Napster and Writing? Indeed! November 30, 2007

The two seem like an unlikely pair- the file sharing site that first introduced the world to free music, what does it have to do with writing? No matter how much people harangue the site, it is transforming the way people view writing and it all has to do with how we perceive writing as a society and how we receive writing. This also effects the ever so ubiquitous plagiarism cases that plagues universities and school and puts faculty in awkward or punisher position. If writing teachers employ the use of Napster for students to post and share documents (for reference and learning, not use) there is the ethics that must be employed to make sure it does not turn into plagiarism central. The Fair Use policy that DeVoss and Porter talk about seems like a really good approach to fend off plagiarism. The approach is based on teachers giving academic support to students to encourage them to write their won work. Extra supervision during the writing process will allow students to collaborate with their teachers and get feedback on their work early on in the revision process. I know some teachers I have had were totally supportive of asking questions about papers and working with you to make them well. On the other hand, there are some professors that are less accessible and harder to get in touch with. Fair Use also acknowledges that writing is intrinsically collaborative, nothing is ever new, and as authors we borrow and credit other writers into our work. Students just need to learn how to do this in a correct way that does not borrow without attribution. Plagiarism is too much a police catches the robber policy. Some teachers I had were just waiting for students to plagiarize, assigning really difficult literary analysis research papers and collecting our disks and using soft wear to detect any plagiarism. Teachers and students must work together to know expectations of their work and how they assemble it, or students may never know.

 

The more our society treats works as something that can shared and used to learn with, the less people may want to have strict copyright and authorship rules. Thus, people will respect the authors more and be aware that they do need to cite them or not illegally distribute these works. As soon as individuals stop acting like children in a kindergarten (MINE! MINE! MINE!) then perhaps sharing will become culturally more accepted.

Venting.. the saga continues…

Okay so besides me stressing over the work load of the semester I’m also stressing over the whole money situation, or lack there of. I know it’s my fault that I don’t have money because I’m going on two vacations over these next two breaks which arent exactly cheap. It doesn’t help that Christmas is coming and I have to buy everyone in my family a present. They say they don’t want one, but I’d feel bad Christmas morning with nothing to give. I’ve been traveling an hour and half home on weekends to make some money. But car insurance is due in December also. So as of now I have to pay car insurance, buy Christmas presents, pay for a Canada trip, and a Cancun trip ALL BY DECEMBER! I dont really know what I’m going to do. To top off the venting I got a speeding ticket on the way home for Thanksgiving break and broke down into tears on the phone with my mom because it is like a $100 ticket plus points on my license. With all my payments and finals coming up I think I’m going to have a nervous breakdown soon.. We will see I guess.

Donna

Three Important Rules For Breaking Up

Breaking up with someone is pretty much the worst thing EVER. It’s one of those horrible tasks that you want to put off for the rest of your life, like doing your taxes or visiting your semi-comatose grandfather. Ultimately, though, you just gotta rip off the bandage…or, you know, pull the plug. It’s hardest when the dumpee is a nice person; by the end of most relationships, you almost wish that your significant other was a dick/bitch so you could righteously dump his/her ass and then maybe, righteously, set his/her car on fire. But when he or she is nice, it’s the hardest thing in the world because you’ll be hurting someone who doesn’t deserve it, even though it’s better in the long run (because it frees him/her up to find someone else who will probably hurt him/her. Ah, Love!). I’ve been thinking about it rather a lot recently, so here’s the first part in a several part series about ways one shouldn’t break up with someone. (Not that y’all need the advice; you’re all lovely people. I would love to be dumped by any one of you. It’s all for kicks and giggles.)

