It is the second week of three and we’ve pretty much finished the website. Our team has been very productive because we’ve all tackled different objectives and have brought them together as one piece. So far we have not had any problems with staying on task or with communication. I believe that we will have a website that a teacher would be proud to use for her class.
My group and I have begun working on the assignment. This looks like it will be something we all enjoy because it has things that each one of us likes to do and are good at. The best part is, since our strengths are so different, we aren’t fighting over who does what because we all pick what the others aren’t particularly good at. Everything seems to be fitting together like a puzzle.
We’ve begun the planning and basic designing of our website. I think out of all of the projects we’ve done so far, this will be the our successful.
This video focuses on the changing demands for the workplace. New generations aren’t being trained to work in assembly lines anymore, the world has changed and it is up to us to make sure that we can keep up with the new carreers. It shows how outnumbered we as a country compared to China and India. Since their education system is superior to ours we have quite a bit of work to do if we want to stand a chance in the workplace of the future.
The first video had Sir Ken Robinson giving his speech on the way our society, especially our educational system, has crushed all creativity. Any sort of strengths that a child possessed that isn’t the normal intellectual strength is being destroyed by labeling it as a learning disorder. I really think that the speaker he makes a good point, I work in an elementary school and I can see that anytime any student shows a “weakness” in one field they are labeled as “special needs”. Their strengths are overshadowed by their weakness; the solution is placing them in a remedial class where they can “catch up” to the rest of the students. What Sir Ken Robinson says is that these children should be given a chance to build on their strengths and received special attention to flourish their talents and strengths instead of destroying them. He uses the example of the choreographer that put together the musical Cats. Had she been in our school system during this time, she would’ve been given a pill to make her “normal” and taught that what she does is not correct. Many of the great minds and talents that we’ve had the pleasure of enjoying would not have existed because of the way our society views them. A child will not show Michael Angelo’s artistic talent at 5 years old, all the teacher will notice is that he is not performing very well on his math spelling exam. The solution, take away the art supplies that he uses to scribble and send him to a counselor.
The second video spoke about the life of a college student and the mistakes that are made in the traditional education system. It shows how students put together a list of everything that that see wrong with the education system. I really enjoyed the way the information was presented; it was shown in a way that actually portrays the traditional classroom set; the professor speaking in front of the class while the students do their own thing. Students go to class because they want a degree so they can make money. They really don’t care about what the professor is preaching about because most of the time it doesn’t matter to the students. This is why it shows how many students buy their books and never even use them. If attendance isn’t taken in class, a lot of the students won’t even bother showing up, they’ll just go to the review session and take their exam. The only mention of technology is about how they will use technology for everything except their actual school work. It shows with how high of frequency they will use their computer for social activities instead of school related, even in the classroom.
The last video shows the evolution of the internet for our generations. It begins with the traditional HTML format which was used first. This shows how it was mostly structured and for viewing purposes only. The information was on there and you could see it, that’s about it. Then it goes to the XML format which is much more flexible and versatile. This format lets us actually edit the internet and add our own personal touches. This allows us to do things like take this class online. Overall it is a very interesting video the way it is presented an d the history it shows of the internet and its restrictions on uses.
I picked this topic because it had plenty of items to expand on. It was something I, like most other people, use very often. I used powerpoint to creat my map because it was easier to handle and I could color code it. Also, in my experience work on Powerpoint looks more professional than other software that I could’ve used. The only experience I have with anything similar to this has been process maps, for company processes.
The chart above means the categories of the cognitive learning type according to the Bloom’s Taxonomy.
In a blog, we use every category shown above in order to write a specific topic about the news or personal blog.
The categories are:
Knowledge: Remembering the information about a specific topic.
Comprehension: Understanding the topic.
Application: Demonstrate the topic.
Analysis: Compare the topic.
Synthesis: Judge or support the topic.
Evaluation: creation of a new point of view.
Every aspect of the Bloom’s Taxonomy is necesary and useful for every individual who writes a blog or a student takes a test. It is all about knowledge and a way to apply your knowledge with a different perspective.
My group and I didn’t really communicate that much through the discussion, we didn’t notice that part of the assignment until the last day. We did communicate with each other about who was doing what, and we decided to meet to combine all our ideas. We had communicated through e-mail prior to using the discussion board.
