Resource of Choice: For this reflection, I’ve chosen to focus on the website Culture Crossing Guide. This website is a handy guide to cross-cultural etiquette, which offers cultural insight into over two-hundred countries.
Reflect on the User Interface (UI):
The primary colors used on this website are brown, gold, white, and black. The font is basic and squarish. Everything is organized in rectangles. The banner on top featuring the website’s title is rectangular, the focal text for each page is rectangular, and the choice tabs on the side of the page are rectangular as well. The main part of the page organizes information firstly by country and then specifies it into categories of basics, business, and students. Within these categories, information is sorted into interaction types such as “gift-giving” and “greetings.” Less prominently, on the left side of the page are rectangular tabs that offer other resources like cultural consulting and family activities. There doesn’t appear to be sound or any fancy cursor-magic. I think the designers of this resource were really intentional about making the information accessible and easy to find. They did this through the aforementioned information-sorting system, which makes it easy for people traveling to specific countries to find cultural information for the place they are going to and the social situations they find themselves in.
Reflect on the User Experience (UX):
The helpful sorting system makes this site very easy to use and, therefore, impacts my productivity positively. This breezy accessibility to information also impacts me positively in a psychological sense, as it saves me some navigation-headaches. In addition, the site makes me feel empowered to respectfully and competently navigate other cultures. However, visually, the site is very boring. The serious color palette and milquetoast, rectangle-based layout make looking at the site almost depressing. These features, combined with the no-nonsense, squarish font, also make the site feel distractingly outdated. I think I realized the effect these features had on me, but I would not necessarily have been inclined to verbalize these feelings in another context. I think what I learned about myself after examining this site is that it doesn’t just matter to me that a website is helpful. It also matters to me that it is attractive and fun.
Reflect on how this resource might impact or support Digital Wellness:
I think that the main way this site could support my digital wellness is that, because it is so organized and straightforward and so unattractive, I will probably not be tempted to spend an unnecessary amount of time on it and will just use it when I need to know how to respectfully interact with people from a certain culture. There will not be much mindless scrolling at all.
Overall, the apps I use daily mostly benefit me, I think. My instagram, email, and messaging apps allow me to communicate with my friends, employers, and loved ones and keep up with my school assignments. However, recently, I’ve become aware that sometimes I am too reliant on technology for entertainment.
One way I can model digital wellness for my students is by using it with intention, not as a babysitter or a substitute teacher when I am feeling tired. I can use it as a support for research or experiments, not as a replacement for me talking. In this way, students will learn to think of technology as a tool and not as an escape or a replacement for real life experiences. They will learn to use technology as a way to actively facilitate their own experiences rather than as a way to vicariously experience.
Reflect on the accessibility of the application or tool you chose:
Overall, I think the accessibility of this site is fine but could be improved. The text is clear and simple but also sort of small. There is an option to change the language of the information, but the button to do so is sort of small. There is no screen-reader as far as I can tell, but it is free!
Finally, think about the ways in which being aware of Digital Design and Digital Wellness could benefit you as a teacher?
Being aware of digital design will help me anticipate whether web-resources will be easy for students in my class to use. Additionally, it could potentially assist me in creating my own helpful resources for my class in the future and could help me teach my students about how to be design-oriented thinkers.
Being aware of digital wellness could help my teaching in a variety of ways. Firstly, it will help me be intentional about managing my own digital well-being. If I am taking care of myself, I will probably be a more effective teacher. In addition, if I am aware of digital-wellness, I can encourage practices in my class that will teach my students how to be digitally-well too!