Inadvisable Method #1:

Through a Friend
Thinking about this takes me back to elementary/middle school. It’s the classic story: girl sees boy, girl develops obsessive giggly crush on boy, girl finally screws up courage after weeks of minutely dissected flirtation, girl writes boy a note in pink glittery pen, girl gives it to best friend, best friend gives it to boy’s friend, boy’s friend teases boy without mercy, boy checks the “no” box, boy dates girl’s best friend instead, everyone wears stirrup pants and vests…How awful. Of course, you can do it the other way around, too, and have you friend inform your significant other that he is “so, like, dumped.” One would imagine that this tactic is followed by the dividing up of assets like best spots on the playground and vacation cubby-space, but sadly enough, I would hear about this sort of thing in high school. I went to a huge high school, so it was inevitable to witness in the hallway at least one break-up a month, some of them through friends whose teachers were more lenient on the four-minutes-between-classes rule. Trust me, though, the break-ups were never as awkward as the, uh…shall we say “unions”…against the lockers.

More later, maybe.

Venting!!! November 29, 2007

So I’m using this blog to vent about classes and work. No one needs to read my problems if they don’t want to. Haha. So I hate that the education program has very hard, well maybe not hard, but very time consuming classes that only count for 1 or 2 credits. I hate it!!! I am taking a Practicum class right now where I have to write an Intigrated Thematic Unit where I have to have 4 lessons that go together and incorporate 4 different subjects of social studies, science, art, and health science. As if that it’s enough work we have to write a content term paper (whatever that is) incorporating those subjects also. I also have to go to a second grade and observe the students and teacher, all for the same class. Now guess how many credits that class is… ONE!! I am restraining myself from using faul language right now. I get so annoyed with the credit system at Rowan, I want to scream.

And because that class is only one credit I have to take 5 other classes to make sure I dont graduate any later than I already am. If you transfer or change majors here your basically screwed. I am one of the lucky ones that did both. I’ll be a super senior next year. One good thing is that I will only be 22 when I graduate thanks to my late birthday that I have been angry about basically my whole life..

Donna

P Runway Week 3

I scandalously forgot to watch last week’s episode of Project Runway due to the excitement of Thanksgiving Eve. This week though I got to catch up with two episodes- the Sarah Jessica Parker design challenges for her line Bitten, and the challenge to design menswear for Tiki Barber. Both were extremely challenging- the Bitten budget was a mere 15 bucks, while most of the designers had no experience constructing menswear. I was surprised at the results.

 

First the Bitten designs were mostly pretty good. A stand out and surprise was made by Elisa, the zany pretty much lunatic designer who teamed up with an apprehensive and scared Sweet P. The cape and dress they constructed looked awesome and way more expensive than a retail price of only 30$. Major disappoints from Marion whose “journey” was ended when he sent a hideous Pocahontas-esque poorly made sweater blob thing described by Heidi Klum as a dirty rag. I don’t know where Christian’s design was headed in the first place. For me, the color and concept was all wrong. He can sew and it talented, I think we will see some good advent guard pieces from him.

 

The Tiki Barber episode was personally less enthralling for me, except the male models were pretty nice to look at for a change. Jack made a well tailor two piece shirt and pant that Barber picked as the winner. I think Kit should have won though because her look was more polished and reminded me of Ralph Lauren- but hey, Barber had to wear it.

 

Bring the drama on for the next episode when it seems that the designers get a bit hairy with one another… Oh crap here comes the divas!

 

-Lisa, your informal P.Runway informant. Please comment if you wish, we can get some great discussions going!

Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits Until We Pass Away

Hello, Greetings, It’s Me, An Outlaw November 28, 2007

::Boo-style from Monster’s Inc.:: “Kitty!”

Second of all, the name of the song is “Baba O’Riley”…I mean, “Dragostea Din Tei.” And it is so sweet. I have it on my iPod, and you know how people have their driving song or the song that they play to get pumped up for a game or to ask for a raise? “Dragostea Din Tei” is that song for me. I sing it, in Romanian, as loud as I can, into my hairbrush. I have a dance that goes with it. My sister knows it, too. My parents are about half a step away from knowing it, and my brother won’t admit it, but he knows it, and the three of us siblings will probably make it our new snow dance. My family is kind of weird. We’re not the only ones, though; at work last summer, someone brought it up, and 90% of the kitchen knew it well it enough to sing along. Only a few people danced, but it was still awesome.