When designing instruction you should also look at the class you are instructing for. Some classes obviously need to give less work than others, If you have long lectures in class where there is not much interaction you should probably give more work for the student to take home since they didn’t really spend time discovering anything new. Classes in which there is a lof of interaction between student and teacher usually tend to give less work for home. The age group for the class is a lso an improtant factor in designing instructions.
The myth I believed to be true when I took my first online class what that it was much easier. I mean, there’s no schedueld class, so you do whatever you need to do and in your “free time” you work on you class. Well, turns out there is not “free time”. I realized I might have been wrong about this myth when the semester was almost over and I still didn’t really know what the class was about. Safe to say I didn’t get too much sleep that week.
Other than that, I haven’t really had any false perceptions of what an online class is. It is common sense that if you sign up for it the same way as a traditional class and it costs the same…It will probably be the same level of difficulty and dedication. After all, classes aren’t designed to take your money for a grade, they are designed to measure your level of mastery over the topic.
I, like a lot of people thought that if it didn’t have the copyright symbol it wasn’t copyright. Fortunately I found out I was incorrect before I got in any trouble. I believe that the fact that the copyright laws extend to the Internet is a very intelligent thing. These laws might even have to be stricter on the Internet because anyone in the world can be exposed to the work of someone else. These laws don’t only apply to written information and drawings. These laws also affect music, and videos on the Internet.
Most of us remember the problem the company “Napster” ran into in 2001. The problem stemmed from the new type of MP3 file sharing, Napster was blamed for people being able to freely share music through Napster’s services. This type of service caused music to be released through the Internet before it was even released by the artists. This was seen by most major music labels are copyright infringement. The first lawsuit filed against Napster was from Metallica; apparently, their new release at the time was released by someone else and leaked out into the Internet. Their song had been playing on several American radio stations prior to their scheduled release date. Dr. Dre soon followed with a similar lawsuit because Napster wouldn’t remove his works from their site even after written request. Madonna, which was planning on partnering up with Napster also suffered from their service when one of the singles was leaked onto the Napster network before her scheduled in 2002.
There were instances where Napster was actually thought of as an effective promotional tool. Most of the bands that believed this were small bands that weren’t signed to any major record label. These bands did not have the means to advertise on TV or radios so they depended solely of their music being transferred to the world. Unfortunately for Napster, the bands that supported them weren’t the ones that could afford the lawyers.
Napster lost the cases against the record labels because they weren’t doing enough to prevent these copyright infringements. The Distinct Court ordered Napster to monitor its customers and block any access to infringing material, since Napster was unable to do this; they shut down their site in 2001. These lawsuits eventually led Napster to file for bankruptcy. Napster agreed to pay $26 million to the copyright owners and the artists; they also agreed to pay $10 million in future licensing royalties. On June 3rd 2002 Napster finally filed for bankruptcy.
Companies have learned from Napster’s mistakes, the way they work around this possible lawsuit is by making the services now peer-to-peer file transferring. There is no longer a centralized server that stores all of the files. Although this case may seem a bit extreme, to drive a company to bankruptcy because of a few people infringing on copyright laws, think of it this way; if the artist work hard to produce the music, shouldn’t they be the first ones to share it to the world? Also, shouldn’t they get paid for their hard work?
References
Digital Millennium Copyright Act – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act
Sandoval, G. (n.d.). Veoh wins copyright case; YouTube wins, too? : News : Internet – ZDNet Asia. Retrieved September 17, 2009, from http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/internet/0,39044908,62057760,00.htm
Thomas G. Field, Jr. | Copyright on the Internet | Pierce Law. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2009, from http://www.piercelaw.edu/thomasfield/ipbasics/copyright-on-the-internet.php
Like I said in my previous blog entry, I had something come up this week. Unfortunatly there was a death in the family. I spent most of last week putting together a Collage for her and her family taking up most of my free time. All is not bad news however, I also found out that my offer on a house had been accepted and that the paperwork is going through with all green lights. Very exciting news for my wife and I. It has really been a rollercoaster of emotions, hopefully this week everything will be “hi”s.
