G-I

G

GIMP: A General Image Manipulation Program; allows the user to manage, manipulate, and edit images and graphics.

Global Information Infrastructure (GII): Used to provide countries with developing technologies with American goods/services; also used for technical collaboration between developing and industrial nations.

Glog: A graphic blog, hence the term “glog” that utilizes digital media to create a multimodal text.

Goldilocks Syndrome: Just like the story of the girl with golden curls and the bowls of porridge, some written documents are formatted perfectly for print publication but terribly for web publication; other documents are formatted for the web but not for easy reading. Lastly, some written documents are well balanced between the conventions of web and print publication. This syndrome impacts the quantity of good academic articles/essays.

Graphic User Interface (GUI): The interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices. Essentially, the GUI allows for human-computer interaction through images rather than text (Britannica Online).

Griefer: A disruptive individual in an online setting, primarily in a game, who takes deliberate action to ruin the experience of other users.

H

Hashtag – A topic, preceded by a “#” that is included in a tweet and can be searched for and referenced by other users.

Human Computer Human Interaction (HCHI): Since the internet connects human beings to other human beings via a computer (see Computer Mediated Communication), Beth Kolko argues that the human-human relationship should be the primary concern in interface design.

Human Computer Interaction (HCI): According to Stuart Selber in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, Human Computer Interaction is “an area in computer science that since the 1950s has devoted itself to improvements in the ways people relate to computer technologies” (141).  In other words, HCI is the way human beings interact with computer interfaces, and computer science has made this interaction easier and more efficient, from line-command to graphical interfaces like Windows XP or Macintosh OS X.   

Hybrid Course: A course that combines online instruction with face-to-face class meetings; also called blended learning, web-centric, partial internet.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): A system of specialized tags designed to be read and interpreted by browsers. The common language used by sites on the World Wide Web.

Hypertext: Text that has been tagged for specialized display in a web browser. For example, a piece of text enclosed with the tag for linking (<a href>) can be clicked on to send the user to that page; information related through embedded hyperlinks; text displayed with references to other links or texts that the readers can access immediately, overcomes the traditional linear arrangement of text.

I

Icon: A picture that a user can click on which links to software on the computer, usually located on the desktop. Users can create or delete icons.

Instant Messaging: Virtually synonymous with “internet chatting”; using a program like MSN Instant Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, and Gmail Chat to communicate synchronously with another user or multiple users.


Interface: Interaction that occurs between a computer and any other piece of hardware or human user.

Interface Design: This element is used in the development of web pages as well as any instructional media or technology. It considers four main factors regarding the interaction between the user and technology: usability, visualization, functionality, and accessibility.