4/23/10

The portfolio website I choose to look over was by Meredith McKee. One thing I really liked about her website was how she separated her midterm portfolio and her final portfolio from one another. This made it very easy to navigate throughout her website. I also liked how she included and about me as well as a home page. The only thing I would have changed with Meredith's website would have been to add links at the bottom of her pages and also maybe have made the blog entries, in class writings and her essays into drop down tabs from the midterm and final portfolio links at the top. I also noticed how she separated her final project into five different sections titled Intro, Space, Interviews, Conclusion, and a Works Cited. This was an interesting way to organize it yet it did the job of incorporating all of the pieces of her final ethnography. Overall Meredith's website was creative, easy to navigate and included everything that is required to be in our portfolios.

4/19/10

The excerpt from the book called Nickel and Dimed really grasped all of the elements that need to be incorporated into my final ethnography. The excerpt was very interesting to read since the author wrote it in first person about how she reflects on the life of struggling lower class American who is working multiple jobs.

The excerpt really incorporated a lot of background information about the jobs she had worked and really gave you an image of how she lived her life. The author incorporated a few interviews throughout the book, but most importantly provided the reader with many observations. She talked about each job individually and also talked about how she was doing this all to help her family who had suffered the worst. She also provided the audience with some very important background research that showed statistics on average wages for people in her town was well as the nation. Her excerpt did not just included the information she had observed but she combined the observations and interviews so that it flowed into one well written ethnography which is what I will need to keep in mind when writing my final ethnography.

4/9/10

One thing I probably need to add more of in my final essay would be more observations of people and their interactions with others at the dining hall. I should also talk a little more about the types of people who work at the seven restaurants at West End. Are they students or adults and are they polite or rude. One pattern I am beginning to see in my essays is how I can now tell the time of day that west end is crowded compared to when it is empty. I have also can tell when certain groups of people come into west end such as the athletes.