Monthly Archives: November 2013

Realizations in The Wake of Tragedy

Taken By Denisse DLC

Taken By Denisse DLC

Just 30 minutes ago I saw one Facebook post that lead me to Google for facts. “R.I.P Paul Walker” were the words. Now, seeing as how internet hoaxes go around easily, I thought to myself that it was a really cruel joke. I proceeded to Google for information and found out that it was true, he had passed. Now, I will say I hope he rests in peace and the entire ordeal is a bit shocking and unexpected. But it did lead me to realize some things about media. How did this information spread so quickly?

For me, one Facebook post lead me to discover the NY Post article online. I called my friend, a die hard fan only to get the reaction, “Stop playing with me Denisse.” But she also Googled and she also found that I was unfortunately speaking the truth. I go back on Facebook and now there are TONS of posts dedicated to the late actor. Now I’m thinking, okay seriously how is this traveling so quickly.

I sign onto my Instagram and pictures are on the popular page and some of my friends have posted pictures of the actor. News does indeed travel very quickly and it’s all because of the various social media sites we use to communicate and the rates at which we are on such sites. I feel like the entire incident and the news of the incident blew up proportionately because of the fact that there are so many people on these social media sites that information travels fast.

The way that people obtain information today is very different than before. I feel like now you might gain information without really looking for it. How many times have people watched videos on Youtube because of links to pages on friends Facebook profiles? Or read a news article because someone commented on a link to that article on Facebook and it showed up on their news feed. Everything is honestly interconnected and because of this we have a large pot of ways to gain access to information; whether that be willingly or unwillingly.

I will say that having this realization is something that came out of no where, to just sit and think about how fast some people were learning of this tragic news inspired me to write this.

Isn’t it crazy though – it’s almost as if we’re all learning some things together.

Holiday Season

One of the best things about the holiday season is how little I depend on my computer.  I have spent the past few days with my friends and family, celebrating Thanksgiving and quickly transitioning into decorating for Christmas.  I am the biggest Christmas fanatic you will ever meet, so on the way back from our Thanksgiving dinner in New Hampshire, we were already blasting the Christmas tunes.  Friday was spent hanging Christmas lights outside, dancing around the house, and putting up every single decoration we own.  We even set the dining room table with holiday colors, and essentially had a Christmas dinner on the day after Thanksgiving.  Why did we do this?  Besides the fact that it’s never too early for Christmas, I wanted the house to be perfect the next time I am home.  I am always incredibly spirited throughout the month of December — I wear a different Christmas sweater every day (they get progressively worse as the month goes on) and I’m all about the Christmas lights everywhere.  But because I’ll be away for the first two weeks of December this year, I wanted to make sure I leave everything so the transition is seamless when I arrive back home on December 15th.  Today, I went to one of our local grocery stores to pick up a baby Christmas tree.  The entire staff outside was laughing at me and judging me so hard as I ran around all the trees and tried to find the best one for my dorm room.  Ok, so I’m bringing a fake tree because of the dumb fire safety regulations, but I still got a mini tree just to have one at home.

Throughout all of this madness and fun, I realized that I hadn’t been on my computer much in the past few days.  This seems to happen a lot around this time of the year, and I guess it just happens often on breaks, too.  There’s so much to do and so little time, that it seems wrong to waste it on my computer.  Bad news for the homework I have to do, but great news for my happiness.  I think it’s worth taking some time away from school work and spending it exactly how you want to.  Now I’m just counting down until the day I finish finals and turn my computer off to head back home for the holidays.

Get ready for my Christmas sweaters, see you all on Tuesday.

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Wi-Fi Dependency

It’s always a little sad when you’re sitting in a well-furnished house in a nice neighborhood in suburban Baltimore with a latte in one hand and a cracker slathered in expensive cheese in the other, and yet you’re comparing your experience to living in a third world country. This was precisely my moment of depressing entitlement on Wednesday afternoon. The cause of my grievance? Unreliable Wi-Fi. At some point down the line the first world decided Wi-Fi was an inalienable human right, and that we are entitled to access to the internet at all times. It wasn’t even that there was no internet – no, the problem was just that internet access was sporadic, shutting on and off every couple of hours or so. Every couple of hours! Do you know how lucky we are to have a power grid – let alone an internet grid – that doesn’t shut off every five minutes? Most people in the world don’t even have reliable access to power and clean water, and yet here I was, about to bite into a piece of cheese whose name I couldn’t even pronounce, and whining because I had to turn the wireless modem off and on again. I’m more than a little ashamed.

