Looking at and through blog

First of all, I noticed in the reading something that had been mentioned in my reading for fine arts this week, that digital art doesn't have an original copy like other art forms such as sculpture and painting because while it has an original, the original can be perfectly copied which is pretty unique to digital art. I thought this was really interesting and was an aspect of digital art that I hadn't considered before these readings.

I'm not sure I really understand the concept of "at" and "through" that well, but I'll give it a try. For my phone, looking at it I have a touch screen and a full keyboard and windows mobile and all these things like a notes program where I can write words on it and then my phone will convert it to text for me through handwriting recognition software. However, this stuff is what it has, not really what it does or the experience I have when I use it. When I use my phone it can make me happy or sad or angry, especially if it breaks or if I don’t get service. My phone allows me to communicate with people through words, voice, picture and video. My phone may not be very big, but if you looked at a map at all it could do, it would be huge. My phone is also somewhat a reflection of me-I choose what displays on the front, the color scheme, the pictures in the background and so many other parts of it. A big part of my phone and most other electronic devices now is that they can be customized. If someone else picks up my phone, they will be able to tell a lot of things about me just by what’s displayed and saved in my phone.

'In regards to these two articles, how do you think the university views multimedia authoring?'

I think WSU is a little confused about multimedia authoring (as are most people, including me!). Both articles touch on how difficult it is to interpret and categorize most kinds of media, especially when different types become combined. The Kress article especially stresses how media showing pictures and text has not been organized into genres, and without that, people remain confused about how to look at and interpret multimodal works. WSU is trying to use multimedia, but I feel like they’re at the point where they’re focusing on the “at” and not yet the “through.” For example, they have all this nice equipment in a lot of the buildings and projectors in every room and tons of computer labs which looks nice from an outside point of view, but once you actually are going to WSU and have to use these things, you realize they are not as up to date as you think they would be. MyWSU and eLearning are both really slow and hard to use, and when I lived in the dorms there was a program called Cisco Clean Access we had to use to log on to the internet that did not work very well with Windows XP. WSU is trying to incorporate multimedia, especially in the English department where every English class I’ve taken has had a visual assignment of some sort, but I don’t think they really know where they’re going with it yet. I think WSU views multimedia authoring as an important, essential thing, they just haven’t figured out exactly how to teach and incorporate it into the university. I think WSU is about where the articles suggest most people are at as far as viewing multimedia authoring.