#lsci121

[searchingforanswers7-blog]

Week 13: Finders, keepers.

After reading that article it had me thinking about how we store information these days, and it had me analyzing how I do it myself. Aside from E-mails, I keep my personal information pretty organized. This article brought up a lot of thoughts in my head however, about how we can simplify our lives in many ways. We live in a day and age where we don’t necessarily need to save information that we receive online, because we can just google it or access it later. I am way more a fan of discarding information versus keeping it. Too much information can cause clutter and stress and don’t want either one of those things. It is pretty easy to stay organized with personal information using various folders on your computer. That is one area of my life that I feel very organized in. 

[l-dibert-blog]

Social Media

Facebook is the only social media I have any experience with. I use it to keep in touch with my family and friends in California. This gives me a little sense of connectedness; I get to see what they are up to, updated pictures, and occasionally chat with them. I mostly feel a sense of isolation because they are so far away. The interaction we share on Facebook it not as rewarding as in person. I think calling and having a conversation over the phone is better then staying in touch only through social media, it is more personal.

I agree with the finding of the article we read. I find that I get upset if people don’t like my post. I also find myself scrolling though Facebook when I am bored; only to get mad because there is nothing interesting to entertain me.I have to take time outs. I will make myself not go on Facebook for weeks; Sometimes I think about deleting my account but then I wouldn’t talk to half of my family.

[ashleah04-blog]

Last week...

I do feel a connectedness from my social media activity. I am not all that interested in social media thus I only use Face book, and only have close friends and family as connections there. I have found that it is helpful for keeping up on the lives of my friends who have scattered to well… everywhere… and every once in a while when I have some awesome bit of news to share I will do so and enjoy the comments. I am not on face book regularly and I have noticed that when my friends are too invested in face book they become frustrated that I don’t comment enough or like their posts. I do see how, if it is the goal to have lots of followers, likes, and comments, it would be easy to be depressed after spending time in social media and discovering no success. I have found that when by friends on face book are getting depressed or frustrated with lack of feed-back it has more to do with how things are off line. It seems that taking out their frustration online is less harmful than blowing up on their families. When I actually notice grumpy posts (‘cause I can be oblivious) I usually go the extra step and call them. I think when it comes down to it, the cause/effect isn’t directly related. It’s like my wellbeing professor says just because crime rates increase when ice cream sales go up, it doesn’t mean that ice cream causes crime. Perhaps for those who get depressed after perusing social media, are depressed for other reasons. Maybe after hours spent perusing other people’s lives they feel upset not because of social media but because they were on social media avoiding what it is that is bothering them and now must face it or find another distraction… like more social media…!!! If you haven’t seen this you gotta!

[hannahlynnyoung-blog]

Social Media

[master-mind42-blog]

Social Media

     For me personally I feel a little connected when using social media.  When ever I am on Snap chat, Instagram, or Facebook I like I know what all of my peers are up to. Or what they have been up to in the last week.

     I like to keep a healthy balance of physically talking to someone and social media balanced more towards the physical part of the way I communicate.  I only look at social media to look at peoples pictures, and keep the communicating to either in person or a phone call.

       I personally think the connection for online versus offline completely depends on the person.  Some people I know completely base their entire communication off of social media, and it bugs me quite a bit actually.  Then I also know people don’t even have social media at all.

[edennis14-blog-blog]

Personal Information Management

Sometimes I think I’m more of the type to let organizational systems on my devices deal with organization and archiving my digital information, other times I get a little OCD and go through everything so that it’s all organized according to however I feel that day. So it’s a little bit of a toss up for me, but I definitely am at a certain level of disorganization when it comes to my digital life.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot better job of organizing my files and documents online, but I haven’t always been the super neat type so my room is still a mess sometimes (most of the time).

[msuinformationists-blog]

The Distance of Connectedness

I think this discussion is super interesting. The idea behind social media sites is to help connect and bring people together. And at a first glance, it seems to have done just that. personally, it allows me to talk to people I barely get to see. In addition, I can see statuses and photos of those people, which gives me the feeling that I can still be a part of their lives, even though I’m hundreds or thousands of miles away. This is especially important to me because I live far away from my entire family. My dads side lives in places like Georgia, Massachusetts, and Colorado, while my mom’s side of the family is in Germany and the Czech Republic. If it weren’t for social media, i would almost never get to talk to them, or see what’s new in their lives. Yes, there is still phone calls and texting, but it’s hard to schedule that many phone calls and pay for international calls on a regular basis - cue Facebook! 

