EdsBlog

Evidential Post #4

2007-06-04T14:14:00.000-07:00

Evidential Post #4 Ed Wesly

The problem of plagiarizing via the web is just way too easy, and many students take advantage of the ease of Google research to turn in papers that are so obviously not theirs. My colleague across the aisle from me at Harrington College of Design will go the extra nine yards to check, especially if the assignment is radically different from anything that she had received from the student previously.

The way she checks is how the students usally and simply get the material; Google it. She’ll Google the topic, and like in a case that just happened last sememster, the plagiarized source is usually in the top 5 hits. There are software programs designed to do the checking for you, especially easy if the paper is received in electronic format. This site gives a ton of them:
http://www.web-miner.com/plagiarism#tools

What happened to the student? According to the Student Handbook, anyone caught plagiarizing not only fails the assignment, but the class! Although this sounds harsh, it is a not uncommon view, viz. this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/jobs/2002/05/2002051401c.htm

The author discusses his history with the problem, and came up with these possible solutions:
1. Fail her for the course?
2. Fail the paper but allow her to remain in the course, on the condition that she signs an acknowledgment of the plagiarism that will remain in her file until graduation?
3. Give her the opportunity to rewrite the paper, and penalize the final grade by a full letter?
Being the nice guy that I am, I would go with option 3, since that makes it more work for the student, since they do have to do the research and learn the lesson to be learned there. It might also be acknowledged that it’s like the punishment of writing lines and lines of “I will not…”, a fair trade for not having the stigma of being a plagiarist and the failure F grade hanging over their academic and job heads. (This will go down in your permanent record.)

Site of the Week #1 (found)

2007-06-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

Site of the Week #1, 4/16/07
http://www.photographymuseum.com/
This is the root of the photo-historical sites in my opinion. The gentleman who runs this site was my photo history instructor at the University of Illinois way back when. He was born in the same year that I was, so he was an undergraduate teaching the class, which didn’t win him any points in academia but he had been collecting photographs since high school and even at that point had amassed a quality collection and had some esoteric photo catalogs and books published in facsimile format. So he knows his onions.
Mr. Wm. B Becker (how 19th century!) has a very well organized site, images are decently large resolutions (having stolen many for PowerPoints for my own classes) and a great selection of links.
NB This si a reconstruction of what I must have wrote originally, as I couldn’t find it on my cuip.net account or in my files, spread over 3 computers!)

Extra Credit Evidential Post

2007-05-30T14:50:00.001-07:00

Extra Credit Evidential Post Ed Wesly

I wanted to investigate the concept of furries in Second Life, plus I think I need some Extra Credit, so I am adding another EP to my blog and listserve. When I signed up for SL on the very first class at the beginning of the semester, and chose my avatar, I picked what I thought would have been a wacky combination. I was disappointed that the dragon was not available for free.

Not that I’m a gamer or whatever, I was just under the mistaken impression that everyone would be different creatures. What the heck, this is a fantasy land, no? Why not play it to the max?

Not really. Everyone else in the class had human avatars. I haven’t seen any other non-humans in my short jaunts outside of DeweyLand. (Currently I am at war with my ISP, EarthLink, and can’t leisurely go to SL from home. I have to go to an NLU lab to SL, as the firewall prevented me from logging on at work.)

So I had to figure out if I really am an oddball in SL as in real life, so I checked out some blogs and other info on the cult of the furries to see who gets the animal avatars on purpose. As to be surmised, if I had put on my thinking cap it would be people who are not happy with their appearances in real life, or those who are nuts about animals and have a fantasy about being a squirrel or something else. I guess it’s a safer fantasy than being a human male who chooses to be a lipstick lesbian in SL. Anyhow, I doubt if any of the human avatars with buff guys and bosomy gals are like that in real life.

So I walked around a bit in Luskwood to see what it would be like in the realm of the furries. People were discussing making textures and stuff like that. I walked around on a cool tree fort(?) I didn’t see any of the abuse that is mentioned in the sites below, but then I didn’t get to the border between the furry land and the humanoids.

I guess that just like in RL, one needs a guide to show where to go for the cool stuff. But it was different seeing non-human avatars walking around.

http://furnation.com/index.php?act=home

http://furry.wikia.com/wiki/Second_Life

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

http://slhistory.org/index.php/Main_Page

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/09/second-lifes-user-database-breached/

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/04/furry_like_me.html

URL catchup

2007-05-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

Here are the URL's for my assignments:

Hotlist: http://cuip.net/~ewesly/PHOTOGRAPHIC%20HISTORY%20HOT%20LIST%20OF%20WEB%20SITES.doc

PowerPoint: http://cuip.net/~ewesly/Why%20Teachers%20Should%20Have%20Their%20Own%

WebQuest: http://cuip.net/~ewesly/WebQuest/

Site of the Week #4

2007-05-30T14:21:00.000-07:00

Site of the Week of 5/28/07, Ed Wesly

Maybe I should change my career and become a history teacher, as most of my picks have had something to do with days gone by. But this site is about days gone by that didn’t go by. What the heck are you talking about you might ask? This is a site that looks at the future as seem from the past, fulfilling the Social Studies Standard, explain the contributions of individuals and groups who are featured in biographies, legends, folklore and traditions. And by folklore I mean characters that are twentieth century inventions, like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc.

The site’s URL is http://www.fabiofeminofantascience.org/ . It is an amazing compilation of retro-future; the future as seen in the past. Yes, the fantasy strips of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Mars Attacks, etc. are all here, plus proposals for things that were never built by the great 20th Century designers like Norman Bel Geddes, Buckminster Fuller, Raymond Loewy, etc. The site’s owner has gone overboard in uploading high quality scans of original material on this site.

The study of the past can come alive if we look at what they thought would come to pass in an era that they wouldn’t necessarily live through but what we are experiencing now in our lifetimes. They were way off on computers, although there are a lot of forecasts on thinking machines. Space flight was one of their big fantasies, and although we have seen it happen, it is not the commonplace occurrence that the ancients would have liked to see. But there are plenty of paintings by the likes of Chesley Bonestell and Frank Paul, which are great astronomical views.

So if you are a Social Studies teacher and maybe even a Science teacher, or just interested in the history of technology, this is a great site to explore. And it’s pretty big, so you can spend a lot of time there. There is a problem, and that is the site is in Italian, but the pictures are pretty much self-explanatory.

Catchup

2007-05-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

NLU Blog

5/18/07; Finally getting it together at work to post all this old blog stuff, since I was out of commission or erratically on line.

5/17/07: Finally just moved all the junk, modem, laptop, etc. down to the basement where the DSL line comes in. Still no signal. Called Earthlink yet again. They concluded I needed a new modem. It’s out of warranty. Either cough up almost a $100, or get it for free with a 12 month commitment to them. Choke. Well, that solves the perennial problem, but now I’m out of action for sure for a few more days.

It really upsets me that this thing has gone down in less than 2 years. I though that was the advantage of solid state devices (transistorized) over that of tubes; it should last forever. But no, this thing that just sits there and blinks is dead! The only good thing to say is that this is another donation to the pile of consumer electronic detritus that can become artwork.

5/14/07 Class in Lisle. It was fun riding the bike out to the Lisle campus, but the traffic on the Stevenson was very unpleasant. How can people do this on a daily basis?

Got there and met some of my classmates, Lucy Frost and Mary Wenzel, names familiar from last semester, Lucy’s avatar I could recognize in SL, Mary is Suri McMahon, for purposes of anonymity. Later I met Sandy Voom and Kumari Roberts.

Craig was a half hour late, having had to go further than me. We did our SL session, still needs some getting used to. Put my big foot in my mouth by volunteering to upload my ppt into SL.

5/10/07 Started pestering Earthlink as to why I am not getting DSL signals. It has been more erratic than ever, and not weather related. All kinds of test, they would talk to the vendor, the phone line people and get back to me.

Also on 5/10, talked to my friend at the Institute, Alexis, about why I didn’t return to his SL site. I asked him about his experiences with SL, and he was quite puzzled as to how you could really run a class using it. I am still not so sure either.

I inquired about what his impressions the rest of the SL world was like, and he said there was a lot of sleaze, and gambling. But on a brighter note he did mention that next time we met in SL, he would take me to some art related sites. Which kind of makes sense that there could be a thriving art community there, since you could make sculptures and installations that would be inpossible in real life. But then again, you got to put up with the visual representation of SL. But it’s better than just writing or talking about it!

5/10/07 Site of the Week #3
Photo-History is one of the classes I teach, and thanks to the impetus that this class gives me I keep going deeper and discovering more sites than the obvious.

This one, http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/links/photo.htm#Photographs is not only of use to photo-historians but to anyone teaching (or just interested) in the Civil War. Computer savvy image collectors are populating the Net with so many more obscure photos than any book could publish, and these glimpse into the past help make the era come alive. The captions under each might add up to more than you might ever want to know about the 19th century.

5/10/07 EVIDENTIAL POST #3:
But just to reassure everyone that there are more than just harmless oddballs on Second Life, there is a letter to the Savage Love column in the Chicago Reader wherein a married guy opens up a SL account, adopting a beautiful woman avatar, just to indulge in his fantasy of Lesbian sex. Chicago Reader, May 4, 2007, p.24; also look (at your own risk) at savagelove.net.

5/10/07 continued
I still keep debating on whether or not this on-line education is a good idea, and the wisdom of these Second Life meetings. It seems like some kind of video game, or whatever. I picked a cartoon for an avatar, unlike anyone else. Oh well, I’ve always been an oddball!
5/6/07: Decided to go and explore Second Life. Arrived at Dewey Jung’s, it was weird gong there when no one else was around, I felt like a home invader.

Went outside the place to walk, got bounced whenever I crossed property lines. I didn’t see any private property markers. So I looked at a map for a destination, found a place to go to, not much happening there. It looked like a sleazy night club, forgot the name. Couldn’t see what the hub-bub was all about

Checked to see if a colleague of mine from the School of the Art Institute, Alexis Petroff, was at his SL Home. He’s one of the librarians there, and told me that he had made some interactive sculptures in SL. He was home, so he teleported me there.

It was a totally different scene from Dewey’s. He had designed his whole environment, from the house/gallery. The sculpture he had made was like a bunch of Frisbees stuck in the ground, and when you walked through them women’s voices, singing a variety of notes were sounded. It was pretty cool, the only thing lacking was better resolution.

But then my avatar was not responding properly. I would tell it to move forward, but then it wouldn’t, so I gave it more commands, then it started moving but ended up smacking into a wall. Daruma asked if I were all right, it looked like I was drunk, so I said I would log on again and come right back, but my connection went dead after that.

That has been a perennial nightmare with me. Whenever it rains or gets humid, the DSL goes down. Usually I can wait it out, the Internet is not all that important to me, it always comes back when it dries out. I subscribe to Earthlink, but the phone lines are AT&T, and I don’t think they care too much about being a vendor when they can have the account.

PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY HOT LIST OF WEB SITES

#1. http://www.photographymuseum.com/
One of the best places to start. Run by the gentleman who taught the photo-history class that I took at the U of I, it features plenty of scholarly dissertations on his “exhibitions” which are pieces from his collection of 40+ years.

The FOUNDING FATHERS of PHOTOGRAPHY
These sites would fall under the Social Studies Standard, explain the contributions of individuals and groups who are featured in biographies, legends, folklore and traditions.

#2. http://www.daguerre.org/
Although named after the French inventor of the first practical photo process this is an American site. Members post images from their collections for scholars to review. It is on of the best pictorial histories of the mid 19th century!

#3. http://www.niepce.com/
Named after Daguerre’s predecessor and partner, this French site is the web presence of the Museum dedicated to Nicephore Niepce, who made the earliest surviving photographs (although not in a perfected form).

#4. http://www.r-cube.co.uk/fox-talbot/
Another site dedicated to an inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, the father of the negative-positive process. Lots of his images and others.

PRIMITIVE PHOTOGRAPHIC TECHNOLOGY
These sites could fall under the Science Standard, Concepts and Principals: 12: Understand the fundamental concepts, principles and interconnections of the life, physical and earth/space sciences.

#5. http://www.precinemahistory.net/index.html
An incredible site done for the love of it. The basic principles of optics start the site, and it gets into great detail on the developments necessary to make moving pictures.

#6. http://www.stereographica.com/index.html
An antiques auction, with all the merchandise superbly photographed, with images of devices that are only mentioned in passing in the standard photo-history tomes.

#7 http://www.visual-media.be/visualmedia.html
Great views of a variety of apparatus that make images.

#8. http://www.ccsd.ca/charlotte/dagazine/mi/exhibit/brochure.htm
A gentleman named Matt Isenring had found a complete daguerreotype studio and has very nicely shown how it works on the web.

#9. http://www.canon.com/camera-museum/
A companion piece to the above, this webseum lists all the models that Canaon has ever made, making it useful for those who collect cameras or just happen into one.

#10. http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/
A well-deatiled history of the process, but not animated like # or #. Not enough images to suit me, but lots of good historical documentation.

#11. http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/
Another site from the UK, this one is not as specific as the above, as it embraces film and video as well as photography.

#12. http://www.historiccamera.com/
A member’s list of current items to be bought and sold.

#13. http:/nbtv.org/
Narrow Band Television is the acronym, and this site heralds an obsolete system of televison, wherein the image is scanned not by moving beams of electrons bu mechanically, by rotating discs. The earlisets recorded televisons images from 1927 (believe it or not!) are linked to this site.

HISTORY FLESHED OUT BY PHOTOGRAPHY
There’s never enough budget to put lots of pictures in books. Thanks to these kinds of web sites, glimpses into every day life and newsmakers are copiously available! They fall under Social Studies Standards, A. Apply the skills of historical analysis and interpretation. Describe how people in different times and places viewed the world in different ways. 16.B.1a (US) Identify key individuals and events in the development of the local commu¬nity (e.g., Founders days, names of parks, streets, public buildings). 16.B.1 (W) Explain the contributions of individuals and groups who are featured in biographies, legends, folklore and traditions. 16.A.1a Explain the difference between past, present and future time; place themselves in time. 16.A.1b Ask historical questions and seek out answers from historical sources (e.g., myths, biographies, stories, old photographs, artwork, other visual or electronic sources).

#14. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/daghome.html
Our tax dollars put to superb use! This is the photo collection of the American Memories that is mentioned in the Leu, etc. book. One of the beautiful things about this site is that you can download high quality, high resolution images that you can print out for your own classroom or gift-giving purposes.

#15. http://www.eastmanhouse.org/
America’s premier photographic history museum at George Eastman, the founder of Kodak’s house. They recently eased up on what you can see.

#16. http://www.rps.org/
Founded in 1853, the Royal Photographic Society has moved into the 21st Century with their web site, which includes a large collection of historical photos that can be accessed if you are a member.

#17. http://www.autochrome.com/Autochrome-centenaire/Accueil.html
A site dedicated to an early 20th century color photographic process. A great collection of images from the process’s heyday, 1900 to 1930, gives a glimpse into an era that is normally illustrated in the more ubiquitous B & W, so for scholars interested in what the colors of that era were like, this is it.

#18. http://www.photolondon.org.uk/
A whole site dedicated to photographs of London from the birth of photography to the present, along with history of the photographers themselves.

#19. http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/links/photo.htm#Photographs
Not immediately obvious from its URL, this is a site dedicated solely to photographs from the American Civil War. These labors-of-love type sites have an incredible amount of scholarship involved, going into such trivia as the tax stamp on photographs that helped finance the Civil War!

#20. http://www.dimbola.co.uk/
Dimbola was the name of Julia Margaret Cameron’s home. She stood out in Vicotrian England as she was an amateur photographer who recorded the poet laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson and his circle of friends, plus tried to illustrate his “Idylls of the King” photographically.

#21. http://www.photoquotes.com/
Normally letting a picture tell the story, here are collected hundreds of quotes by photographers. Literature standard

#22. http://www.popphotographica.com/home.html
Silly items collected by the web site owner that have a photographic image on them. Although some are kitschy, many are examples of how people in the 19th century incorporated photography into their daily lives.

#23. http://www.stereo.canonia.pl/
An incredible gallery of 3-D images, presented in the anaglyphic format,w hihc means you need the red and blue glasses to view them. The stereo viewer was the television of the 19th century, no home was without one, and there were tens of thousands of different images for sale. Again, this site is a treasure trove of images to see how people lived and worked and what were considered interesting sights back then, a boon for the student of history.

ANTIQUE AND ALTERNATE PROCESSES (Do-It-Yourselfers)
The sites below would fall in the Science Learning Standards, encompassing Science Goal 11 of Inquiry and Design: Understand the processes of scientific inquiry and technological design to investigate questions, conduct experiments and solve problems. A. Know and apply the concepts, principles and processes of scien¬tific inquiry. B. Know and apply the concepts, principles and processes of tech¬nological design.

#24. www.photoformulary.com
The most reliable way to get photographic chemicals to perform experiments. Maybe not up to Science standards, this site makes it easy for science teachers (or anyone) to get recipes that work and the chemistry for them.

#25. http://albumen.stanford.edu/
How to make light sensitive coatings using egg whites!

#26. http://www.f295.org/
A site dedicated to backyard inventors of personal cameras, usually using a pinhole as the imaging optic.

#27. http://www.alternativephotography.com/
Plenty of recipes for creating light-sensitive coating, some without any toxic chemicals. They are touting a process using casein, or stale milk, something I have never heard of!

#28. http://www.rockaloid.com/
Gotta love that URL name, which is a contraction of Rockland Colloid. Prepackaged chemistry which can be coated onto practically anything, like tee shirts, metal, rocks, lasagna noodles, etc.
apply the concepts, principles and processes of scien¬tific inquiry. B. Know and apply the concepts, principles and processes of tech¬nological design.

#29. http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?act=HomePageAct
The Canon Digital Learning Center (dlc) is of course a Canon site, but their explanations of how digital cameras work can be applied to any manufacturer’s chips.

#30. http://lensbabies.com/
A Lensbaby is a single element lens that is equipped with a focusing mount for a wide variety of contemporary cameras, conventional and digital. Besides making “arty” photos with lots of unsharpness, they are useful for showing the problems that have been conquered by lens designers, namely the seven deadly aberrations.

#31. http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/pf-faq.html
A site that answers Frequently Asked Questions on general photography

#32. http://www.jumbo.th.com/application.html
A site devoted to making photographic prints of the most colorful kind, called gum bichromate. The bichromate it the light sensitive substance, but water color pigment is added to it, so that images of any color can be made!

#33. http://pinholeresource.com/
A site devoted to making images using no lenses, just a pinhole in a piece of metal as the imaging optic! Lots of fun for students

#34. http://www.pinhole.com/
Similar to the above, but is more concerned with images rather than technology.

#35. http://www.photographysites.com/
Gee, I wish that I had run into this one first! This is a site cataloguing sites on photography.

3-D IMAGING
These sites definitely encompass Science Goal 11 of Inquiry and Design: Understand the processes of scientific inquiry and technological design to investigate questions, conduct experiments and solve problems. A. Know and apply the concepts, principles and processes of scien¬tific inquiry. B. Know and apply the concepts, principles and processes of tech¬nological design.

#36. http://holographyforum.org/
A place to start when looking for FAQ’s on photography with a laser, holography, and friendly members who are always happy to help, including myself. Learning Standards: This website encompasses

#37. http://www.holokits.com/
A place to go to get everything you need to start student shooting holograms!

#38. http://www.stereoscopy.com/
A big site that has everything that anyone would ever need to know about making 3-dimensional photos.

#39. http://3dculture.com/occ/Panoram_time4space_wiggle.htm
A new way of presenting 3 images that requires no viewing goggles! Anyone can make these using an image editing program.

MISCELLANEOUS
#40. http://www.worth1000.com/
It’s always said that a picture is worth a 1000 words, and here is a site that proves it. Many unique and cool images, almost always doctored in PhotoShop, always good for a laugh. If you are the type that likes to send sight gags to your friends, here’s a bunch of them!

5/6/07: Decided to go and explore Second Life. Arrived at Dewey Jung’s, it was weird gong there when no one else was around, I felt like a home invader.

Went outside the place to walk, got bounced whenever I crossed property lines. I didn’t see any private property markers. So I looked at a map for a destination, found a place to go to, not much happening there. It looked like a sleazy night club, forgot the name. Couldn’t see what the hub-bub was all about

Checked to see if a colleague of mine from the School of the Art Institute, Alexis Petroff, was at his SL Home. He’s one of the librarians there, and told me that he had made some interactive sculptures in SL. He was home, so he teleported me there.

It was a totally different scene from Dewey’s. He had designed his whole environment, from the house/gallery. The sculpture he had made was like a bunch of Frisbees stuck in the ground, and when you walked through them women’s voices, singing a variety of notes were sounded. It was pretty cool, the only thing lacking was better resolution.

But then my avatar was not responding properly. I would tell it to move forward, but then it wouldn’t, so I gave it more commands, then it started moving but ended up smacking into a wall. Daruma asked if I were all right, it looked like I was drunk, so I said I would log on again and come right back, but my connection went dead after that.

That has been a perennial nightmare with me. Whenever it rains or gets humid, the DSL goes down. Usually I can wait it out, the Internet is not all that important to me, it always comes back when it dries out. I subscribe to Earthlink, but the phone lines are AT&T, and I don’t think they care too much about being a vendor when they can have the account.

5/6/07: Decided to go and explore Second Life. Arrived at Dewey Jung’s, it was weird gong there when no one else was around, I felt like a home invader.

Went outside the place to walk, got bounced whenever I crossed property lines. I didn’t see any private property markers. So I looked at a map for a destination, found a place to go to, not much happening there. It looked like a sleazy night club, forgot the name. Couldn’t see what the hub-bub was all about

Checked to see if a colleague of mine from the School of the Art Institute, Alexis Petroff, was at his SL Home. He’s one of the librarians there, and told me that he had made some interactive sculptures in SL. He was home, so he teleported me there.

It was a totally different scene from Dewey’s. He had designed his whole environment, from the house/gallery. The sculpture he had made was like a bunch of Frisbees stuck in the ground, and when you walked through them women’s voices, singing a variety of notes were sounded. It was pretty cool, the only thing lacking was better resolution.

But then my avatar was not responding properly. I would tell it to move forward, but then it wouldn’t, so I gave it more commands, then it started moving but ended up smacking into a wall. Daruma asked if I were all right, it looked like I was drunk, so I said I would log on again and come right back, but my connection went dead after that.

That has been a perennial nightmare with me. Whenever it rains or gets humid, the DSL goes down. Usually I can wait it out, the Internet is not all that important to me, it always comes back when it dries out. I subscribe to Earthlink, but the phone lines are AT&T, and I don’t think they care too much about being a vendor when they can have the account.

Ed Wesly Evidence Based Posting #2 for 4/23/07:

The Internet: The Best Thing to Have Come Along Since Sodium Hyposulfite for the Teaching of Photo-History.

The History of Photography and Imaging is one of the courses that I teach at Harrington College of Design. Although there are many survey textbooks that are available on the subject, they all have one major drawback: there aren’t as many images as one would like. The problem is not just judicious editing due to lack of space, but the high production costs of putting images next to text.

But thanks to scanners and the need for not so high res images for display on monitors, hundreds of images by photographers can be easily accessed using Google Image Search. And all the collectors who are anxious to share their finds have their own web sites. Some sites, like stereographica.com, illustrate devices that I have only read about, and some things that I have never even heard of!

The evidence is that I have accumulated approximately 5,000 images for my class, and although many are from books, the others are from sites as cited below to amplify the one or two images sprinkled in the classic texts.

One caveat: there is a need for the student to experience daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, and etceteratypes before rushing off into the digital world. Photographs, especially 19th century ones, have a physical presence that is hard to emulate on a monitor.

4/30/07: Getting all panicky about the class. Trying to rationalize that it wasn’t or isn’t my fault that things are late. It’s too much work.
.
Even thought about dropping out of the program. Why should I be doing all this meaningless work. I can’t see exactly the point.

When I wised up, the point of looking at ten sites didn’t seem too unusual. This is how I can categorize all the things that I hate about this goofy computer stuff. A sampling of ten ought to show more than enough things that extend form the slick to the crummy.

Realized that this program should provide the credentials to pay off in professional advancement when I was told that CEC was thinking of going blended courses in the not too distant future. If I can establish myself as an in-house expert, then there is job security, or one would hope.

Trying to figure out what is the goal of this course; just what are we supposed to get out of it. It is rather hard to figure out. The other NLU on-line classes have also been like that. For instance, the FND class, a bunch of articles, somewhat related, I am only surmising their connection. But there is nothing that ties things together, like a lecture/discussion. Fill in some vague reasons. Read the articles. Write what you think about them. Get it in on time. Hopefully you’ll pass.

So I decided to think about what I want out of this course. Or if I got handed this course, what I would teach.

The latter would be kind of hard to achieve, since I am really kind of like a babe in the woods when it comes to the Web. There are a couple of forums that I post at, and even contribute to their little Wiki on holography. Somebody had previously worked the bugs for these sites, providing the php template. But what is a php template, etc. I need to know more!

So what do I need to know more about? Certainly my goal is to set up my own killer site for my own personal aggrandizement, the worlds’ coolest web site on holography as an art form. So how do the latest assignments relate to that kind of business.

Going to web sites can be aggravating. Some are poorly done, things take forever to load, and a variety of other complaints. Here with this rubric jive I have a chance to catalog what I don’t like.

So what seems like an extra step is necessary when you start looking and you see other things that you couldn’t foresee in your rubric. Like when I went to the highly regarded by the book mathforum.com, it wanted a fee! I didn’t figure out that point in my first iteration of my rubric.

As Nam June Paik said, he likes to learn more about technology in order to hate it more.

Site of the Week #2, 4/30/07
http://www.precinemahistory.net/
This is another photo history site that could be included in a Physics class that explores the history of optical technology. The author of the site has painstakingly researched every minutiae regarding the developments in optics that led up to the capture of motion, cinematography. It is arranged by decades and is illustrated profusely.

Second Life Experience

2007-04-19T08:05:00.000-07:00

Second Life Experience To say the least, it was a little different than being in a classroom. There are plenty of interesting distractions, so it will probably take a while for the novelty to wear off.

It is still awkward for me to navigate my character, and due to the software it doesn’t seem that the motion will be as good as some video games. But the characters do move, and it looks like their hands are typing if their real people are, and if there is no activity with the real people for a while, then the characters seem to fall asleep. There are even yawns that can be conjured up, much to the consternation of the teacher.

The hardest part for me to deal with in SL is the same thing that I had commented on in my last semester’s class, that the chat room experience is more like something that could have been invented in the 19th century, like “Mr. Edison’s Teletypewritergraph”. You type, and someone responds at a distance. It’s a little more sophisticated than a telegraph and its Morse Code, but not as sophisticated as a telephone which transmits voice immediately.

Which makes communication in a group somewhat weird. Typing, which is not my forte, as I still have to look at the keyboard, from lack of discipline in high school typing class, so that slows me down. Plus I am so persnickety about spelling; I have to check it before I send. But it doesn’t seem to bother most people when confronted with misspellings in the heat of the game. The thoughts come up, but then there is this delay in transmission by not vocalizing the verbalizations.

My own sentiments are that there is no substitute for face to face learning in a classroom environment. Not only is speech used, with its modulations so that meaning is more readily apparent, but there is of course the body language and eye contact that really helps the communication.

Not that I am not open to looking at new modalities. Will the classroom of the future be totally on-line? As for the subjects I am teaching right now, since they are so demonstration intensive, I couldn’t see it. Of course it could be said that the demos could be viewed on line, but then again it all could be faked.

To paraphrase a slogan from the Gay Rights movement, “It’s here, it’s queer, get used to it.” There are enough forces academically and commercially that are propelling the movement to have these virtual classrooms. It will be interesting to see where it all ends up.

So I am willing to play around with this SL business, to see what are its advantages and disadvantages. It definitely slows down the learning exchange, since the motions are awkward and communication is slowed down due to the typing.

It sounds like not everyone is as open-minded as myself and there is a little bit of a possibility of mutiny. And I can see the point of why go through all this monkey motion of having this virtual world be the classroom? What is the real advantage of having your avatars? If the point is to simply chat, then why have a setting?

I find it kind of humorous to the objections that there are things there that would best not be seen. Being a bohemian artist type, where anything goes, not too much disturbs me. It’s a cartoon world, and you can always teleport away from the scene of the crime. But what I don’t find humorous, actually downright disturbing, is that it seems that Dr C. has been side-stepped and complaints lodged with administration re the SL, which is every teacher’s nightmare.

We shall see what happens next time!

Test

2007-04-02T14:46:00.001-07:00

Hey, is this thing working?