Blog Post #15 : Retrospective

In my last blog post I would like to take this time to look back and write about my experiences in my Professional Writing course. In my first introduction to the class I was really surprised about the type of new internet technology we would be using. Such web based platforms that would include assignments that would require the use of Twitter, google docs, google wave and many other internet innovations in sharing.

I thought this course was really unique because of the required use of these platforms. Tweeting on twitter was a very fun and a sort stress relieving assignment because if gave me an opportunity to share my feelings easily and quickly with my classmates on not just our Professional Writing course but other courses and campus activities we shares as well.

Everyday day for the more part was a truly a new learning experience as websites and blogs were introduced to us. Our professor shares with us many new and interesting websites I would have never known existed such as www.wefeelfine.org, which I wrote about in another blog how innovative and thoughtful I felt it was.

Reflecting back upon the more of the curriculum aspect of our course which was the reading and writing of blogs, I felt they were also a great new experience I was able to have in this unique course. The blogs we were focused on reading concerned internet applications and web based innovations which was often referred and defined as “web 2.0″ . This concept was and is a very important aspect so many peoples lives and this is why I believe we focused on this notion. The phenomenon of “web 2.0″ is the idea of profiting off free based internet applications. It was a new innovation that i never really thought about or considered as a economic notion.

Another important aspect i would like to reflect upon is the collaboration requirement in the course. Specifically in our collaboration project. Each pair of students picked a unique project to undertake that would in someway benefit a non profit organization, but my project was very different. My project was to change the Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi homepage to be a more broad based in its pictures of student life on campus. It was a very enjoyable experience because i was able to do a special project which I had control over. It was one of the most enjoyable projects because it was not a typical research oriented project.

The final concept I am able to take away from this course was how sharing with other students was not only important to the curriculum to the class but also incredibly enjoyable. The idea of “Web 2.0″ to me is the ability of internet users to come together and share with others their feelings and experiences .

Blog Post # 14: Collaborative Update

The project as I have been explaining in the last post is still in the process of final production. In this post I would like to briefly discuss the difficulties in this effort. Before I can do that though i must detail what type of photos i am intending to take. The photos that I want are of students working together and doing regular school activities with commonality. I wanted these shots because i thought it was good way to represent islander life unique to TAMUCC. The problem that is occurring though is my aversion to interacting with a large group of students I do not know and asking them for permission to photograph them.

In one instance there was a great opportunity to take interesting photos of students practicing for a dance routine. What made the shot not possible was that it was outside and at night , to which my flash photography would have been distracting from their practice. I have also been wanting to take photos of students working in the library which is also a difficult process to do. My camera will be using flash and is bother and perturb students that are trying to complete assignments or relax between classes.

I have been attempting to work around this problem by taking pictures of students from farther distances and especially if there is no need for flash. Missing opportunity for good photos is another problem too because I am not constantly holding the camera on my person. Many times i do not plan to take photos but in some occasions there has been events at school that could make for great photos but I am often without a camera.

Other then these problems the collaboration project is going smoothly and I am enjoying it. This project has been very fun and i think it is special because of that. In most cases assignments for college courses are not meant to be enjoyable and usually are not, but this has been one.

Blog post # 13 : Collaborative update

My last post blog post was a insight into my new project for my professional writing course. The project is a collaboration of between myself another student in the course in which we are taking photos that reflect student life at TAMUCC. We are going to be sending these photos to the president of the university and hope we change the main home page of the site which has left out key elements of student life from the images that are shown on campuses homepage.

Our current status on the assignment is finding the best opportunities for pictures ,capturing the best and most suitable pictures to use for our final draft. What we are doing with the pictures currently is sorting through and them choosing the best ones to offer and write about. Flickr is giving us a helpful tool in collecting, sharing, and writing caption to the shots that are on the site.

Our current photos have mostly of been of the outside areas of the campuses. These shots are important because it is a big part of student life, lounging and studying outside. The beautiful scenery and architecture of the campus is a conducive to student enjoyment of TAMUCC.

Blog Post #12 : Collaborative Project

This blog is going to be different from my other blogs post, because  instead of being about trends or other new concepts coming from the internet age, instead it will be about my current collaborative project. My projects theme is about a proposal to TAMUCC to add new pictures and insight to different activities currently shown on the website through pictures. It is more then a picture presentation, rather it is telling a different side or what could be seen as a new look into what college is for a portion of students that have been unrepresented.

How I choice to take the pictures was through a discussion with my professor and partner about what i thought would be interesting and beneficial pictures. I decided that the best route would be to take ten pictures in different themes. Some of these were practical ,  such as the scenery of the are around the school and in the classroom with participating students.  These shots seem like a reasonable assessment of what should be included in school photos but on the official school website they have been left off. I felt it would be important to put them their for students that are looking to attend this school .

