldonado

Leave a reply

What I got out of reading this is that to be careful how to save online citations although online tools like the wayback machine offer a way to securely save your citations they can’t always save the what all websites in the world wide web looked like at a certain time. The reason being that the wayback machine mostly saves what high profile websites looked like also they need to get more servers if they do wanna cover every single website. The only secure alternative I think would be approved by more people as an online citation is if we take screen shots of resource and add it as an extension of our citation just in case.