Its alive!

 In edit class this semester we spent a great deal of time talking about the Internet and its pros and cons. we talked at great length about how the Internet is a tool that should be used for the good of man kind. we also spoke about how the it can be very dangerous if used for the wrong reason. With all these things said, I still find it fascinating that the Internet has, for lack of a better word mutated far beyond the control of its creators, to the point where no one entity can control it. there is no Donald Trump or Rupert Murdock on the other end of the Internet controlling what we can and can not access. the closest thing we might have right now is google, and even that cannot limit what people can access.

 I had a teacher once who spoke very passionately about Frankenstein. She argued that the the story of Frankenstein has become one of the most re told stories of our time. Think about it. The movies Terminator, the Matrix, I Robot, and Tron are all stories about how man creates something that eventually grows beyond his own control.
  It seems to me like the Internet has become our own real life version of Frankenstein. It may be good, it may be bad. that's for us to find out. All I know is that briliant minds that created the Internet didn't have a clue what they had made until the moment they stepped back and realised "its alive!". Ok maybe not, but it is definitely not under their control any more.             

helpful programs

    for the first half of this semester I learned about many new tools that Im sure I will find helpful in the future.
I really like xtranormal and go animate. I also found prezi to be an exciting alternative to powerpoint. However, I did find it frustrating that some of the sites seem to be rigid up so that you almost need to purchase credits if you plan on using the site more than once. Maybe its just me, but if I dont know what something can do for me I have a tough time justifying spending money on it, and I am getting tired of signing up for on line programs that can only do one or two things and can only be used once without paying. I already have more user names and passwords than I care to remember.
 
 I had a similar problem with Adobe photoshop, It took me almost the length of the trial period to figure out how to use the program, and I was only scratching the surface of what it could do for me. The cost of photoshop is $700 dollars and up depending on the version you want. I dont have $700 to spend on something I dont know how to use. I know that for many of the programs like Adobe photoshop I can go on line and find thousands of helpful tutorials and forums that will tell me how to use it. The problem is that many of the online help sites often offer anonymous advice on how to get these programs for free (aka stealing). As it stands right now, I am learning how to use these programs from the same places that are also telling me how to steal them. This puts me at a crossroads. I can get ahead by stealing and teaching myself how to use these very useful programs. Or I can fall behind by either spending money I dont have, or by denying myself access to tools that I know will help me in the future.  
  
I think that if schools really want to teach good digital citizenship, they need to start  offering courses that help students learn the potential of these programs before students have to buy them.        

on line addiction

  for my first post on this blog I want to talk about the possible dangers of the internet.  
Our class spoke a week or so ago about the people becoming addicted to technology and how we need to be aware of the amount of time that children spend on the net.
I absolutely agree with the idea that children need to have limits on the amount of time they spend plugged in to technology. However, I also think that some people are projecting a negative view of new technology on to their children based on their own ignorant beliefs.

   I can remember hearing parents and teachers urging children to minimize the amount of time they spend playing with technology based on the belief that the child will never find a career playing video games or talking on facebook. Well people get paid ridicules amounts of money to be good at sports, and I guarantee that many people originally laughed at the idea of paying someone to play a game. yet in 2008 the average salary oh NHL hockey player was $1,906,793 (http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/story/?id=240324). who is laughing now?

 the following link I think serves as proof that we really don't know what kind of future we have created for our children.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982001.htm
the main part of this link I hope people notice is that a person with an on line avatar named Anshe Chung owns online (not real/pretend) property that is valued at $250000 real dollars. suddenly the all time Anshe Chung spent playing on line games doesn't seem like a waste. 

I am not saying that excessive on line gaming pays off. I just find that passion and persistence more than anything else attributes to success. Malcome Gladwell  when referring to people like Bill Gates talks about a 10,000-hour rule. this rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, you will see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years at 4 hours a day   http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/11/news/companies/secretsofsuccess_gladwell.fortune/index.htm.

 So I say if a kid is passionate about video games, let him/her be. Because we really don't know where that passion will take them.