Reflections on Technology and Life for CS 1300

Helicopter Parents

2008-01-24T10:11:00.000-08:00

Today's News in Chronicle of Higher Education points out the benefits of having helicopter parents http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1355n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en . When I was in college, my parents came to the school exactly twice - once to move me in and once to move me out. Telephone calls were deemed too expensive and we communicated by letter. I was expected to write once a week.
That is in sharp contrast to the communication parents have with their children and with the universities they attend. New and inexpensive technologies have made this possible.
"Do 'helicopter parents do more harm than Good?" See the Q&A Advice on ABC News: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/story?id=1237868
The College Board has an online quiz for parents and discusses the benefits of parental involvement http://www.collegeboard.com/parents/plan/getting-ready/155044.html Take the online quiz for your parents and comment on the results. What guidelines would you suggest for parents of college students in the 21st century?

Open Education

2008-01-24T09:54:00.000-08:00

The founders of Wikipedia and Connections (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) were considered to be outrageous when they dreamed of anyone being able to contribute his/her knowledge freely in an arena that anyone could access. This idea must be very threatening to scholars. Should we be concerned? How will we know what to believe?
The free sharing of books and other materials, the sharing of research possible via Web 2.0 are emphasizing collaboration rather than competition. Who does this threaten?
See the Open Forum from the San Francisco Chronicle. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/22/EDRTUJ346.DTL

Open Access: Sharing on the Web

2008-01-23T06:57:00.000-08:00

Here are some links to videos done by students in a contest about Open Access. Did you know that faculty here at Trinity have published scholarly articles and the copyright by the publisher did not allow them to make copies to distribute for their students? That's right, they couldn't make copies of the articles they wrote. See this video:

http://blip.tv/file/517300

To see other contestants' videos, including the winner's, see today's Chronicle of Higher Education blog.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/?id=2682&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

French Students Become Prostitutes to Pay Tuition

2008-01-22T05:43:00.000-08:00

For interesting news about what is happening to higher education, subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Education blog. To do that you need a news aggregator and a feed to the blog. Here is a link to today's blog about French students becoming prostitutes in order to support themselves.

http://chronicle.com/news/article/?id=3780&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Web 2.0: Professors as Video Stars

2008-01-22T04:48:00.000-08:00

In the early 1970s I worked on a math series for education television. The idea behind the series was to identify topics that were difficult for students and could be better addressed through the medium of television rather than in a typical classroom setting. The ability to show motion is very powerful. The microchip came out in 1974 and computers as a vehicle for education entered the scene. The World-Wide-Web became a phenomenon in the late 1990s. Distance learning became possible. Students didn't have to be physically present in a classroom. More recently, Web 2.0 is allowing people all over the planet to work together in a way that has never before been possible.

The rock stars of teaching now have the potential to educate anyone who "tunes in." Colleges can now have channels on YouTube and podcasts on Itunes. Berkley has taken the lead and others are following. A new web site named the Big Think, a YouTube for academics, was recently launched.

Twenty years ago, the president of Trinity predicted that technology in education would go the way of educational TV, that it wouldn't have much impact. Now we are on the verge of something really big. Universities are sharing their education. People everywhere are contributing. What changes will this bring?

If "a picture is worth 1000 words," how much is a moving picture worth?

I would like to embed one of my favorite videos, but for now you'll have to take the link to view it. Thanks you, Professor Walsh for making "The Machine is Using Us." http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Link to Email Address

2008-01-17T15:46:00.000-08:00

How to make a link from your name to your email address:

Pat Semmes

When you preview the post you should try clicking on your name and see if it links to your email. The email program will open in the email program on your computer and your name will be in the TO box. If you are using a TU computer, you cannot check it this way. Mouse over the name and you should see mailto: followed by your email address.

YouDiligence Monitors Athletes' Web Sites

2008-01-14T05:24:00.000-08:00

Who is reading what you put on social web sites? Large colleges have coaches who monitor what their athletes put on Web sites like MySpace and Facebook. Now there is a program they can purchase to do the monitoring for them in real-time. If it finds objectionable words or phrases, it sends an email alert to the designated college official with a link to the page.

