Too Far with Technology

On the Caravanserai webpage I found myself browsing for a few minutes, just scrolling up and down the page looking to read other college level students express themselves.  Before long I looked at the clock and found forty – five minutes quickly lost, due to the interesting pieces of information and opinions plastered all over the cite.

            One area that particularly drew me in was the post of the robot youtube video which received many comments.  I wanted to pull away from reading all the comments and posts this video caused but I truly was not able to stop reading.  Every single conversation between cleverbot and my fellow student classmates, which was left as a comment, was read by me.  Each one caught my curiosity, with our classmates taking stabs and coming up with witty responses for the AI system, and with the cleverbot creating no sensible replies to frustrate the real humans talking to it.  The whole situation constructed through this interactive system was quite amusing and entertaining.  On a few instances, I found myself literally laughing out loud, but that was just one interesting piece that caught my eye.

            Another fixation from the website that really forced me to start thinking is how we can have a completely technology based curriculum in a college setting.  Personally, I am not fond of the idea altogether, but assignments are addressed and posted through a website and there is little human interaction at all.  The robotic system talking to us students is too farfetched to think about, while being at a university practically taking an entire course online, but still being required to attend a classroom setting.

Blogging on the Rise

When this English class started off I felt a little bit nervous about all the use of technology. The entire class is based on using the computer, internet, and this blogging site which can get pretty frustrating. Then I remembered my prior knowledge and experience with blogging, and that turned out well for me because when I was in high school, I took a class where we students actually got to intern as teacher trainees in an elementary classroom setting throughout our school district. This turned out to be a real job for us, and was a great experience. With my class trainees we discussed the rise of internet blogging and its effectiveness. We started a blogging site for our group using a site named edublogs.com, and we were required to post a blog at least once a week and comment on classmate’s posts. I expanded my knowledge in the field of blogging through this experience of posting, blogging, and commenting with my employees on the edublogs site. After getting used to the program we began posting questions on the site that everyone would have to blog about how they felt. We used this to gain experience, knowing blogging would soon come back in the future with its growing popularity and we could use the familiarity we earned from our personal blog.

            At first I was very against the idea of blogging and sharing my personal feelings online, but now I realize it is a great way for people to express themselves. It is a great way of communicating with each other, like in the teacher setting, an entire school district could link together to share teaching techniques and important information with each other. Now I can put my prior knowledge of blogging to good use with our English 104 class, and hopefully my high school experience will help me along the way.

Pictures on a Website

When you were a little kid do you remember your disappointment when you would pick up a book at a library or a book store and there would be no pictures? I remember immediately putting that book down and moving onto the next one because no one wants to stare at a piece of paper if there are no colors or images. Now I know and agree that books can be intriguing without pictures or color, such as Harry Potter, but I guarantee a picture book will capture your eyes first. Although the saying “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” is true in most cases, I am still going to pick up book that has a dragon on its cover rather than a book with only the word dragon.

Looking Inside Twitter Itself

Twitter also known as a social network for many; the nature of the conversation will definitely fluctuate. Any individual who is signed up for twitter can tweet (make a post) about what they are doing, how they feel or just random thoughts throughout ones day. Usually dealing with a social network via Twitter there aren’t any comments; although the reader reading the mediator’s post can chose to “reply” or “retweet” ones tweets if they feel the need to give their inner thoughts. A social network such as Twitter allows a person to create their own background picture, font color, social network name etc. basically defining a person for who they really are through the web. Therefore, defining who a person is via web will attract others whom may think similar as they do or vice versa setting the tone of your blog.

Some will say, the more followers you have the more relevance you have on this social network due to the fact that you are grabbing the attention of others with what you post. In order to comment one must make an account like any other online site such as Yahoo or Google Mail revealing a name, email address, leaving a photograph, short biography and city; optional if wanted. Depending on the type of information a person posts on their blog such as provocative pictures or foul words for example may acquire a certain type of unwanted or disturbing crowd. Ultimately, I believe a few guidelines for great web commenting is to post things that go on throughout life that individuals can either agree or disagree on or find outrageous relations that others may not know trying to reel them in and get certain feedback.