Reflections on Week 5

Assignment #4

This week’s assignment was to create an interactive timeline on CircaVie. I created my timeline on the history of film innovations. I focused on the major occurrences and some of the stranger innovations. The site was great. My only problem was that even though I saved each entry it would occasionally start to get buggy then crash. I finally started saving all my text entries into a Word document because it was so frustrating to lose so much work. Otherwise, I had a great time using this site. I am going to post my film history for my production students. I also plan to create more of them for other media like radio, television, newspaper etc. and add to this one. What a great tool to keep students interested in what they are learning.

I especially loved that linking a YouTube or Google Video would mean that it would automatically start playing when they opened the entry. The only thing is I wish that I could have linked to the video AND provided an additional hyperlink to other information. You could do one or the other. You could include the link in the textual description but it would not be active unless you did it in the URL portion. It might also be nice to be able to pause/stop/start the video so that they could read the textual information then watch the video.

I also think I would use this as an assignment for students. There are SO many things that they could use this for. I do wish you could just put in the month and year since sometimes an exact date is difficult to determine. I also learned more about film (or remembered more) just by doing this assignment. I think it is one of the best interactive tools we have worked with so far… even if it is a bit buggy. The best part is, that it is free! Cannot complain about that!!!

Course Material

As I discussed in my post, I think AUPs are so important. If students, faculty, staff and parents do not know what is expected of them, how can we ensure they use the web properly? I think the key for these policies is that the language be absolutely clear about what is not acceptable. There also needs to be some discussion of Netiquette so that students really do understand that there is a person on the other end of the email or IRC. Once the policy is in place, it is important that it is enforced. If those in charge do not enforce the policy then what incentive to students have to follow it?

Personally, I like the idea of the sleeper programs that only activate when a violation has occurred. Oftentimes filters OVER filter content and websites that are perfectly harmless. For example, I attended Duquesne University for my Master degree. It was a small private Catholic university and it had filters built into its browsing for objectionable content (i.e. porn). We were told to create a webpage about Breast Cancer… well it filtered out some of our websites (though not all of them)! I couldn’t believe that a university would do that. It was however a private/religious school. I do think some type of filter has its place in K-12 schools and public libraries as long as it is not overly restrictive of content for adults. I think that that is the biggest challenge, finding a balance between protecting kids and allowing adults freedom on the internet.

I think satellite technology is going to become more and more important as we progress. My husband and I have Sirius satellite radio and we love it for travelling long distances. I think satellite in education is great once the overhead is addressed. My cousin’s wife home schools their son and she gets foreign language programs via a satellite education service. She also plans on using it for the advanced sciences like physics and chemistry when he gets to those subjects. Their problem though WAS that line of site issue. They are absolutely surrounded by trees. So my cousin ordered a windmill kit, installed it and then instead of the windmill attached the satellite to the top of it. Ingenious really (he is an architect). The service is rather expensive but they got a free 90 trial and that’s how they were able to check to see if they could actually get reception (using the windmill). I think satellite programming services for small schools or those that are too poor to afford some of the specialty education classes (music theory, advanced sciences etc.). The problems of course are the costs and issues like the propagation delay. But once it is installed, I think there are a lot of possibilities.