I think the most interesting part of the YouTube article was the question of intellectual property. My aunt is a patent lawyer, so I’ve been caught on the end of a many a lecture (not that I paid attention to a whole lot of it), and it’s sort of alarming how complicated it can get. I would think that a lot of bands would appreciate what basically amounts to free advertising, except that then it’s so easy to go online and just continually watch the video or download the song for free. It seems funny when you consider that companies like Coke, Apple, Sony, Nike, et cetera, pay bajillions of dollars to have their products inserted into TV shows and movies. If you watch The Wedding Singer, you’ll notice, if you haven’t already, all the ridiculous branding; the book Syrup is an amusing look at this type of insidious advertising. And that’s pretty much it for that.

Cyber Psychos

The LambdaMOO cyber rape case goes against the old “sticks and stones” platitude. This is an extremely bizarre case and the article from Julian Dibbell reads more like a wacky well written short story than a case about online rape. At first the whole concept was difficult to believe, rape occurring in an online world through a voodoo doll? It’s probably the craziest thing I have heard happening online. The whole realm of MUD (multi user dimension) redefines what reality is and what is pretend. The boundaries of physicality are crossed through emotional and psychological standards; no longer can a rape only occur bodily, but mentally too. The people claiming the rape received vulgar and explicit sexually oriented messages while using the MUD space.

This virtual world online is a part of people’s lives. When I questioned why the rape victim did not turn away from their computer, it became clear that the MUD was not a mere game; it was an extension of self for many people. What made the rape case so compelling was that it effected the whole MOO community, making it a “social” issue. This brought about concerns that rules and regulations needed to be followed in order for the community to still work effectively in a respectful manner. A web government was needed to ensure the safety and rights of online users.

This got me thinking about how monumental people’s online lives are. Can they step away from the screen? If someone was harassing me online I would stop going on. No one can hurt you if you don’t allow them too.   

Lonely girl…lonely boy November 27, 2007

When I read the article about lonely girl and how Flinders used to get beat up in high school, I thought that maybe he was using his own life experiences in this youtube story line. I was thinking about how he made up short stories about a fictional girl with boy problems and parent problems. It got me thinking about how technology is changing so much these days that someones short stories can be broadcasted on the internet in a tv show style for the entire world to watch. I think it’s amazing how technology is changing so rapidly right at our finger tips.

Donna

Lord, That Lonely Girl

I don’t know, maybe I’m too old and cranky for teen angst. I used to love it; I delighted in all the drama that my friends came up with and was thrilled when I had my own to bring to the table. Something about lonelygirl15 rubs me the wrong way, though. It might be her twitchy face and frequent use of fillers. “Um, I’m a lonely girl…I’m 16…but I don’t want, um, you to be all, um, stalky, so I won’t tell you where, um, I live, just say a million times that, um, it’s really boring. And make some more faces. Um.” Ugh. It could be that I’ve known about the series for a while, since right around the time it started getting big, before people were seriously questioning how real it was. I never watched it, as initial descriptions made it sound stupid and I had lost interest in the whole blogging thing after my own blogring had gotten too histrionic, even for my tastes. Plus, it got really outlandish, like the Internet version of “Passions”, another relic from my middle school days. When it was finally revealed to be a hoax, I wasn’t totally surprised, but I’ll admit to being disappointed. It’s sort of sad that this public diary, one that touched a lot of young people, was all written by adults with marketing on their minds. I guess this has a lot of implications: our manipulation by the media, the ease with which we can re-invent ourselves on the Internet, our voyeuristic interest in the personal lives of others/our solipsistic belief that people give a damn about the mundane happenings in our own lives, our need for a human connection in an increasingly remote and mechanical society. I don’t really want to talk about any of those, though; that’s fodder for a research paper that I am too lazy to do. Basically, I hate lonelygirl15 for being angsty in a way I like to think I’ve left behind; but I also hate her for abandoning it for some stupid occult theme. If someone is going to have access to the minds and emotions of thousands of people, there should be some honesty in there; teen bullshit is largely no more real than anything lonelygirl15 said, but at least it has belonged to everyone.