Project/Product Using IT
March 31, 2009
When I was accepted as a student at the i-School, I had limited experience with information technologies. I was comfortable enough as a user of the web, but I had no idea how it really worked. I didn’t even have much of an idea how my computer worked. Reflecting back on my experiences, I realize that I’ve come a long way in my ability and comfort levels with information technologies. Being an online student, it was necessary to become quickly acquainted with chat forums, consumption and creation of multimedia projects and various methods of online communication. To my surprise, I was able to do so with relative ease.
As I progressed through the program, not only did I become more familiar with information technologies, but I really enjoyed the analytical thinking and careful problem solving that came with the creation of projects that used a high level of information technology expertise. Here are the projects that I enjoyed the most.
My handcoded site
During my second quarter at the i-School, I was introduced to the world of HTML in LIS 541. Before this class, I tended to dive under my desk when I encountered words enclosed in angle brackets. With the guidance of several HTML manuals and Professor Bob Larson, though, I was able to learn the basics of tables, formatting, headings, stylesheets, images and links–the building blocks of web pages. As the culminating project of the course, I created a multi-page informative website about kombucha brewing. While my site hardly rivals one that was created with a fancy HTML editor, I think it represents a basic, well-formed website. I still show it off as an example of what I’ve learned.
After LIS 541, I felt confident enough in my HTML skills to create a site completely on my own. In order to provide information about our then upcoming wedding, I created an additional multi-page site.
Urban Spelunkers Metadata Schema
I felt that LIS 538 allowed me to explore two professional interests–information representation and information technology. Building on foundational knowledge from LIS 541, I learned the syntax of XML and used it to bind the metadata elements that my partner and I chose to include in our schema. In addition, I learned about how XML metadata is used in the emerging semantic web. Until this class, the semantic web was a fuzzy, hypothetical concept to me. After mastering the concept of RDF triples and how to translate them into XML, I felt that the potential of the semantic web suddenly became more clear.