The program named YouDiligence was shown at the NCAA annual convention and is discussed in today's Chronicle of Higher Education. Wouldn't this be a violation of 1st amendment rights? Legal experts say if students publish information over the Web, it is public and anyone can search for it. Why does this make me feel queasy? Maybe it depends what they do with the information. On the other hand, I can't believe what students and others put out for public consumption.

wmv file

2008-01-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

Uploading a Test Video

2008-01-11T05:19:00.000-08:00

The following video is a .mov file. The file size is 1.3 MB.
It is the first video I took with my digital camera.

Seth's Edublog

2008-01-11T04:43:00.000-08:00

While surfing the Web this morning looking for information about embedding videos on blogs, I came across Seth's Edublog http://networkedmedia.adc.rmit.edu.au/index.php/about-this-blog/ . Seth is a professor who is interested in video theory and practice. Many of the entries discuss some topics that we cover in our class especially as related to Web 2.0.

He has a link to a video by a Stanford law professor that looks interesting
Free Culture: What we need from you
http://www.linuxworld.com/events/keynotes/lwsf06-lessig.html

Seth gives guidelines for the "hypertext essay." This looks like an interesting idea but what if the links are broken?

Video theory is especially interesting to me since I did research in the 70s for educational TV on comparing the instructional effect of still pictures vs. moving pictures. At that time, it was slides vs. film.

Privacy Issues and the Web

2008-01-09T05:26:00.000-08:00

This morning I got the following email from my niece Windi:

Just for kicks tonight I "googled" my name, first with my married last name....then with my maiden name (mostly I was making sure no one else was using my name!!) and look what I found!!! An old art show I was in before I was married!
How funny! It's my art on the wall! I have NO idea who took this photo....but I sure didn't get a copy....and was never told it would be on the web. Freaky. These pieces are now on our bookshelf wall. Yoga poses.

The website is http://www.accd.edu/sac/vat/EXHIBITS/2002student/ceramics/source/22.htm

I truncated back on the url http://www.accd.edu/sac/vat/EXHIBITS/2002student/ceramics/
and found that Windi's ceramics were in an art show at San Antonio College. There are photographs of all the works of art in the show.

Should the webmaster have gotten Windi's permission before posting a picture of her work? Were any laws violated? Was it OK since the web page is an education site?

Using Word 2007 for Blog Post

2007-09-24T20:11:00.001-07:00

I am typing this entry in Word 2007 using the Blog Post Template. If this works, it is easier than posting from Blogger. Checking spelling and grammar is easy and the word count is available in case the teacher requires a certain number of words. O.K. Here goes.

Pat Semmes

Welcome to Computer Skills

2007-08-11T14:26:00.000-07:00

It is a pleasure having you in my class and I look forward to getting to know you. Students who have taken this class often say they learned a lot more than they expected to and the class was really helpful.

For the past ten years, I have taught essential computer skills at Trinity. I also taught computer science here in the early 1980s.

My experience with computers began in 1962 when I was a co-op student working for the Navy on IBMs first commercial computer used for business. Our mission was to silence the noise on submarines so they would not be detected in enemy waters. The computer had 8K of memory - that's about 8,000 bytes. It took up a physical space larger than our classroom and was so expensive it could only be leased. My desktop computer has 2 gigabyte of memory - that's about 2,000,000,000 bytes. We've come a long way.

During the Viet Nam War I worked for the National Security Agency as a cryptanalyst. NSA is a sister agency to the CIA. The job was to "read other people's mail" and be sure that no one could read ours. Of course, they didn't have email then and the Internet didn't exist yet. That would happen 30 years later.

My educational background is in mathematics and I've taught both math (mostly calculus) and computer science. There were no computer science classes when I was in school. We had to learn on our own and from each other. We still learn that way. This semester we will be learning Office 2007, Expression Web, Adobe Photoshop Elements 5. Next semester we will be changing to the Vista Operating System. You may already have that. Undoubtedly, there will be new threats to your computer and you will get up-to-date information on how to protect yourself.

Please keep in touch, work hard, and enjoy!

Pat Semmes