However, when one takes a closer look, something daunting reveals itself. Just as the New Yorker article suggests, social media makes people super unhappy with themselves. When you think about why, it makes sense. People used to do things because they liked it, and it made them happy. But now, I find a lot of people I know (and sometimes even myself) doing things simply so that later they can post about it on social media. Now, logging on to Instagram, I rarely see a powder day that hasn’t been documented. It has become a competition of who can do the coolest stuff, or even more accurately, who can look like they do the coolest stuff. People do stuff in public in order to post in private. That’s just the way it is now, and I can’t think of a more isolating and lonely way to live.

I think the only real way to navigate the fine line between “connecting” with people and flat out isolating yourself from everyone else is to be aware of the motives behind your social media use. Are you logging on to see what everyone else did today so you can compare that to yourself, or are you logging on to say happy birthday to your cousin in California? Noticing why and how often you log on will allow you to become self aware with your behaviors. Are you living for the rush of being online famous or are you living to experience the famous offline world?

BTW: HAPPY EARTH DAY.

Get outside for the hell of it - and don’t post about it. I dare you.

[nikenerd04-blog]

Should Social Media Be Acceptable in the Classroom?

Preparing to be a future teacher I have to look into what I need to adapt into that will help make me a better teacher for my students. In what ways can I incorporate new things to capture my students attention and allow classroom time to be a time they feel comfortable learning. I know when I was in high school phones and all kind of social media was banned. We were not allowed to have any sort of electronic in the classroom that would distract us from learning. When it came to having to work in the computer lab my teachers really kept an eye on us to make sure we were on task. But now as time has changed I have noticed more and more schools are incorporating technology and social media into the classroom. Is this really a good idea? Is this going to benefit the students?

Turns out results have shown that using social media in the classroom is actually benefiting the students. An example of this would be allowing students to use Tumblr in the classroom. All teachers have to do is give the students an assignment and they have to write about the assignment on their blog. They then can go and comment on what other classmates may think about the assignment, which incorporates classroom discussion.  This would also be a good idea because you can set up a link to where parents can go to that link and see what their kids are learning so it’s a great way to incorporate parents into the students learning.  One other great learning tool they can use is a site called “Socrative”. Socrative is a great tool for students and teachers. It is an easy set up and you can do multiple things with it. You can present a quick quiz for the students to take in the classroom and at the end of the class when the students are gone you can graph the answers to see what the students knew and did not know. This would be great for a pre-assessment before a unit project and then a good test at the end to see what the students understood and learned. There is also a section called the quick question to assess the students throughout the class period. It also gives the teachers the opportunity to put their lessons and assignments directly on google drive.

There are also your traditional teachers who believe incorporating social media into the classroom is a bad idea. They believe it is distracting to students and students won’t learn because they are spending more time surfing the web then paying attention to the topic given to them, which may be true. You have to have a lot of trust with your students I believe to make incorporating social media into the classroom successful.

With this I have a couple articles for you guys to read. One article is about why social media would be good in the classroom and the second article is the Pro’s and Con’s to using social media in the classroom.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/social-media-valuable-tool-teachers/

http://www.schooliseasy.com/2014/02/social-media-in-the-classroom/

With this I have a couple questions for you guys:

“Do you believe social media and mobile devices should be used in the classroom? How might they be beneficial or, on the other hand, distracting?

If you were the teacher, would you incorporate social media into your classroom like the newer teachers or would you be more like the traditional teachers who don’t allow social media? Why would you choose one or the other (or maybe a mix of both, depending on the circumstance)?”

[margeduff-blog]

Personal Info Management

This article, i thought, was somewhat accurate. There are always new ways of improving technology. However, I do not agree that we are necessarily making a mess for the future historians to deal with later down the road. The way we work with social media sites, papers, email, and any other way of journaling, blogging, writing, or communicating is just the way we know how to do it today. There is going to be an easier way to do these things, yes, but we arent going to complicate things for the future. They might look back and say “wow!! how and why??” but thats it. 

As far as technology goes, i am not very tech savvy. So trusting sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, or any other site is hard for me to do because its on the internet and you never know what can come of that and who can see what you have on your walls or what have you. However, there have been times that i would like to know how to manage my information better. Not using Facebook too much i am not too concerned about it, but it would be nice to know how and what to do. I have never really lost data from a social media sight, but i have from my computer and at that point i definitely wished i backed up with work. But, again, i wish not to put it on some website and i dont think i want to go out and buy a 100 dollar device to constantly back up my work. So where would that leave me? But then again, compared to back in the day, people back then didnt have too much to worry about as far as their computer crashing. These days, technology has become such a big and important part of our lives that if an ipad or computer crash its what seems like the end of the world. In my opinion, if it crashes and we get so upset about it, maybe its time to take a few steps back and think about maybe pulling yourself away from technology a little bit. And i am not saying technology is a bad thing at all, it just can be taken advantage of in some sense. 

