Competencies

During the course of this assignment, I used several of the New Century Competencies. But the one that was I feel was enhanced the most was most definitely Information Technology. Obviously for this assignment, it was vital for each student to learn more about various imaging and editing programs. Not only did I enhance these areas of expertise, I was able to go back to the basics of html hand coding. I used Macromedia’s Dreamweaver in order to create these web pages. This program, although very helpful for some of the more complicated tasks, could be quite trying at times. Some simple actions I wanted to perform would occasionally cause me a great deal of distress because I could not figure out why the program could not understand what I wanted it to do. In many of these situations, I eventually pulled down the coding section and typed in what I wanted by hand. I occasionally needed to seek help because I am far from an HTML genius and do not know enough codes to do everything I want. For example, I was forced to find help to learn what the HTML code was to do footnotes. After learning several other basic codes, I then felt more comfortable with the Dreamweaver program. I believe that by building on the basics, one can enhance his or her understanding of the more advanced programs, and that is what happened in my case.

What would a research paper be without the Critical Thinking and Analysis competency? This competency had to be employed in a number of situations. When I was researching, I needed to use this competency in order to analyze all of the websites. I needed to be sure that they were reliable sources of information, and not simply a person pretending to know what they are writing about. In order to accomplish this task, I needed to examine each part of the URL and decide whether or not the site was credible. I also used this competency after finding all of the information.

Although some people take it for granted, I felt that the Aesthetic Awareness competency was a necessary one to use during the creation of this project. At some point, for example in creating graphics in Adobe’s Photoshop, I felt as thought it went hand in hand with the Information Technology competency. It is important to use and work on this competency because people will not enjoy or come back to a webpage that is displeasing to the eye. The only problem with this though, is that beauty is very subjective. I looked at pages that I enjoyed and tried to figure out what it was that I liked about them. My final page design stemmed mainly from the simplicity that I found I enjoy. I created it with my own tastes in mind as well as thinking about the ease in functionality for less experienced Internet users. I enhanced my aesthetic awareness because, though my site’s design was created with me in mind, I developed an understanding and an appreciation of why others might arrange their pages differently. I also have a greater respect for those people who create these types of pages for a living.