My New Media Lab Blurb and Icon and a Critique Using WebNotes

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My Icon

I recently joined the New Media Lab (NML) at the CUNY Graduate Center. The lab coordinators asked me to create an icon and write a blurb about my project that will be posted on the NML website. Here’s the blurb and click on the link at the bottom of the page to see my critique of my project icon and blurb.

Title: Is Blogging Good For Your Health?

Research indicates that writing about college experiences in a private context can lead to positive health and academic outcomes for college students (Pennebaker & Francis, 1996).  Recently Finkel et al. (2013) showed how a writing intervention had a positive influence on married couples happiness. Daiute et al. (2003) and Cohen and Riel (1989) demonstrated how audience is a key component of writing. Do the positive benefits of writing persist when that audience is the general public, as is the case when blogging. Or must the audience be specifically chosen by the writer in order to contribute to positive health outcomes?

Currently I am exploring a variety of platforms including blogger, wordpress, and edublogs to determine which will work best for this project. Following the initial phase of selecting a platform I plan to create and pilot test at least three blogging templates. During the research project participants will be able to select one of the three templates to use for their blog. The final research project will analyze how participants write in the blog setting as compared to a more private MS Word setting.

Who will the participants be?

What will the writing prompts be?

On my blog you can follow the progress as I develop these tools and concretize my method.

Brief Note on my WebNotes Critique:

I wanted to use WebNotes to critique the real NML page, however, it will not be posted for another couple of weeks and this assignment for ITP Core II is due by Tuesday. So I have pasted the blurb and icon on my blog above. Then I used WebNotes to comment on this icon and blurb. I found it a bit overwhelming when I looked at the WebNotes; to ameliorate this I suggest minimizing all of the stickies and then going through and maximizing and minimizing as you please.

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