Welcome to my portfolio! Over the past few months I have spent countless hours researching different topics as well as going into depth with research on my “tentative topic”, which is Augmented Reality. My first blog post was just a little about me and way to get some content onto my site, and then I dove straight into researching different things starting with the “Augmented Reality Sandbox”. The Augmented Reality Sandbox was the first time I was formally introduced into what augmented reality (AR) is and actually what got me interested in spending the past few months researching AR. At this point I had a pretty good idea that AR was most likely what I was going to spend my time researching but instead of jumping straight into it, I looked into a few other things that I thought I might also have interest in and that is where my “Tricks of Vegas” and “Self Driving Cars” blogs came from.
When going to vegas I have always wondered what it is about the city that keeps you dialed in on gambling while completely oblivious to time. In “Tricks of Vegas” I was able to look into all the myths I had heard in the past, such as oxygen being pumped into the casinos, and learn about the facts and how Las Vegas really does use subtle cues to manipulate you into spending more money. Next came my post “Self Driving Cars”. With one of my passions being traveling, it is inevitable I spend a lot of time sitting behind the wheel of a car. What if you could jump in that car and fall asleep, not waking up until you have reached your destination? This question, is what led me into my curiosity of the possibilities with self-driving cars and how far off in the future it is from this technology becoming a reality. While both of these topics are extremely interesting to me, they are also both things that I have heard about and the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about what AR is or how it can be used won me over in the end.
With my mind made up comes the rest of my posts. First I did a few simple blog posts just searching for ideas and questions to go off of to expand my work, which is where my “Tentative Topic” post comes from. After that I looked for as much information as I could find to not only answer my first questions but also lead me towards some new questions. In doing this came my “Mega Blog” and the my more formal post, the “Lit Review” which were both just very broad information about what AR is and where its being used or can be used. Then I followed up the Lit Review with the proposal which is a more specific use of AR. In the proposal I focused only on education, I wanted to show all these amazing ways that AR’s already being used in education, in the process of developing for education, as well as what the future could hold if the technology is embraced and support is shown by the school systems.
This is also the basis for my “Project”. In my project I created a website to host the information I’ve found about AR’s current uses and possibilities in education. I made it a website in hopes that it could be shared around to different programs in schools showing them the benefits they could have by implementing AR into their curriculum. Overall I like how my website came out aesthetically, but I do wish I had a little more time to keep adding information to it as well. I believe there is enough information to get the general idea across but if I could have found some links to companies or programs that they could contact to actually talk to about putting AR into their programs and how well of a fit it would be for them, then I think that it could have more impact.
To me, my best writing, or at least my most enjoyable writing of the semester, was my first post about the Augmented Reality Sandbox. I felt as though the writing in that post was completely free and not forced. At the point of writing about the sandbox I could actually talk about how the technology interested me and how it could have been beneficial to where I am at in school and in my daily life with my passion for hiking and climbing. Here is one section where I felt it could have fit well into helping me in daily life “but for me it has different meaning than just a virtual map. For the past year or so I’ve been taking a lot of climbing trips up in the mountains, specifically Idyllwild and Tramway in Palm Springs. For these climbing trips we use bouldering guides to decide where we plan on spending each day climbing as well as to figure out how to get each area. Basically these guides use topographic maps to show whats around you and where to go. Up until last semester, when I took my first geography class, I hadn’t been taught anything about these maps or how to use them. Needless to say I spent a lot of time wandering aimlessly through forests with not much of an idea of what I should even be looking for”. As the semester progressed though it wasn’t possible for me to stay as connected to what I was writing about and still find enough info to write a lit review or proposal paper, so I slowly lost interest and the posts and papers felt more forced rather than something that I picked that interested me.
Overall I think the class not only helped me to improve my writing, but also pick my sources better making me more efficient when writing papers.
Andrew's Blog 