Blog Evaluation

This was a very interesting class as a whole, and was much different than what I first expected when signing up for this class. I really did like the blog idea for this class. It was a very effective way of both gathering and communicating your own ideas to your classmates through a public posting. I've always wanted to start writing in a blog because I thought it was a clever way to discuss your ideas online, for yourself or for others to view, such as this class. This class was a great way to introduce blogging to me to possibly continue writing my ideas and thoughts on here.

I found the class as a whole very interesting, yet it did have both its pros and cons. Lets start off with the good. I liked the activities that the professor chose for us to do, along with the assigned readings. Most of the activities went along with the current reading which made it easy to apply real world communication to the book. Writing in the blogs about our thoughts on the activity was a great way to communicate with our classmates and also compare our findings. The online discussion board was also a convenient way of talking to other students about the readings. It seems that almost every internet class I have taken, there are quizzes that you have to take at least once a week. I find that it gets incredibly old taking a quiz every week, and this class really gave me a break. Instead of memorizing terms for a quiz, we spent more time interacting and communicating with others.

As for some of the parts of class I thought could be improved. Some of the activities were better than others. I thought some of them were a little too general, and evident. Some activities brought out new ideas about online communication, and others I felt were already evident. Some weeks of class the readings didn't always go along with the blog topic. At times, I found it very hard to write about the relations of the two. The biggest part of the class I thought could be improved was the lack of simultaneous converstation or communication with other students involved in the class. Although we all did communicate often through blogs and discussion board, it was all delayed conversation. We didn't get to really interact with other students in real time. I thought some sort of project where you have to a chance to interact more through the internet would have been a good way to wrap up the class. I'm not really sure what sort of project this would be, but it is just an idea.

As I said before, all in all I really enjoyed the class. It was a real break from ordinary online classes that I have taken. Instead of just communicating online, I had the opportunity to learn what other people think and interpret the internet as, and how they use it. Some parts of the class really opened me up to new ideas about the internet both in the present and in the future.

Wild Card.. My mishaps due to the internet

WILD CARD!!!!! Write about one experience you’ve had with communication on the internet that happened outside of this course. Explain what happened, why the situation was exacerbated or eased because the situation occurred in the realm of cyberspace. How would the situation have been different had it happened outside of cyberspace? This situation could be a mis-communication because the words written were misinterpreted, something didn’t happen because of the technology, etc

When my family first got the internet, there was no cable or DSL broadband provides. It was all dial-up 56k speed, and the only choice you really had was the type of web browser you wanted to use. I still remember when we first got America Online. AOL was the first biggest thing besides Napster for me because it had all these new ideas that I was unfamiliar with; e-mails, instant messenger, web browsing, chat rooms. Everything in one package! I still remember when I didn't know how to instant message someone online, and I started off e-mailing people back and forth waiting for responses. Ah the good ol' days. As personal computers were still fairly new to homes around America, we only had one as a family. We all shared the same computer, which was mostly used by myself and my mother. My brother and father weren't so quick to adapt to the new technology.

Anyway, as I became more familiar with the internet and all of its tools, IM's became very popular when I entered high school. Everyone either had AOL or had AIM with their own screen name. Everyday after I would finish my homework or whatever I would sign into AOL at night before I went to bed to chat with my friends. Well, one night before I went to bed, I was having a conversation with a buddy of mine about an event that had happened recently. This event is not something I'm going to explain for the best reasons, instead I'll just let you know that I was doing something that I should had never been doing. If my parents knew that we were involved in this event, there would be some serious consequences.

The next day, as soon as I walked into the door to my home, my parents told me to sit down on the couch (this is usually a very bad sign, either someone died or I'm dead for doing something). My mother quickly informed me that she read the entire conversation that I had with my friend the previous night. I had accidentally left the chat window up, and never closed it out before I went to bed. So there it sat, waiting for my mom to wake up to when she got onto the computer.

This was the worst conflict that I had ever had with my parents. I mean, this was a very serious matter, and it probably never would have been brought up to my parents attention if I left that chat window up. That chat window never would have been left up if I didn't discover the the IM feature on AOL. The IM feature never would have existed if the internet had not hit the homes of Americans.

Fortunately, this whole thing was a blessing in disguise. My parents forgave me for the things I had been doing. They of course gave me a harsh punishment, but the punishment made me realize that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Sometimes it takes some tough love to fix the problems you have in life. Without the internet, this would never had happened.