This is an assignment that I am looking forward to being successful in, because I want to able to help this school be more appealing to its maximum ability. As students I believe it is a give and take relationship with college, and i believe this is another way to give back to the school.

Blog Post #11: Free of Charge

In “Priced to Sell is free the future?“  Malcolm Gladwell writes a article about the current trend of free internet hoisting sites that are succeeding and setting the standard on the way business is conducted on the internet. Malcolm Gladwell writes about how business’s should not fight against the trend because as he puts it “content is never going to be worth what they want it to be worth.” Gladwell sites another author with similar subjects in the current business trends of internet sites , Chris Anderson.

The next portion of Gladwell’s musing details the how the internet and hoisting sites are able to succeed economically even though their products are given to users for free. Gladwell also discuses the human phenomenon of how free items make us want the product. Gladwell uses and sites heavily from Chris Anderson’s previous analysis of the psychological phenomenon that makes people want to to have items that are free and how demand for the same item would go down if it cost had  no more then a penny.

What Gladwell details next is the way ideas and intellectual property are profiting over actual items of desire. He foretells that Apple will most likely be making bigger profits of off selling applications then they are going to make off of selling Iphones.

Gladwell’s article falls short of proclaiming enough of this own ideas and feelings. He focuses much of his writing on that of Chris Anderson, but instead of adding very much to it, he merely restates it. Gladwell could have presented a more articulated article and response , or addition to Chris Anderson’s studies with his own research but he did not. This caused article to fall short of its potential to benefit readers and interested learners of web economics who have studied and read Chris Anderson’s editorials.

Blog Post #10: Distractions and Attention Management

In a insightful article by Professor Howard Rheingold called “Attention Literacy“, describes the problems of attention distractions in the classroom he has encountered as a teacher in a modern era. These technological distractions include laptops with wireless internet and cell phones. Professor Howard Rheingold’s blog post details how this is a new experience for him and how he takes the opportunity to do social  experiments on his classroom. The experiments he does on his classroom first was to film his students for a brief period of time to display to back to them their actions and then question their feelings regarding the subject.

I felt these experiments are a great way to get interaction with the students, because it will bring them into a discussion in a active and fun manor that is new to them. I thought the experiment sounded entertaining for the students because it was a deferment from the usual progression and scheduled norms of a course. When the Professor described his actions of posting the word attention on the screen , I felt that was a intriguing way to get his students to think abstractly about their own relationship with the required responsibility.  One student interestingly responded that the students understand that they loose focus on the teacher by using their laptops but still decide to use them anyway.

What i do feel is missing from the article is more detailed input from the students regarding their sentiment about the topic of technological distractions in the classroom. These topics were not covered very much in the post , but it could have been very informative to the reader if they were. The experiments that he did on his students was not related enough to the reader and left the readers of the article slightly short changed on what could  could have been very informative article to those interested in the psychological aspects of students concerning their actions in the classroom.

All in all i think students should read this report because I believe that they can come away with a important lesson. That lesson being that controlling multitasking and focusing attention is a key ability to learn when trying to succeed in a professional environment.

blog post # 9

In  “Free!Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” by Chris Anderson, is  a extensive historical examination of the beginnings of the from the first commercial use of offering a free product to sell itself to modern practices of the same . The author cites the the inventor of the Gillete Razors, King Gillete, as a pioneer of  free or cheap product pricing for promotional use. The author goes int great detail about the brilliant idea that inventor King Gillete had about the safety razor  and how he used free promotions to make his product popular. Anderson sites King Gilletes promotional method of selling large quantities of safety razors in bulk to the army to promote his invention.  The author compares this use with the current trend of free website product promotions , such as google’s email service and it’s directory assistance GOOG-411.

Anderson discusses next how these online services, and other business’s are taking advantage of the almost unlimited abilities of technology that is becoming cheaper and better. So with the expense becoming closer to zero, marketers realized they could sell a product by calling it free. The author then describes how profit is made of a product that is given away for free, with the use of ad space. His example of this practice is pay-per-click text ads, though the author fells to define this term.

This articles has is a great examination of the market of the internet, how it works and why it works. What it offers to the reader is a new way to see a somewhat abstract concept of the internet. The websites we love to use and occupy our time with has always been thought of as a simple and free service but when looking deeper we see that we are involved in a money making market. Anderson describes how this free promotion can be used to gather a subject group that other companies will pay to exploit from the identification of their interest.

Anderson in this article refers to a idea that has grown and spread to modern internet practices which he phrases as embracing waste. After first mentioning the idea of how using waste to profit, he then describes how technology moves so quickly that there is no time to save outdated technological products. The author makes this assertion but without much other defining or connecting of the concept to its economic use.

What Anderson also does is a take a psychological evaluation of how the concept of free product makes consumers out of people. He describes this act of how we have historically been tricked into getting into deals when a promotional offer highlights a free aspect to the deal. What Anderson succeeds well to identify this concept by citing the example that when a product is given away it is easier to sell , and then sites if that same product cost just one penny the outcome would be much different.

