Blog #2- Course readings

I am honestly not sure which course readings this blog is supposed to be about. I am going to write this blog on the basis of the various readings that we will be doing while in this class, that Dr. Chandler briefly told us about, while in class on Thursday Jan. 29th.

Some of the readings that Dr. Chandler talked about, captured my attention, while others turned my attention off. Right off the bat, the articles that captured my attention were as follows:

1. "Flashmobs"- While hearing what this article was about, I began to grow some interest in it. The title itself, is enough to make you wonder what the article is about and make you want to read it. It almost sounds like one of those space stories (which is something I am not interested in, yet this title caught my attention). While presenting this article topic to the class, Dr. Chandler mentioned that youtube can be a source of our presentations. I regularly use computers, but do not have a lot of experience with youtube.com. I tend to only go on youtube when a friend of mine tells me of a video that is sure to make me laugh (or just worthwhile to watch). Overall, this caught my attention.

2. "Friend Game"- This article caught my attention as well because it is about cyberbullies. I use social networking programs such as Myspace and Facebook, and never picture myself getting cyberbullied, yet it is possible. When Dr. Chandler was talking about this article, it caught my attention because I am going to be a teacher, and part of my job is to protect my students. I can do my best at protecting them in my classroom, but what happens when they leave my doors. There is no way of preventing them from having these social networking websites, nor ensuring their safety outside the classroom. There needs to be some sort of protection that can be put inplace to prevent these cases of cyber bulleying and horror stories that come from it.

The second part of this question asks for us to talk about any personal experience we have with any of the topics related to these articles. I have personal experience with the Friend Game article, as mentioned previously, that I do have a Myspace and Facebook account. Additionally, I would like to know what and how can we deal with cyberbulleying? The article entitled Flashmobs, I don't exactly have personal experience with, but I have interest in reading more about this phenomenon that people show up in an agreed upon destination, do their thing, and all disperse within minutes of their arrival. It sounds like a cult or something.

Those are the two articles that I hope to be assigned to report to the class.

Blog #1- Using google.docs

After our first class on Thursday, January 22. I was a little nervous going into the class, because I really don't have extensive knowledge about computers and cyberspace and everything that goes with it. I got even more nervous, when Dr. Chandler said that we were going to create a blog and that during the semester, we would post numerous blog entries. The other thing that caught me by surprise is that our first homework assignment was to work collaboratively with the rest of the class to complete a History of the Internet Time line.

Over the weekend, our assignment was to make a few contributions to the time line. When I logged on from time to time over the course of the weekend (Thursday night- Sunday night), I saw that a lot of people had posted new comments, and at first when I was looking at the websites to get the information from, I didn't know where I could post something knew, that was a valuable contribution to the History of the Internet. This assignment was to be completed on google.docs, which is something that I had only heard about, but never used. One thing that I have been told, time and time again, is that when it comes to the internet, the best way to learn something, is by playing around and figuring it out on your own. Chances are, when you learn on your own, you tend to remembe the steps you took to doing something, better than if you were shown how to do it by someone. After playing around with the google.docs in class on the first day, I learned how to log in and how to post something.

During our first class, we spent some time just practicing putting stuff on the website, and it proved to be an issue. When everyone in the class was logged on at the same time, some people were shut out and not able to post anything, while others were successfully about to do so. For the most part, after I learned how to use google.docs, it was easy and it was a different way to work collaboratively with a group of people, yet be in different locations and working on the document at different times. I wasn't too concerned or worried about deleting someone else's work, my only thought was once someone saves what they were working on, if there is a correction that needs to be made, can it be made without messing up the entire document?

Some features that made it easier to collaborate with classmates were as follows. For starters, if we were all in a big corporation and needed to work together to get a job done, who says we all live in the same location. Same goes for this class. We don't all live in the same place, nor do we have the same time available to work on the assignment. By having this technology, as a class (or corporation if you want to call it that), we were able to work together on the timeline, and not once did we have to pick up the phone and call someone else, or drive to a mutual destination to sit down and work together. Another aspect that I thought was relatively easy, was once you let yourself go and explore a bit within the google.docs, it was really easy to insert a new row and put a new date in. I noticed that people tried doing so, and were able to put a new row in, but it didn't go chronologically in order. I'm the one who rearranged a lot of it. I also found out, that if someone's entry needed a little correction, even though it was already saved, another person was able to go in and correct it, without messing up the entire document. Overall, I found it relatively easy to navigate my way through google.docs, open the documents that we were to read, and then post on the time line.

Although I say that I had a relatively easy time, there were some problems with the google.docs. While we were all in class, and logged onto the google.docs, the network was not powerful enough to allow for all of us to post at the same time, so it allowed some users to post, while shutting out the rest of the users. This could pose as a major problem, because, what if there was a deadline. If there was a deadline and everyone waited until the last minute to go on and post something, there would be some of us who got shut out and others who were able to post.

I'm not too sure about what features I would add to google.docs to make it easier for class projects, but the one major thing is related to when too many users are logged on. I think that if there was a way to allow as many users as possible to work collaboratively on one project, all at the same time, it would eliminate some of the headaches that we might have had during our first experience. Again, I'm not really that knowledgeable when it comes to technology, so I really can't say what else we could do to make the system work better.

My first experience with google.docs is not something that I can complain about, and overall, it was pretty easy to figure out how to navigate my way through the program.