To be fair to me, I did have work to do – I had to turn in a freelance writing assignment via email – but it wasn’t like I was utterly without access to the internet. There was a desktop plugged into a landline right five feet away, so I just loaded my work onto a flash drive and, lamenting the extra three minutes it took, sent it off.

I wonder at what point Wi-Fi became a prerequisite for productivity. I can’t imagine doing my homework without my laptop, and to me my laptop means internet – web browsers, email, etc. The thought of being without Wi-Fi when I was trying to work legitimately scared me. There’s a reason for this. Many of our applications have come to rely on constant internet connection, whether for updates, for retrieving information, or even for basic use. Without the internet laptops are no longer as powerful. They’re just fragmented devices that can do a few things like word processing and photo editing. At a certain point the cost of the machine and the power to run it was no longer enough. We began having to build in the cost of internet service, the cost of constant connection to a network. The price, much more than the monetary cost, is that we have become dependent on Wi-Fi and the internet in general. This is not a bad thing, per se, as internet connections are pretty much a given in most parts of the developed world, but I wonder if we’re setting ourselves up for a situation where our dependence on the internet – I’m thinking about things like online banking – could fall prey to cracks in the system, and we could end up in a situation where all the information stored in the cloud (read: giant server farms in California) is either lost or rendered inaccessible. Do we, a connected generation, have the resiliency to bounce back if we suddenly lose our connection?

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Technology Over Break

Break has been in one word- awesome. It has been so nice to catch up with my friends and family, some of whom I have not seen in three months. I have noticed, however, a significant change in my technology use. Perhaps it is the hours of waiting for food to be fully cooked or the frequency with which other people at home use technology compared to my friends at Middlebury, but whatever the reason, I have been texting and Snapchatting much more since I have been home. In the Logue household, Snapchat is a fun way to cram as many Logues as possible into a 2×4 picture. We take Snapchats as a means of connecting in that moment with each other, in addition to connecting with the recipients of our crowded Snaps. At Middlebury, I use Snapchat frequently, but I use it more as a means of keeping in touch with my friends from home than as a means of capturing a moment.

That’s all for now! Hope everyone is having a great break!

 

Teaching at a Middlebury Unified Middleschool

When I first went to the middleschool, I felt prepared and ready to go after all the preparations that were done. What I didn’to account for was the nerves that I had when I saw all the kids infront of me. Public speaking is not my forte and as a result, I was not able to think as straight as I hope during my discussion. The kids at the middleschool were great and I was very thankful that we had an attentive class that wanted to do our assignment. It is true that teachers really have a hard job and putting together a lesson plan even if it is only for a half an hour can be really difficult. The amount of thought that had to go into each part of a lesson plan is a lot. Many revision are essential to create a plan that will work under all circumstances. Sometimes you can’t account for everything and as a result, being able to do some improvisational thinking can be really important. Teaching was really fun and a great learning experience that I hope to have at another point in my college career and maybe later on in life.

The Frustrations of Travel

As I sit on the break bus bound for Boston, feelings of irritation and anger surge through me. The bus left at 4:30 and was expected to arrive at South Station around 8:30. It is 8:30 right now and we are still 45 minutes away from South Station. Unfortunately for me, Boston is not my final stop. I live in Maine so I have to take another bus that goes to Portland, a bus that leaves at 9:15. Over the past four hours, I have watched the bus fall more and more behind schedule and now it is official, I am going to miss my bus to Portland. The next bus that runs to Portland isn’t until 10:15 so it looks like I will be spending some time in South Station.

This was certainly not how I expected my night to go. As of this morning my family was coming to meet me at South Station, we were going to have dinner together, and then I was going to go home and see my dog and my boyfriend. Now I will not be home until at least midnight. Transportation is great in general, but on days like these, it frustrates me like no other.

Missing School

During my Senior year of high school, I missed over fifty days of school between the months of January and
April alone due to ski racing. Throughout high school, I missed a almost unreasonable amount of school due to ski racing. Now, I find myself super stressed out because I missed two days of school. I barely finished my DML research paper and had to take a Spanish midterm via fax early yesterday morning and I have yet to start any of my readings for other classes (which are substantial). Yet, it also made me realize the importance of digital media in one’s ability to miss school.

Imagine missing school without the Internet. Imagine having to send Professor Mittell your essay via Fax. I had no idea how to use a fax machine. Someone at the front desk of the condo complex we are staying at had to show me how to use it. I have no real way of knowing if it actually worked or not. Being able to use tools like email are vital to communication between professor and student while they are absent. Bein able to conduct research online opposed to having to use hard copies of everything makes writing papers much easier and viable for the absent student. Being able to talk to fellow classmates via social media and text messaging is crucial for knowing what was discussed in class. None of this mattered as much during high school. Missing class was not as vital to your standing in the class as it is now. I rarely if ever did homework while missing school in high school. Now, I miss one class and I feel stressed out. It will certainly be interesting to see how this continues this winter as I miss more school for ski raicng.

– Murph

Teaching at MUMS

I thought that teaching at the middle school was a very interesting experience because the challenges of teaching and the challenges of conveying the ideas behind digital media. The teaching portion was more challenging than I expected. I was certianly grateful for the opportunity to work with the education class prior to our lesson because they pushed me to put more and more detail into my lesson, which helped a lot. When first thinking about teaching the lesson, it seems like it will be an easier thing to do than in reality. I found that getting the class going and brining them into the lesson was more difficult than expected, but one the students were engaged the lesson improved.

I think one of my mistakes was overestimating the intellectual capabilities of my class. Middle school is definitely a tricky time to tell who is at what stage in their learning curve, which made things more difficult. I found that my assumption that the students would be able to grasp the term of digital media grammar was a bit of a reach, but I think they still ended up enjoying the lesson. Hopefully it at least got them thinking more critically about what is going on behind the scenes of the digital media they consume each day. Also, I felt that maybe because the students are so entrentched in digital media on a daily basis, it was more difficult for them to break into the idea that there were things going on behind the scenes.

Overall, I felt it was a very cool experience. I feel that I learned a lot about teaching from the experience. Also, by trying to break down the concept of digital media grammar, I feel that my own grasp on the subject has grown immensely.

Teaching n stuff

I think students more often than not take teachers for granted. It takes a lot of work and preparation to make an outline for a single session, not to mention an entire semester for several different classes. Weird to think of it now that I’ve tried it out – sort of. Then there is the presentation component of teaching, something students see every day but again, don’t appreciate. It’s a tough job, at any level.

I think if I learned anything from my experience at MUMS it was just that. I don’t really have much else to say about it. If I were to give pointers, I would say: 1. Be prepared (seriously though, know what and how you want to teach, allocate time, etc.) 2. Speak up and with enthusiasm, grasp the student’s attention. 3. Be confident, you run those kids, let them know who’s boss.

All in all, good experience. Something every student should try once.

Teaching at MUMS

Last Friday, Meg and I had the pleasure of teaching an 8th grade computer class at the MUMS. It was a great experience and I think Meg and I did a great job. The title of our lesson was “Communication and Collaboration: How to Use Facebook and Twitter…Educationally.” We talked about how Facebook and Twitter can be used to collaborate with classmates outside of the classroom. Specifically, we taught them how to create groups, ask questions, and share information on Facebook. We taught them about following informative accounts on Twitter and using a class hashtag.

Our lesson plan was pretty simple. Our hook was a cool online pool, exactly like the one we had in DML, in which we asked about their Facebook and Twitter use. Jan, the teacher or the class, told us that most of the kids used Facebook and Twitter but our poll proved otherwise. Only a few kids used each. Jan told she thought they weren’t being honest in the poll. The majority of our teaching was done with a powerpoint. Once Meg and I introduced a new topic, we would have the kids discuss with a neighbor if they have used any of these before or what they could use them for in the future. This happened two or three times. At the end of the powerpoint we had the kids get in small groups and talk about a recent group project they were assigned and how these new tools could be used to collaborate outside the class room.

That took us about 22 minutes so we had eight minutes left for our activity. The day before teaching Meg bought a beach ball and wrote all of these scenarios on it with a sharpie. We had the kids throw the ball to each other and read the scenario closest to them out loud and then tell the class how they would use Facebook and Twitter to solve their situation. It was actually a lot of fun and it took the perfect amount of time.

I took a few things away from this experience. The first of which is that you should never underestimate the power of a beach ball in classroom. It is both an amazing tool and potentially dangerous tool as well. As soon as we brought out the ball, all of the students faces lit up. It kept their attention for the whole activity as well. Having said that, one kid did hit a light fixture pretty hard and two girls were hit in the face, but nothing was broken and no one left unhappy.

To add to the silly things that I learned: don’t stand in front of the projector. Duh.

I also learned to be on my toes. Being able to adjust a lesson plan or even the frame of the lesson is a key skill for a teacher to have. Its hard to know how well your students will be prepared for the lesson of the day so its good to have back up plans and the ability to adjust. I’ve thought about becoming a teacher, teaching is something I’m good at as long as I know what I’m talking about. I learned that if I was to teach, I would want to teach middle school. The kids are a lot of fun and are at an age where they are beginning to appreciate the education they are getting. Overall it was a great experience and I hope the kids got as much out of it as Meg and I did.