Personal Choice Response

I have really enjoyed most of the ways we learned in this class. I think that activities I liked the most had to have been the online scavenger hunts. I liked these not only for the fact that they were pretty simple but because I thought they were all interesting and had great connections to the class. I think that these activities worked better for me because I am more of a hands on learner and like to explore things myself. I did like most of the other activities in the class too and thought that all of them were fairly entertaining and fun. I really enjoyed the audio response to the papers as well and thought that it allowed for a lot more to be said in review of a paper.

I Be Yearnin' for some Learnin'

I must admit... I have never been in a class that took advantage of so many learning methods. I guess I didn't really realize how many different things we have done and learned to use until we wrote them on the board last week!! It was quite astonishing.

Overall I think I am still a sucker for in-person discussion. I love technology, don't get me wrong, and I love the convenience of being able to do "lecture" and "discussion" at 3 am while riding out the tail end of a caffeine buzz in my pajamas. However, there are some areas where technology cannot simply replace real life things. I will use math as an example, because I think that many people have had similar experiences. I am good at math, but I cannot understand math books. If someone writes an equation on a board, explains what it means, and goes through an example, I will be able to understand and use the formula with no problems. However, give me the same explanation in a math textbook and I will have no idea what the hell I am doing!! I have a very good memory for verbal interactions, so I think that is why I am able to "get more" out of in-person discussion sections and lectures. Using all the other technology sure was fun though!!

Even if none of us retain anything about the information society, I am sure we all learned something about how we learn best, and have some new techniques to use for learning in the future.

Great discussing tech, society, information, and politics with y'all this semester!!! Hope to see you around campus!

Technological Politics

The article I found was titled, "The First YouTube Election". As the title clearly states the article is mostly about how YouTube has revolutionized the election and how candidates have had to change the way they campaign and raise funds accordingly. The article opens up just talking about how the internet has changed the style of elections, stating that 7 out of the 16 politicians who would run for president announced their candidacy via the internet. It then covers how fundraising has moved from big parties for the super rich to large numbers of small donations over the internet. Then the article talks about how more and more people get their news online then almost anywhere else in the world now. After all of that the article gets to Youtube. It talks about how people can access youtube via computer or even cell phone from almost anywhere in the world, and how candidates can use it to spread information at a speed they never though possible. Along with this benefit however, there are some downsides for the candidates as well. With one slip of the tongue, a candidates campaign can take major heat due to youtube. Videos of candidates saying things that may offend others can be spread just as quick as promotional videos can be. Youtube makes it possible for people to view and share all types of videos and opinions between each other. The article, which was written before the election, even states that because Obama has more views on his youtube accounts and more friends on both his Facebook page and Myspace page, he is a lot more likely to win the election.

I agree with pretty much everything in this article. I think that Youtube and other online networking and file sharing sites have had a huge impact on the election and played a large part in this last election. Obama seemed to have the internet aspect of the election mastered a lot more then McCain and as we all know, this played to his advantage in a big way. He was able to raise a lot more money and gain a lot more supporters via the internet. I think this article really sums up the technology aspect of this election quite well.

My Personal Learning Method

In discussion when we started to list off how many different medias we have used, I was surprised as to how many we actually used. I could think right off the bat a couple but some I completely forgot about. I found it very usefully when you did the voice peer review. I feel as if you were able to tell me more of what you really thought. Email's can only go so far. So thank you.
I also liked our online "lecture". At first, it was challenging because of Prof. Downey's actual lectures but after that, it was better because of the scavenger hunting. When I am involved in what I learn like that I learn way better. I am more of a on-hands kind of girl when it comes to learning. Me actually doing that helped me get more involved with the class. I will admit, I am a quiet person in discussion so doing this type of blog also helps. I never thought I would be into this type of thing ever either.

Thanks for a great semester Annette! It was fun!! :)

check out my pelicula

and good luck to all on the homestretch of the semester. If this blog is still up into winter break, I will post videos that have more relevance to the information society. Epics I've been saving up... The Police... Too Much Information... The Residents... King of Kings... coming soon this Winter Break!

David's online discussion: personal choice

As we discussed in section last week, there were so many formats, I can't even remember them all. We definitely did a lot of learning by doing in Lis201, experiencing information overload firsthand with all these formats. I found it mentally difficult to juggle all these formats in my working memory. I thought the blog was pretty fun. I don't know how you'd do this, but I think it would help if the blog archive module had a little more functionality, like making it easier to access old posts of interest, like assignment posts, posts by person, and posts by topic. We had the opportunity to do some fun activities online. I also liked some of the websites introduced to us in online lecture. The Smithsonian online v-mail
exhibit was something new to me. I thought the extra credit opportunities posted on the course webpage were pretty cool. I'm a visual and auditory learner. I preferred lectures and visuals to a heap of scholarly reading.

Obama's Technology Use

The main argument of the article that I read was that Obama used technology effectively in the election, but his victory in the election gave use of technology too much credit. The author states, "Once again, social media is taking more credit than it deserves." She goes on to argue that even though Obama made great use of Online mediums such as Facebook and Twitter, people decided to elect Obama because of the ideas he supported, not just because he effectively used online technology to gain a huge following. I will admit that a lot of people probably decided to vote for Obama because they were dissatisfied with the previous Republican administration, but I feel that her argument that "technology was given too much credit," is flawed. This may just be my opinion, but I feel that US voters are too highly influenced by media, what they perceive, and who they think is "cool." Even though the president may benefit from having a "cool" personality, people put too much emphasis on this and fail to look at hard facts. I am not just saying this because I supported McCain and he lost... I feel that this is a sad trend within the US population. Thus I think that Obama's use of technology should be credited with a lot of his success in the election. The mere fact that his use of online information made his personality and "ideas" more accessible to voters and gave him a larger exposure, is a huge factor. If you see a lot of info on the web released by one candidate, and little released by the other, a voter is likely to develop a bias to the person they feel they are more familiar with, even though they might not know all the facts. Since I believe that American voters are already too emotional when they pick a candidate, the use of this online technology, in my belief, furthers the problem of uninformed voters backing a person just because he/she seems to be "cool" and has huge levels of media exposure.