Tag Archives: readings

Classes will resume on Friday, November 2

hi everyone,

The latest CUNY alert tells us that classes are cancelled again tomorrow, Thursday, November 1:

ALL scheduled Day and Evening classes at ALL CUNY campuses have been canceled for Thursday, November 1, 2012. Classes will resume on Friday, November 2, 2012.

See you all on Monday; we’ll pick up where we left off with the reading/blogging assignment originally due on 10/29. I’ll distribute an updated schedule of readings, discussion, and blogging assignments as soon as I can. Stay safe!

Best,
Prof. Leonard

Homework #9 – Charles Baculima-Castillo

The first reaction I had when I read Liddy’s article about search engines was that I was mind blown. I had an idea that how a search engine works would be complicated but I had no idea that there were so many steps revolving around this process. One aspect that I greatly wanted to touch on was the “stop words”. Stop words is a step that pretty much eliminates and negates common words like “the” and “is”. This step is really important because without this, someone can have a much harder time to search what they really want because these words would cause interference.

Homework #8 – Charles Baculima-Castillo

In the video “Laws that Choke Creativity” Lessig goes over history in the way that someone from the past viewed how technology would shape and change the future. For example, he discusses how John Philip Sousa used to enjoy music by hearing people actually sing and not depend on vocal machines, like auto-tune, to make music. Another example was William Blackstone’s perception of land in which he believed that no one has the right to trespass someone’s land, way above or below the ground, without the land owner’s consent. With technology growing throughout the years, the invention of planes and helicopters took place. This was problematic for several landowners since planes and helicopters would cross many pieces of land, in the sky, without their consent. As the time was evolving so has the law. The land laws were changed so that planes or any other aircraft that flew over other people’s land were not considered trespasses. This had to change because if the government would have kept the old land law. then flight trips would become impossible since they would get sued by many land owners for “trespassing”.

Homework #7 – Charles Baculima-Castillo

The first thing that came to mind when reading this article was that any one can be found guilty of plagiarism if they commit it, for example in here it’s Eugene Tobin, the ex president of Hamilton College. I’ve always known about the seriousness of plagiarism throughout my life as it was always discussed in my previous classes whenever I’ve had to do a research project. I completely agree with Isserman that plagiarism is wrong and unjustified because the person is taking someone else’s words and ideas as if it were their own and not giving the original source credit. In my opinion, I see plagiarism as a form of theft in all honesty.

Homework #6 – Charles Baculima-Castillo

I learned that on September 5th, 2006 Facebook launched a new feature called “News Feed” which angered many people because they saw it as an invasion of privacy. As a result, this led them to create groups and pages within the Facebook website itself that were against the new feature. I never experienced this myself because I joined Facebook in 2011, which was a lot later. I disagree with the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, on saying that all the information on someone was public anyway. On a technical standpoint; he is right because all the information on the News Feed can be viewed on everyone’s individual profiles, but people actually had to put time and effort to find certain information. With News Feed, everything little detail is added to that page which is accessible when someone enters Facebook and log in.

Homework #5 – Charles Baculima-Castillo

In, “The Charms Of Wikipedia” article, I know that Wikipedia is a website that pretty much acts like an encyclopedia. I can search anything I want and there will be an article based on the subject I searched. I find this website very helpful for homework and personal research. The growth of Wikipedia is very appealing to me because I’ve been using Wikipedia for years now; when the website was on its early stages and wasn’t popular at the time since it was new. Now throughout the years, Wikipedia has expanded so much and received recognition. As a result, it gained a huge audience and the website has undergone through several changes and revisions not only to their articles but to the website itself, like the homepage and menu bars. I find this very convenient, personally, because as Wikipedia grows, so does the content it carries. A few years ago, I remember I used to get frustrated when Wikipedia didn’t have articles on subjects I wanted to find and learn about. Now, in today’s world, the website has an article on almost anything; whether that ranges from music genres, movies, celebrities, food, hardware, to languages, politics, government, history, etc. I also felt that Wikipedia wasn’t just a website, but more like an online community data base, where anyone can contribute to the website. I’m a user of Wikipedia and I’ll proudly say that I also contributed to the website by adding content to articles that I have a great interest in and am very knowledgeable in.

Homework #4 – Charles Baculima-Castillo

In the readings of “Zine World, Zines 101 — A quick guide to zines” I’ve learned that Zines are self-published pieces of literature that are distributed locally. I’ve noticed that in the reading they say that Zines are personal pieces of literature, and the topic and the content varies from each creator of the Zine. I’ve concluded, that if someone were to use a Zine, they would have to do a thorough review on it to consider it a valid piece of information because some Zines may look rubbish, with a whole lot of grammar and literature mistakes and may have an amateur Mood Board appearance, while others may look great and professional, and even resemble other pieces of literature like Times Magazine, etc.

HW #3 Producers of digital Media

Through reading Pavlik’s, “Producers Of Digital Media” I took a big understanding to how and why media changed through time. In the reading it was confirmed that most of the newspapers were privately owned, however many people were into blogging. So the privately owned newspapers had to start allowing the publics voice in the paper or they would end up with no sales. The reason being is that people would simply go online and look at blog post for recent news and unbiased thoughts. The way that we know the internet plays a big role is even the presidential candidates promote very hard through internet ads on common websites like youtube. That goes to show that the internet is very powerful because if people promote on their to be world leaders harder then they do on the public campaigns then you know that the online community is very large and at the same time very powerful.

Homework #3 – Charles Baculima-Castillo

When I finished reading Pavlik’s, “Producers Of Digital Media” I’ve learned that in the past most national newspapers were privately owned but, with technology steadily increasing, they are becoming more public owned. Books, audio, and video content have greatly expanded because of the World Wide Web. As a result of this, now everyone can publish anything, not just the professionals. People can now use the web to publish anything they desire, whether it is for literature, music, or home-made videos. As the World Wide Web has greatly increased the availability for anyone to post and share their media content with anyone else, many people took the opportunity to make fan-made videos and publish them on websites like Hulu and YouTube for the rest of the world to see. The main thing I’ve learned about reading this chapter was that the web also had an impact on the presidential candidates. Presidential candidates are also using the web now because it is a tool that they use to communicate directly to the public without having to worry about the media changing what they are saying. As a result of the advances of technology; videos, audio, and images can be easily obtained by devices like tablets, cell phones, cameras, etc. and then be sent to other people and companies through e-mail. Some global news services are starting to promote and encourage people to submit their media content to them because by doing this, it increases the possibilities of obtaining new stories and coverage.

Homework #2 – Charles Baculima-Castillo

In the video I learned about the Information Cycle, which is a process in which information is launched through different ways over time. As time progresses after an event occurs, people will know more information pertaining to the event which will lead to a different format of publishing the information. For example, people might publish a newspaper article the day after the event but someone else might publish a book, years after the event. I honestly didn’t know about the Information Cycle but the way I’m seeing it now, this process really makes sense and gives the way information is processed, a lot more clearer. In the “Digital Possibilities for Literature” book, they say how publishing has become a lot easier with the introduction to Web 2.0. This is true because now anyone can publish anything online with little to no cost at all. Before the Web 2.0, one of the major problems for authors was that a lot of them couldn’t afford to pay the fees to get their arts of literature published.