[ashleah04-blog]

Week 13 Sarah’s week

Reading the two articles for this discussion really reminded me of the movie starring Robin Williams called the Final Cut… I remember sitting in that movie with the same internal conflict that these articles caused. I like my privacy! But I also like to remember what it was like to hold my children for the first time; the feeling of my first kiss and all the home comings when despite all odds my marine was returned to me mostly intact…. But then again, I don’t want all my ugly moments caught on tape either. How awful to have to share your honeymoon with strangers or to have that embarrassing first aunt flow visit on the record for anyone to revisit…

I do think that scrap-booking, as a way to keep memories of family events, is slowly dying today it’s more a form of art. Today digital scrap-booking is how it’s done. All my life I have moved from place to place (with the longest time between moves being about 4 years…) so, I learned to toss everything ‘cept what I really needed. I have a tiny box that is sitting on my desk as I type with the few pictures that I hoarded from before the wonderful invention of a digital camera… It is much easier to just have everything on iCloud or a backup hard drive. The information is easily accessed and so portable it’s ridiculous…(My over 700 book library can be carried in my pocket!) I will never again have to go to the book store and order another copy of my favorite book because I accidentally dropped it in the bathtub. To me life logging seems to be a digital hording problem…. I can picture future reality tv shows where I.T. specialists are slogging through someone’s life logging information to try and make sense of it and assist in weeding out the things that aren’t necessary. (ok maybe not but still!) and that isn’t even considering how much easier it would make identity theft!  As for the self-destructing media… I think its name is apt but not in the way intended; it can be self-destructing behavior (especially in teens…)! I don’t believe there will ever be a way to truly keep information that is sent between people in digital media private. The internet is forever and the nature of the internet is what keeps it that way. I don’t think I am a life logger… I’m more of a victories logger and I am not a snap chatter but then again I wasn’t a blogger till this semester ether.

[searchingforanswers7-blog]

Copyright

Honestly, when I think about copyright issues with pictures I have never really thought it was that big of a deal. Unless the photographer clearly states that they want that credit, but honestly if you are posting something on the internet or on different social media websites you have to know that your work might not always get credited to you. 

 Today with all of the different social media sites out there every user is a publisher of sorts and is probably not aware of the copyright laws. It is really easy to post/share photos and a lot of the images shown were just borrowed from websites.  Some original authors will probably want their material posted and shared with others, because it gets their work out there and exposure is huge in that field. I think the big issue here is that most people aren’t really aware of the copyright laws, and the social media websites that we use aren’t very clear either. All of that being said, I do think that credit should be given where credit is due.

[master-mind42-blog]

Personal Information Management

       I am a big believer in managing personal information through technology.  I have all of my information such as photos, papers, important documents, and stuff on back up hard drives.  If I were to lose all of my stuff I would be devastated for half of my stuff, and the other half I would definitely be in some serious trouble because most of my stuff I have saved besides my photos that I have saved is all school related work.

      So reading through the article that Bill Gates has people work for him that he has people back up all of his work for him I think is pretty smart.  If he were to lose all of his information he would be in some deep trouble.

[edennis14-blog-blog]

Week 14 - Social Media

So this week's main topic is Social Media. I thought it would be fun to explore some more specific topics within social media...

What do you consider "boundaries" of social media, in terms of oversharing or having your content seen by unintended audiences? When you share a post on social media, how far do you expect that post to travel? Only those who know you, or friends of your friends, or perhaps anyone in the world who finds your account?

I was also thinking about how social media accounts can be a potential turn off to future employers. Since social media is wildly popular among young adults; what kind of careers is it okay for an employee to use social media? Which ones might encourage employees to avoid it?

For example, if you post a personal item on Instagram, and an employer sees the post and thinks its inappropriate, is it right or fair for that employer to "punish" you? Here's an article that gets at that question:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/06/living/buzzfeed-social-media-fired/

Is one social media site worse than any others when it comes to employer/employee relationships? Is there on that's most acceptable?

