Hey Roomie!!!

I had wanted to do some farther looking online schooling from the beginning of our experiences this week. But I was interested to find this article about how some colleges are using a new profiling program to have student find roommates. The link to the article is http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/connecticut/ny-bc-ct-fea--onlineroommat0927sep27,0,5892616.story. It is just awesome to think that I could have known a majority of my class prior to starting college and also avoided roommate problems that I dealt with my first year. There are very few drawbacks that I can think would even occur from using these types of systems.


The part that I find the most interesting is the option the student have as well as the benefits that the school gains. The school no longer has to do the entire roommate work and hope for the best by just randomly combining students. The system works by students crating a profile with interests and study habits. They then use this system to look up one another and also are able to chat and post on a wall system much like face book.


Overall the program seems to be working well the main drawback are a lack of student participation that is hovering around 50% for most of the schools it has been introduced to. The system of allowing students to choose roommates also helps them insure they will get along with their roommate, which is a major benefit when beginning college experience. The program has also helped students to know someone before they even begin school, which really helps because most of the schools that use it are accepting more than 800 freshman and they are from all around the United States. Overall I think this should be introduced as an option at all schools allowing students to meet people and also help people get acquainted.

IM in the Office

This is extraordinary to me! That it has been proven that persons whom work in a cubical style workplace are claiming that using instant messenger only creates a small distraction compared to more common types such as phone calls and face to face conversations. The idea is that the work can be focused and only pertain to information that is essential to the work that needs to be done. It is the idea that you can wait to respond to a message more easily than a phone call where one would feel obligated to answer immediately.

The idea I find hard to grasp is that employees would only talk to those that they are working with. It’s not like the employer has controls to see who someone is messaging. That and even if they attempted someone would probably claim infringement into their freedom of speech. So how do we expect employees to honestly do more work with such a simple distraction? I know for myself I had to remove Instant Messenger from my computer due to me not getting work done. Work that could wait for a five minute chat, that would soon become two hours and leave me scrambling to finish before it was due at midnight.

Hence the case for them to remove instant messenger from the office altogether. The research done was also merely interviews where they sat down with employees and asked them how they felt their work was affected by Instant Messenger. Instead of actually comparing offices productivity of businesses that allow IM and those that do not to see which gets more work done. This is an only a suggestion for potential methods to confirm or deny thee findings. But in my opinion the findings are not the best and can stand to have farther investigation .

Cyber Bullies

I found a reading to continue the idea of cyber bullying. It was interesting to see there views on how to solve the problem. The most common from both what we watched in class and what I read was for teens to block those people offending them. This is a great idea but how simple is it to create another profile or go onto a friends screen name and use it to carry out the dirty work.


The next piece of advice offered to teens suffering from the bullying is to simply limit their friend list to those whom that are truly close friends. This comes as a shock to me being that friends list should not be about how many friends they can claim to have when in fact they only talk with a few.


The following is a major hindrance to the idea of privacy. Teens sharing their passwords that are meant to only allow them to access their profile. How can it be seen as ok to share things of that nature? I find it disturbing that so little of the society is relying on building relationships in person.


I completely agree that having these means of CMC are easier to maintain long distance relationships or even reconnecting with friends long forgotten. But wouldn’t it look just as nice to keep those relationships, because if it was someone that truly meant something to me I could manage to find another way to stay in contact with them. Look people were able to do it across a country even prior to telegraphs, so why can teens not do the same and talk on the phone or just pass notes in school. This would eliminate the online bullying altogether, and when in person it could easily be deterred by a teacher, who is there to intervene.

Cyber kinetics

Cyber kinetics the art of using peoples brainwaves to control mechanics. The basis of this is to allow persons who have lost a limb to compensate by using a mechanical one. The easiest way to explain this is to take someone missing a hand and have it replaced with a mechanical one. This is then attached to a sophisticated computer system that attaches to the brain then using the brain impulses that would have once controlled the hand to do the same for the new mechanical one.


This is an awesome method of CMC, but instead of people conversing to one another through the system the system actually communicates with the machine. It’s quite impressive to think that we can use this to replace the human form. This science could potentially mean that one day everyone is plugged in, literally. We could be jacked into the car, computer, even work without having to ever leave our beds. Although at this point the science is very specific to individual systems who is to say we can not use the system to remotely control thoughts or speak to one another without ever moving our lips.


I am really excited to see where the potential of these systems takes us. I am currently envisioning a world where instead of ever typing I simply think what I want to appear on the screen and the words appear as I am thinking them. