Week 11 Accessibility

https://www.csps-efpc.gc.ca/tools/articles/roadmap-accessibility-eng.aspx

     Welcome in Everyone! Since reading on digital rhetoric from week 8, have you been consciously looking for the use of digital technology such as hyperlinks or videos that engage the audience while on different web sites; or have you used this technology within your own web page. This week we will be discussing Web Accessibility. Having an accessible website that is user friendly by people with disabilities means to have your design deliver inclusive experiences for everyone. This involves developing content that users with visual, physical, and cognitive limitations can interact and navigate. To ensure your website is in compliance of web accessibility, you should follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines were set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They provide a structure for creating websites greater accessible for people with disabilities.  

        WCAG has four principles that form the foundation of web accessibility. These four principles are Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust (POUR). Let's discuss these key principles in detail. Perceivable means the information must be introduced in a way that users can recognize. As a content creator you should provide text alternatives for non-text content, like using videos, icons, audio, and images. These alternatives offer a visual rather than text. Operable means the content should be functional. The user should be able to interact freely using different methods, like user interface should be accessible through keyboard and time friendly to read content. Understandable means the user should be able to comprehend the interface. This would include making text understandable and operate in predictable ways. So, avoid using jargon and complex terminology. Robust means having content strong enough to be interpreted by a variety of user agents, this includes assistive technologies. Examples of assistive technologies would be any software or equipment that maintains or improves the capabilities of the disability community. This could be voice recognition software or text-to-speech programs. Also, this means updating digital resources to ensure compatibility with different assistive technologies and ensures accessibility as technology evolves. 

    WCAG has three levels of compliance. All websites should strive to meet at least level A, which is the minimum of the accessibility guidelines. This is the foundational level of conformance. The creator should provide alternative text for images. Level AA is the most common and builds upon Level A. Level AA address common barriers such as, allowing text to be resized up to 200% without loss of function and allowing various modes to navigate the content.While Level AAA is the peak and most challenging level of conformance accessibility, it requires meeting Level A, AA, and AAA criteria. An example would be offering extended audio descriptions for videos and sign language interpretation for all pre-recorded audio. Level AAA is not needed for the entire website, just where it can be applied as some criteria can not meet all content. 

    Making digital content more accessible can make the experience better for everyone. "Finding ways to be better and contribute to a more accessible world is part of what I call "being a good citizen of the world" (Driscoll et al., 2022).  I hope this helps you create a more usability and web accessible website. I wish this course material had been introduced earlier in the semester, that way I could have been more aware. I have provided the link below to the WCAG checklist summarized by Yale University for your toolbox.

https://usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/articles/wcag2-checklist

Question of the week😊

Before reading this content, did you look for accessibility conformance when viewing a website?

Week 8 Digital Rhetoric

 

   https://digital-rhetoric.weebly.com/

    Welcome in everyone! I hope you all enjoyed the visual imagery of my favorite poem from Week 5, Still I Rise.  It was fun to create; it was like painting with words and aesthetically pleasing. That poem is sentimental to me; it encourages me in difficult times. This week we will be discussing digital rhetoric. Digital rhetoric is a multimedia dynamic, where you analyze, create, distribute text, images, videos, messages, and interact through digital technology. This rhetoric is applied to digital applications like social media and websites to inspire, build communities, persuade, and inform. Remember in week 5 we discussed how everything is an argument. While constructing during digital rhetoric you are persuading your audience. 

    So, among having a persuasive argument, you are using rhetorical strategies in production and analyzing digital text. These strategies would include embedded hyperlinks, images, and videos to engage the audience. "Visual rhetoric, visual strategies used for meaning and persuasion, is hardly new, but its importance has been amplified by the visual and interactive nature of native hypertext and multimedia writing" (Hock, 2003). I recently found a new website called Kidcourse https://kidcourses.com, to help children learn and create. One of the resources offered by this website was American Sign Lang (ASL), where they offer to teach children sign language and they used videos, colors, and shapes to engage children and accomplish this task. Second, another rhetoric used is identifying characteristic, affordances, and constraints of new media, with this you are creating an interactive environment to encourage participation. Also, when content is created it should be personalized for the audience according to demographics and past behavior. Constraints would be considered to avoid information overload and being aware of privacy concerns. You should also form digital identities; this would mean being actively showing self-presentation, passively collecting user information, and sharing personal information. This helps to persuade your audience to trust you and you get to know the needs of your audience. Lastly, building a social community involves creating a space for interaction with a group of people with a shared vision and to connect and engage with content. The key to this strategy is to create the right platform, encourage participation, be present and responsive, and create a safe environment. 

    Digital writing is the design of your content. It's about creating a space with a layout that attracts the audience to want to explore and engage. The content creator should have a vision to lay out the foundation by having a clear purpose. Be able to foster interactions with relatable content.  Creating new exciting digital rhetoric content will be an ongoing strategy to maintain and grow your audience. Adding color and graphics persuades your audience to interact and certain colors like red sparks the audience to interact, but red can also cause eye irritations. So, research before choosing colors for your layout. Your ultimate goal is to create a trusting, interesting, engaging, and interactive way to persuade the audience. Your visual imagery should encourage them to dive deeper into your content and to keep the audience returning for more content. For a further look into understanding visual rhetoric in digital writing, I have referenced the Hocks article on Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments. 

Hock, M. E. (2003). Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments. College Composition and Communication, 54(4), 629-656.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3594188

Question for this week😊

What visual imagery attracts your interest when browsing content? 

Week 5 Digital Authorship

 

                      https://ed.ted.com/blog/2017/01/17/rhetoric-101-the-art-of-persuasive-speech

Week 5 

Digital Authorship

    Welcome in everyone! I hope some of you moved your participation level from Lurker to Contributor or perhaps Creator, which we discussed in week 3 content. This week we will discuss Digital Authorship, which is what I'm doing by creating and controlling my digital writing journey content. If you have created, interacted, and collaborated in a digital space with an audience, guess what; you have the title of digital authorship as well. Let's cover more concepts from this week. A persuasive writing or speaking style to impress your audience is called rhetoric. To use rhetoric in your digital or traditional writings you should reflect Aristotle's Rhetorical Triangle, which consist of these three concepts: ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos, the writers spirit or beliefs should be portrayed to gain trust from the audience. Second, pathos is where the writer influences the audience by using language to evoke emotions from the audience. Third, logos is the cohesion of logic and factual connections to persuade the audience of a particular point. To create a well-rounded effective argument, these three elements should be used together. 

    Let me cover some examples of ethos, pathos, and logos. When an author gains the trust of their audience by sharing personal information, this would reflect ethos, such as I have two adult children and a granddaughter and I encourage them to write digitally as well. Also, I shared in week 1 that I am taking a digital writing class. I'm expressing my trust and credibility onto my audience. If I wanted to impact my audience with pathos, I would share personal stories or imagery of how several of my family members and friends have been diagnosed with cancer to build an emotional connection with my audience. Lastly, an example of logos would be to share data on a particular subject matter and be able to provide statistics by citing a study for audience confirmation. 

    So, what makes digital writing compelling; the audience is real and you can make connections with people of the same interest. I have communicated with people in Africa, which I thought was amazing. What I'm fascinated by is the immediate feedback. Being able to collaborate globally to brainstorm ideas encourages engagement. I totally agree with Professor John Ruszhiewicz and Andrea Lunsford "everything's an argument" (Steffen, 2025) and everything has a message are meant to persuade actions or feelings. Until I read this module I did not consider this to be true. The best example is what should I wear today, why did I choose this particular outfit. I wore a yellow shirt today, in hopes to put a smile on my students face and for them to feel joyful. I wanted to persuade their feelings. 

    We must remember that with digital writing, it leaves a digital footprint, whatever you post will always be there in the digital world. These post can be copied and can go viral without our control. Lastly, our information is on social media and anyone can search you. Quick story, I lost a debit card last year, someone found it and searched my name, found my phone number, and they called me trying to return the lost card. They asked for my address, which I didn't share. I cancelled the card. This weird event made me search myself and some of my personal information was listed and all my social network post. Please be aware of what you post, because it's permanent. We are all considered digital writers once we use an electronic device to post content, when we engage in a digital social environment, and this includes social networking. 

This week I have included visual poetry of my favorite poem Still I Rise,

 -by Maya Angelou

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise

https://canvas.odu.edu/courses/195854/pages/05-%7C-digital-authorship?module_item_id=8635631

Question of the week😊

Do you have a favorite poem or song that you would like to share?

Week 3 Participatory Culture

 

Virtual Community

https://www.localhousingsolutions.org/plan/conducting-virtual-community-engagement/

Week 3

Hi fellow digital writers,

    Welcome into week 3! Did you start your digital journey this week? I want to share my digital writing experience for week 3 with my fellow writers. This week we covered participation with virtual communities. Participatory culture covers how much you are engaged with the online author and readers. Also, creating content that helps the community. I admit before this class I have never created content, it has been exciting, and it allows me to explore something new. Creating content can be an outlet to express yourself, while sharing your knowledge to help someone else in the community. It's also a way to build social connections, become a mentor, and create a positive virtual environment. I learned that a virtual community can lend support, exchange ideas, and offer encouragement with groups of people with common interest. Also, we covered the difference between social networks and virtual communities. 

    Honestly, I haven't considered the difference before this week. Sure, I have social networks where I communicate with people I know and I like and share their content. Whereas with virtual communities you would actually create, coordinate, and collaborate as a group to share ideas, solve problems, and create content. I am apart of several virtual communities where we share the same interest. The one that I share the most with is a home decor group, we share decorating tips, pictures, and designs. It's nice to communicate with people of  the same interest. Cultivating a culture of participation means I/we have to participate, engage, and create content. I was definitely just receiving information without realizing that by not actively engaging and creating, I was doing myself and my community a disservice. Also, while creating content we must be mindful of the content we make public. We have to ensure it's proper for our audience, ethical, and culture diverse. Keep in mind that whatever you place online leaves a digital footprint, which is a digital account of what you have posted that does not go away. 

    What I thought was interesting is the percentages of engagement amongst the community. I think the four levels of community engagements are spot on about audience participation. So, I will breakdown the levels. Majority, 80% of the audience are Lurkers, I like to call them lookie-loo's, where they (me included) are just reading and clicking on content. Then you have the Opportunist, this group sits at 10-20% level where they may ask questions or offer feedback. At the Contributors level which is fairly lower at 3-10%, this part of the audience shows interest in the group by giving a large number of reviews and answering questions. The last level are Creators which accounts for a very low percentage of 0-3% (Steffen, 2025). This small percentage of a audience will create new content to establish an engaging community. "Full participation in contemporary culture requires not just consuming messages, but also creating and sharing them" (Rheingold, 2012).

    I was hesitant when I first read the assignment to create my own blog, now it's another tool to have in my toolbox. What does it take for people to move from Lurkers to Creators? I think people have to feel comfortable in a particular setting, have a passion, and be knowledgeable in a subject matter. Lastly, the class touched on having a public versus a private voice. A public voice is offering content through posting new ideas, leading, and offering tags (other sources for information) that is relevant to the group.  A private voice is established when the creator shares private information and takes on a personal tone with the audience. I want to thank everyone for joining in on my digital writings this week.  I'm learning a lot! For further information on participation with virtual communities please check out Howard Rheingold's book Netsmart: How to thrive online, chapter 3 pages 111-141.

Question of the week😊

What would you consider to be your level of participation a Lurker, Opportunist, Contributor, or Creator?

Rheingold, H. (2012) Netsmart: How to Thrive online. MIT Press

https://canvas.odu.edu/courses/195854/pages/03-%7C-overview?module_item_id=8635621

Steffen, V. T. (2025) Participatory Culture [Module 5] Canvas.

https://canvas.odu.edu/courses/195854/pages/03-%7C-participation-and-virtual-communities?module_item_id=8635623

Week 1 Social Media Literacy

  Attention                                                               Collaboration

                        

 https://giffiles.alphacoders.com/209/209562.gif           https://www.mikeebresnahan.com/work-1/casestudy-navigatedu

                                                              

Hi Everyone,

    Welcome into my journey! I wanted to share what I learned in Week 1 of my digital writing class. Social media is a huge part of our everyday lives, so it's important to know how to navigate digital media. "Social media-networked digital media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and wikis- enable people to socialize, organize, learn, play, and engage in commerce" (Rheingold, 2010). I learned of 5 different social media literacies, attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, and critical consumption. I personally thought that attention was the most important social media literacy. I say this because I think focusing your attention to the task at hand without becoming distracted will allow for task to be completed on time. You can retain more information if you remain focused. I learned of ways to train my attention by being self-ware, which is when you are aware when you are becoming distracted. I found this to be helpful tip to stay focused. The mindfulness technique is one that I use regularly by setting timeframes of how long I will dedicate to a particular task. This has proved helpful for time management. I definitely believe in the healthy attention habits. I have a routine that includes an exercise regime, an 8-hour sleep schedule, and balanced scheduled screen time. 

    The participation social media literacy at first was not as important because I'm not an active participant on social media. I do more observing. After reading week 1 information I see that being more engaged by interacting with. readers and the author it can help the community with your advice or knowledge. Also, it encourages others to participant. Creating content is new for me and I must say it has become an outlet to express myself. I created a sample blog about my traveling experiences. I look forward to creating a positive environment blog. Understanding platform dynamics is still one that I'm navigating through. I will explore different blogs to get a feel for the layout and community norms. Being responsible comes natural for me, I believe in creating a respectful, trustworthy, and positive environment. Networking is one I practice outside of social media as well. Networking is a great way to collaborate with the community and build global connections. Being able to communicate and express ideas with others from all over the world is amazing. 

    Collaboration is a huge portion of social media, being able to share knowledge and best practices. While collaborating we have to be able to communicate effectively by having clear and concise task, goals, and ideas. Group dynamics are important to assign roles and responsibilities and deal with challenging situations that may arise. Ethics should always be at the forefront of any group. Having integrity and taking responsibility are just a couple of attributes that come to mind. Having an ethical social media environment will encourage participation. Having a inclusive and diverse dynamic fosters a balanced community. Especially with how diverse our society is today. Inclusion is important to have a well-proportioned environment. Being network aware allows you to build connections to be able to better spread information, ideas, and best practices. LinkedIn has been a great way to network with my professional community. 

    The critical consumption social media literacy is a literacy where I was using some of the aspects but not all, The CRAAP evaluation helped me since learning of this process. All of these tips are useful when vetting a source. You ensure your source is reliable. It should be relevant to your subject. Make sure your source can speak to your subject matter without biases. Lastly, check sources for correctness. I have included a link for you to further explore on social media literacies.

Have you started your digital creative journey yet?

https://er.educause.edu/articles/2010/10/attention-and-other-21stcentury-social-media-literacies

References