Welcome to my UAS Online Portfolio!

On this blog, I will provide information about me, my past and assessments of we are doing in class. I will post weekly updates and post my exercises as reports.

UAS Background

My background may look slightly different from the other students. I was working in finance as a stockbroker for almost ten years before throwing in the towel and decide to invest long term through an engineering degree. I went into the field of geomatics, which amongst other subfields particularly focus on surveying but also photogrammetry. Still today, UAS is used commonly in surveying, but the industry is positive this will increase by staggering proportions coming years. This said it is strange that no UAS courses are provided at my home University. Thus, one of the reasons I decided to go on Exchange to Purdue University was actually that I wanted to learn about UAS and how it can be applied to the field of geomatics. Languages disabilities and the fact that I have no knowledge about UAS from before may imply that the course will be hard for me in the beginning. But I am eager to learn and find new ideas in how to adapt principles from AT 319 into my own field. Who knows, maybe I will have my own private UAS integrated surveying company in the future.

Previous Students E-Portfolio Critiques

Wil Blouin, GEOG 390, Spring 201

Wil had decided not to have his pages represented as horizontal tabs. Instead, he put them on the vertical, beneath the Blog Archive. To me, a blog seems better organized and is easier to navigate having the pages horizontally. The white background made the blog eye appealing and tons of interesting course images were found. However, I would have preferred if he also had a separate page which showed the figures and had a hyperlink to the actual post. In that way, it would be possible to locate the topic of the image that one finds interesting.

Todd Horn, AT 40900, Fall 2018

Todd had put up a decent amount of information. To my eyes, though, I would prefer a larger font size. Also, I would choose a background that not steals the attention from the content. On the good side on the Assessments page, he had put up criteria for the grading. After scrolling through some web pages, I found that some had chosen not to describe what the grading represented.

Dylan McQueen, AT 40900, Fall 2018

Not sure how much effort Dylan put into his blog, but it seems a bit incomplete. Only three pages exist and the good pictures one can find in some of the posts cannot be found under the Figure page. The posts are made in a transparent manner which in combination with the background makes it unnecessarily difficult to read.

Evan Hockridge, AT 40900, Fall 2018

Evan had made a very thorough effort to present his skills. Content included everything from well-explained posts, what the course was all about, to good color contrast. It had an abundant amount of information. Perhaps he could have worked a bit more on the Contact page and had some more delightful images. To summarize this fine work, it was easy-navigated, user-friendly and the blog wore a character of simplicity over itself.

Kyle Sheehan, AT 40900, Fall 2018

Kyle had also put in great effort in order to attract eyes to his blog. It really captured your attention. Particularly I liked the easy navigated way of sorting his posts. A short abstract with a heading and light-colored background appealed to me. Even though I would prefer a horizontal bar of the pages, the classic sidebar on the left worked here. The width of the posts was dimensioned perfectly, not too long, not too short.

Thoughts

After scrolling through most of the blogs for AT 40900 and GEOG 390 I intend to produce my blog in a simple easy-navigated way, not having it unnecessarily detailed. I will go for a horizontal bar and having brief abstracts to every post and a comfortable color scheme will be chosen. I will also add relevant images to my gallery. I guess more ideas will come through the semester and I make a reservation that I may adapt the appearance as time goes by.

The UAS curriculum looks very interesting, I am looking forward to learning and I am curious about how the labs are going to turn out. Especially, I have an interest in learning ArcPRO and ArcMAP and how one can implement UAS data into them.