Assignment 2

Common Themes

After researching my fellow classmates’ websites, I noticed a lot of them share similar motivations for taking this class. For example, Joshua Sass, Reuben Tadpatri, and Karter Bullard share similar sentiments, in that they chose this class with the interest of learning how media and technology impact our lives. On the other hand, others like Julian Tiu, Tate Banks, and Eric Zahn chose to take this class with the hopes of learning how to use media and technology to improve different aspects of our present lives and thus change the impact for those in the future, whether it be through education, industry, or entertainment.

Common Media

Another thing that a lot of my classmates have in common is the media that we consume on a weekly basis. Whether it be TV, social media, music platforms, etc… a lot of students consume media through the same mediums. For example, Joey Whitmore, Leuel Asnake, and I all use YouTube and Snapchat, while Leuel, Taylor Williamson, and I all use Twitter as well. Practically every student that mentioned messaging apps included GroupMe, a lot of students like Reddit, and students like Kevin Wolfskill, Tristan Seifert, and Ledet Awano, among others, like to watch The Office. As for music platforms, it’s a toss-up between Apple Music and Spotify, where most people use Spotify. Lastly, of the students that said they like to play video games, most like Battle Royale, RPG, and MMORPG games.

Common Website-Structure

One thing I was interested in seeing was the similarities and differences in the way students built their websites for this course. Some students used website builders like Wix and WordPress, mostly using Wix in that area. Others just wrote straight HTML in order to get the job done. Others built full on websites, hosting on either GitHub or their people.tamu.edu/ page. I was intrigued to see just how many students were skilled in website development, since a lot of the aspects that go into web dev are skills not included in our curriculum, like UI/UX, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc…