Almost done with finals week. Finished two papers and two tests, and have one more of each to go. I came back from Thanksgiving break and started on a bad and exhausting note due to travel. As a result, I also missed a lot of class. So the first thing I am going to say is that I probably won’t be going back to California for Thanksgiving in the future years because come back only for two weeks and then we are home again, so it is not really worth the travel and trips that last 34 hours. Anyway starting Tuesday, I cracked down on studies. I didn’t do much for those following days, other than go to class and study. I knew that these two weeks would be really rough, but that if I felt like I did my best and finished all my stuff on time I would feel that much better when I went home. So, I told myself that I was not going to waste a lot of time procrastinating using digital media, including social networking sites. The truth was I couldn’t afford to procrastinate, especially if I wanted to get some sleep every night. Like I stated earlier I had 3 papers and 3 tests going into this week and because I focused I was able to get two of them done this weekend, and most of the third one, as well as study for my tests. I have a few more days to go and then I can relax all of break and all of January term. It will be so nice and a deserved break. I am excited to start fresh with some new courses and a new schedule next semester. I still can’t get over how fast this first semester went, its insane. Anyway, I hope everyone else had a good finals week as well and that you have a good break.

Just when I thought my trip to Middlebury in September couldn’t have been worse, I experienced a new level of bad luck. My first flight yesterday from California to Philly went very smoothly, and my second flight seemed to be on time. We got on board and went out to the runway where we sat for at least 45 minutes before the pilot told us that the weather in Burlington was so bad that they couldn’t land and that we had to sit it out for a couple hours. So a bunch of other midd kids and I were just hanging out in the airport for an hour or so waiting to hear back from US airways as to whether we would be able to get there or not. By this time I had been traveling for 12 hours. I went to the gate to check with an attendant about the flight and sure enough there was no one there to answer questions. I noticed the pilots coming off the plane ready to head home, when I knew there was something wrong. If the pilots are leaving how would we ever get there? The pilots apologized and told us that the flight was canceled and that they had no idea why no one had told us that already. Everyone was all just so oblivious to it all. It was a good thing I ran down the pilots before they left the airport because otherwise everyone would have been just waiting there for hours. So the next step was to wait in this two hour long line to get our flights rescheduled. Sure enough no flights were available for the next couple days unless you wanted to pay a fortune and switch airlines. Everyone was hectically trying to figure out an alternative route whether by different airport, car, or train. People were also figuring out where they would stay for the evening. This ties my blog post to the digital media aspect as literally every single person in line trying to figure out new planes was using some sort of device, mostly iPhones and Droids to make other accommodations. What would life have been life if we didn’t have our phones. I honestly don’t know what I would have done. Our phones are so crucial at moments like these that without them we would have been stranded. In my case, I was able to contact a friend at nearby Swarthmore College and stay with there for the night, and then book a 6:30 am morning amtrak to New york and then up to Vermont all using my little iPhone.\

People using their mobile devices to find alternative routes

Recently, for my research paper on mobile media I found many great books to look at. I usually go to the library and rent out the books to have paper copies, but a lot of the books I found online were not in the Middlebury Libary. As a result, I found them on amazon for very cheap if rented for Kindle. I was a little worried about not being able to have a paperback copy to do my research, but as I used Kindle more and more I realized how great it is. The best feature about it is that you can easily search key words, where as looking through a paperback book for some main topics could be a lot harder. Another great thing about it is its ability to take notes and highlight, while keeping track of page numbers so that when referring back to the notes it doesn’t take too long to find it. I would most definitely recommend it to future researchers. It makes organizing your books a lot easier too, allowing you to put books in special categories. It is a free application on the computer, iPad and iPhone and therefore syncs the books to all different devices. This allows you to read the book on the go if necessary. The books are relatively inexpensive, especially if you rent them, which gives you a good month or more if you want. Obviously not every book is on kindle, but most are so give it a try and you won’t regret it. It definitely helps!

P.S. Writing this from 10,000 feet about sea level in a plane heading back to school… the wonders of new technology and wifi

Almost four weeks ago I got a concussion. It was a really lame way of getting a concussion as it happened in my sleep. What I thought would be just a minor bruise, turned into a three to four week issue that prevented me from getting work done and focusing. One can never really understand the severity of a concussion until one gets one. I never knew what a big deal getting a concussion is rather than just getting a head bruise. Even when you start to feel better, you truly aren’t recovered. I would go days with a lingering headache. It tended to depend on how much rest and sleep I got the day before. If I went to three of my classes in a day I would be totally brain dead after and would not be able to do any work. Some people would think this a normal thing, but if you have ever gotten a concussion you would know that it is not normal to be a full foggy state and have blurry vision after just a few minutes of looking at your computer or trying to take notes in class. Many people in my grade in college had gotten a concussion in the few weeks or so, and as a result we bonded on the fact that we couldn’t go out at night or do homework. Some people also may think that not having to do homework is a good thing but in reality it just hurts you and causes you to be much more stressed out than you already are. It is so stressful to have to catch up on all the work that you missed and keep up with the current work. My professors were very understanding and that is the important part. I knew someone in my high school that got a concussion so badly that she was unable to go to class for 6 weeks and than had to take it really slowly to get back into the swing of things, and as a result she had to continue being schooled through the summer and took her finals almost two months later. Luckily for me, my concussion wasn’t nearly as bad, but I still probably should have taken off a few more days than I did.

The most important thing I wanted to touch on was the fact that being concussed and taking classes like digital media and computer science do not go well together at all. It is almost ironic because the first thing the doctor tells you when you get a concussion is to not look at a screen for almost a week or so. You have to be bored as you recover. Being in a digital media class and computer science class, when all you work is online, does not help the situation. It was so hard for me to recover fast because everything is on my phone and computer. I realized through this concussion that I am on my phone and am addicted to my phone way too much. I went maybe a day without looking at my phone, which probably caused my recovery time to increase unnecessarily. I never thought that looking at a screen would actually cause you to get headaches faster when concussed, but after sitting through a digital media class or working on a comp sci lab my brain would be absolutely fried. I would leave class all blurry, probably not remember anything that I had just learned, and have a headache. Basically I just did not feel right as most of the time I felt like I was in a fog. A lot of the time I would second guess myself and consider that this might just be because of lack of sleep or maybe just looking at a screen too much, or a long day of class, but as I start to fully recover I can tell that there was definitely something wrong with me at some point and that I most definitely did suffer from a concussion.

After getting a concussion, I am much more careful of my surrounding and I focus on trying to keep my head safe. People tend not to realize how important it is to keep our heads from bumping into other things, but in reality it is a huge deal and can lead to some chronic issues. The next step for me is to make sure that there are no post concussion symptoms and in a few weeks. There should not be if I continue to rest and take it easy.

The question to think about is what does the future look like for reading texts? With the new digital media age growing and coming on fast, reading an actual book is in the past. Everything is online.

A great example of this is a research project that I am doing. I had to find many sources and a lot of them were books. I looked them up on my college’s library website, and almost all of them were available online. Soon everything will be a ebook and libraries will go out of business except for the ancient texts of course. Another example of how digital texts are becoming a more popular is newspapers and magazines being easily read and delivered online. Many newspaper companies are going to soon go out of business because of the news and information that is posted free online.

Although I am specifically referring to texts going online, when it comes to engaged online texts I don’t believe they will be something that people really will adapt to so soon. They may adapt to them over a longer period of time, but for now it won’t be some that catches on for a while. It can be very confusing and hard to understand. It can be hard to navigate. The positive about it is how great it can be for education purposes. They are definitely what we should be looking forward to in the long time future, but for now we can easily still have access to normal books and ebooks and not have to worry about the integration of videos, photos, and text all in one, because for many of us that can be confusing. It is like the generations before us not really understanding how to text and use computers.

The world is changing as we [read]!

After going through the process to start creating and thinking about a lesson plan to teach students at a nearby middle school, I have come to realize that most students need more appreciation for how much a teacher puts into each lesson plan (this of course if the teacher is a good one and likes his/her job). The process is incredibly thought intensive and takes a lot of time and energy to come up with a good lesson plan. It is obviously easier when you have a utility in your class that the teacher uses as a structure for the class, like a text book, but it is still difficult to transfer information that you take from the text book and transform it into an engaging lesson. Having a specific topic to teach is also a great help to coming up with lesson plans, but like I said the topic is the easy part, the way in which you present the topic is the hard part. There are many things that come up when making a lesson. You may start with a good idea, but then decide to change it at least three or four times throughout the process. You have to think about all factors that are involved in the topic and make sure to point out the negatives and positives of the topic and the way you teach it. In my digital media class, we are going to a school nearby and teaching middle school students a lesson relating to digital media. It is definitely a exciting experience to have the students look up to you and listen to you as you are the teacher, but the important part is to make sure that you get the students excited and engaged about learning. In class we have gone through a lot of preparation, including going through many different articles on how to come up with a good lesson plan starting with some good goals and substantial essential questions.
Teaching has a lot to do with planing and coming up with a outline for your lesson, once you have a general idea for your lesson you should be confident enough to teach it!
I have a lot of respect and appreciation for teachers and professors.

In my digital media class, we were assigned to work on making a wiki page on a social media of our choosing.  I have been created a foursquare wiki.  I find the process to be very intriguing and worth talking about. I honestly had no idea where to start, so I looked up how to format things on wiki pages and made an outline with general topics.  As a I researched Foursquare, I added to the page each time I found something interesting.  I split it up into the features of the application, the uses of the application, and so on.  It made it very enjoyable to see the page grow from all different places.  I started with a struggling 100 words and now its almost 1500 words.  I think I added enough to make it a good draft that other people in my class can contribute to.  It is hard to contribute to other pages if they are not sufficiently outlined, like mine is.  The outline really allows the editor to know where the founder of the page was headed with his or her work.  I really enjoyed contributing to other pages and making it a team effort like a google doc.  The technology today has allowed producing information to be so efficient and wonderful.  For those of you who do not edit wikipedia, you should really give it a try because it can be very rewarding and fun to do.  You can see how a page can be transformed with oodles of information in just under a day.  I definitely think I will continue to edit pages in the future and move towards harder and more complex works.

This last weekend, I went to visit a friend at Cornell.  I sat in on a bunch of classes and noticed that Middlebury and Cornell have some differences and similarities in media use while in class.  I found that at a bigger school like Cornell, where most of the classes that I went to were over 200 kids, there was a lot more digital media use in distracted ways.  Middlebury students definitely use laptops and phones in class, but they definitely aren’t as distracted by their technology as Cornell kids were.   I believe this has to do with the class size and how it can be much harder for the professor at Cornell to maintain attention in such a large size class room.  I believe the class size at Middlebury is more conducive to learning than at Cornell, but still digital media can be a major distraction everywhere.  Sitting in on a big lecture was an interesting experience because I was able to observe that there were some kids that were paying attention and some kids that weren’t.  It goes to show that you can definitely learn something if you want to learn something.  I saw kids playing games on their computers, which was interesting because if you go to a big lecture like that where the teacher doesn’t know or care if you show up, than why do you even show up at all.  At Middlebury it is more important to go to class and get involved because not all the professors post their notes online and many of them take attendance and care to if people don’t show up or not. It would be nice to have some sort of balance between the two types of schools.