PH COR100

( Readings at Bottom )       Recently, I bought a new game for the computer called Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 that essentially allows you to design your own theme park, complete with custom paths, roller coasters, and water slides. You manage it with hiring workers, placing food stands, opening and closing rides, and everything else that goes into managing your own theme park. A lot of learning in this game came from tutorials that you had the option to do. In the tutorials, there would be dialogue boxes that popped up that said what the goal of the tutorial was and give instructions on how to take steps to achieve that goal. There were multiple kinds of tutorials, including how to use the camera (what buttons to press for various camera movements), how to start building your own coaster, how to place paths, and how to change the terrain just to name a few. The tutorials were really a general overview of everything that was possible and ultimately was just opening the do...

(Readings at Bottom) The two videos “A Vision of Students Today” and the TED talk on “Learning” both had more or less the same theme in terms of the fact that today, students are not as engaged in learning and there needs to be a reevaluation of how learning is done in schools today in order to tap into everyone’s potential so that everyone participates in ‘real learning,’ as Michael Wesch says. I was surprised at some of the statistics. Some, of course, don’t really apply here at Le Moyne, like the average class size being in the hundreds. The largest class I have is 30 or so people, so I don’t really feel like the teachers don’t know my name either. I can’t say that I’ve ever really had a problem with learning in the way that Michael talks about, but I can definitely understand the perspective he is coming from. I know that the best experiences that I’ve had in the classroom were times where we could go and apply what was just ‘learned,’ especially when we were just encouraged t...

  (Readings at Bottom)             The main theme of the readings this week was the impact that social media and other newer technologies have on our socializations skills, with there being points saying that people socialize more and others saying they socialize less. The video and the article “The Flight from Conversation” both focused on how technologies are taking away something from our regular ‘socializing’ and connection with others, and for the first time, they mention a concrete reasoning behind why these new social media sites are so beloved. It is all about control. You can control what you pay attention to, you can control what you say in the conversation or how you display yourself, and you get a feeling of understanding and connection from the ‘automatic listeners’ on social media. That really hit home for me, because I could see myself doing those things, especially the last one, that sense of automatic list...

(Readings at bottom) The first reading, about the internet affecting how we think about thing, was a good opening for this week, and it really showed me how much the digital world is changing how we think and see things. I definitely feel that I, personally, have become more receptive to just the surface level information, not paying attention to things unless I can get the answer I want right away. I also find myself reading less books, as they mention in the article. I have conflicting feelings about this shift from a deeper reading to a more surface level approach. On one hand, I don’t like that it’s happening with people, myself included, because I feel like I can’t get as deeply involved in what I read. I have a shorter attention span, so reading something for school, for example, becomes more about finishing it rather than paying attention to it and really picking out the crucial details. I want to get back to that, to rediscover that joy and involvement of deep reading. How...

(Readings at Bottom) In watching the TED talk, one thing struck me about his examples of a communal value and civic value, with the LOLcats and Ushahidi, respectively. The speaker stated that communal value is created by its participants for each other, whereas civic value is created by its participants but for the whole of society to benefit as a whole. A major distinction I noticed between the two ‘projects,’ for lack of a better word, was that LOLcats are often created by individuals, whereas Ushahidi was created by a group of individuals working together. I don’t think that the speaker was saying it outright in his presentation, but I think this was a point he was getting at. It is not only LOLcats. A lot of things that I would classify as having purely communal value are all created by individuals or maybe a very small group of individuals. Examples would include gamer YouTube channels, someone drawing comics for Tumblr, or people posting funny quotes on Twitter. Similarly, t...