I felt this article was a great insight to the business aspect of the the internet. What the author does is point out the fundamentals of what has worked for business’s and what makes people buy into current successful business’s.

Blog Post # 8: Response to “Naked in the Nanopticon”

Putting yourself on the internet for display  for everyone to witness may not be what users of the social networking site facebook intend to due. In the article “Naked in the Nanopticon” writer Siva Vaidhyanathan addresses this issue and the problem that users have concerning the facebook releasing personal information about purchases to those viewing their sites. What Vaidhyanathan does next in is express to the reader the problem of having a control and understanding of the meaning privacy. She explains that we have very little privacy, considering our phones calls are can listened to by the NSA, and most people are carrying phones with cameras. True privacy has become a very minuscule concept in our lives, but what the writers explains is that we care very much about the little amount of privacy we do have control over.

Vaidhyanathan wrote in the article a breakdown of four different types of interfaces between us and others  relating to privacy. In the fourth type the writer discussed was person to public,  which is a new concept, and has become a type of last stand against the overstepping of private boundaries. It is the personal information that the public can know about us. This interaction  is one of the most important types of interface to us because as Vaidhyanathan  explains, it can be very detrimental to us for people we don’t know to have a uncontrolled view of us. The writer explains this as a type of scarlet letter problem, where we could be easily shamed in public if our embarrassing actions we would do privately are seen by others. This is a major problem that people are having concerning the internet and uses of other technologies that break the our privacy walls down.

We would all like a little more privacy but with the benefits of public viewing such as cameras that could catch criminals on the street, many people have decided that the lack of privacy is a necessary evil that could make a safer community. Looking to the future we are probably going to lose even more rights to privacy, as baby steps are taken into our nonpublic domain. Their are many different actions we can take in controlling some of our worries about our image be seen in the wrong way. One of these can be from making better decisions about posting information on ourselves on the site facebook, along with risque images of ourselves doing activities we would not want everyone to witness.

Participatory Survelliance in Social Networking Sites

A internet user that signs up and use social networking sites such as facebook and twitter, are now playing a part in a self projection idea of participatory surveillance. In an interesting article by Anders Albrechtslund named “Online Social Networking and Participatory Surveillance“, the author does a research into the pathological  theories and basic uses capable of social networking sites.

Albrechtslund begins this assessment by recognizing this social internet trend of needing a private space in which to display information regarding personal affairs. What Albrechtslund uses this report mostly for  is to voice concern over the public usage of private information that users put on Myspace or Facebook. Albrechtslund’s concern is demonstrated in the amount of context the author writes about the subject, titling these sub-sections “Moral Panic” and another “Life After Social Networking.” The aforementioned section going into detail about his sentiment about users who are maturing and changing their habits while their past activities which could be viewed as immoral or unprofessional are recorded on the internet for display.

Albrechtslund then describes our actions as being that of a participatory agent in a self aware surveillance society online. Comparing it to a historic prison design of the Panopticon, and that we are out of control of who is viewing are online profile.

This article does a great job of discussing important subjects and problems within the cyber-community. That of controlling your image and privacy , while maintaining a sense of maturity in the awareness that these records of your past will always be there. Albrechtslung seems really passionate in his sentiment about the dangers of using social networking sites. I believe this problem mostly concern young adults who are using the site. This age group of teens and early twenties seems to be the largest amount and most frequenting  users of social networking sites, and the maturity level of young adults could cause them problems when they are not controlling very thoughtfully the content that they are putting on the internet about themselves.

A Look to the Past that Looks to the Future

Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist and writer who is credited in helping create the internet. I call Tim Berners-Lee a writer because of his very well thought out and well written circulated ideas about the future abilities of the internet. A very interesting article written in 1994 by Berners-Lee is entitled “The World-Wide Web” is a type of learners manual to the web. This article covers the technology aspects to the web and he goes into great detail defining internet components such as URLs , servers, and hyper-text. Considering all the different uses of the internet that there are today and how important it is to spreading ideas and news this article has a feel of early importance in its ability to teach.

Even though many of these web definitions are now understood by so many users , at the time it this article was written it was and still is a very important in its ability to teach new internet users about what the web is. An intriguing aspect to this article is that it can still be used as a teach method today as well. The internet has not changed very much and this writing contains the solid foundations of what makes the internet work.

A internet user does not need to understand all the components of the internet to access and enjoy it but for many it is a very interesting to learn how the internet works because they use it and rely on it alot. i found it very interesting yet difficult to fully understand the complex working off the science behind the internet.

Another portion of the Berners-Lee’s writing is his look to the future capabilities of the internet. His view of the future of the internet has partly come accessible though. He writes of future abilities of users create their own information , link their publishing and share ideas more simply . This idea has now become a reality.