Here are some articles to help you get some juices flowing! http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/how-too-much-information-shared-through-social-media-can-really-hurt-you-infographic

http://www.berkeley-scott.co.uk/social-media

[msuinformationists-blog]

Online Errything, or Disappearing Data?

Reading the first article about lifelogging, I had to laugh a little. I’ve never heard of the term or practice and it just seems so ridiculous to me. I’m pretty “with it” technologically; I have an iPhone and mac, use the “cloud” and am on many social media outlets. However, the idea of literally recording my entire life and storing it is just too much for me to take in. I can’t imagine how that could help someone, and I don’t really understand why everything in a person’s life is worth recording. Some of the things mentioned, like an online calendar, using Dropbox, and scanning paper documents are understandable and I can really see how that can not only cut down on clutter, but become a resourceful way to store important information. However, things like putting a camera on you and recording everything, or setting up a device to record all of your phone calls is just too much (I think). I just don’t see a purpose to keeping track of every moment in your life. 

I don’t think scrapbooking has become obsolete. I think it’s more of a lost art now, more than anything. There is something to be said about the comfort felt from sitting on the couch with your family and looking through family photo albums. The art of reminiscing with physical pictures is something I miss now, and wish I did more often. It’s definitely something I want to do with my kids.

As for the article about ephemeral data, I was a bit confused. As we all know, there are so many ways to post and record your life. We have various photo apps and websites, and sites devoted to statuses alone, and everything in between. So, apps like snapchat, where the ability to view the content is limited, and archiving is more complex and difficult, are just another way to record and observe your life and the lives of those you know. What confused me about the article was the tone. It seemed to me like the authors were concerned about where data archiving will head, and how history will be passed down if ephemeral data is to continue to become popular. I don’t really see a problem with it. Because there are so many ways for us to record our lives and pass on our experiences to the future generations, having an app that deletes the data in a matter of seconds isn’t going to cause that big of a shift in practices. It’s simply another option for us to connect and record things we deem important. Besides, I don’t think 100 years from now people will care about what my friends had to drink the night before...

As for which side of the spectrum I fall on, I think I fall somewhere in the middle. I do partake in ways of recording my life, such as Facebook, Instagram, Evernote and online calendars. I also use “disappearing” data sites like Snapchat. However, I haven’t practiced one or the other to the extreme of labeling myself as one or the other. 

[nikenerd04-blog]

Robin Thicke vs. Marvin Gaye

After listening to both the song from Robin Thicke and Marvin Gaye they are very similar songs I believe. Especially when it comes to the music. I find it to be somewhat tricky these days to even come up with making music because you always have to ask yourself whether or not the tune or the lyrics had already been made. I feel that now days a lot of people are just trying to get money out of the was said to be copyrighted was by Sam Smith the song “Stay with Me “. It was said that if you slowed down Tom Petty’s version of “Won’t Back Down” and sped up Sam’s version and changed a couple things it would have been the exact same song. But when it comes to something like that, I honestly feel like people are only trying to get money out of the whole thing.

But speaking of copyrighting I have never, to the best of my intentions, copyrighted something. I have never illegally downloaded movies or music. If I ever bought music it was through ITunes. It may be hard to believe but I truthfully can say I never have

I have never considered the implications to copyrighting. I knew that it was a serious thing but I never knew exactly how serious until I read these articles are read more articles about copyrighting. Now it is so understandable to why teachers do everything they can to make sure things are not used illegally and they have a copyright to them. Because I have never copyrighted I didn’t seem to pay attention to how serious it was until now, especially since I plan to become a teacher.

Being a future teacher I think copyrighting is going to play a huge role in teaching. I am going to have to make sure I am using tools legally rather than illegally whether it be for readings or music or whatever I decide to use for teaching. I will also have to make sure the students’ I am teaching understand what copyrighting is and how serious it is as well.

[margeduff-blog]

Week 11

Comparing the two songs both by lyrics as well as the tune that the two songs have, it is very similar. When reading the articles, it is understandable that Thicke is being charged with plagiarism. The lack of creativity is what seems as though any musician should not lack. And even then, there should not be an issue with taking a song from a long loved musician and make it into your own. Although he is being charged with as much as he is being charged for, I believe it is only fair that that many millions are being handed over to Gayes family. 

As far as Copyright, Fair Use, and violating the two, I do not think I have taken advantage of any documents that i havent “works cited” before. If I have and didnt know it, I think its time to start being more aware of these different ways you could get into some serious trouble with copyrighting different pieces of writing, music, or any other forms of work that you be able to violate.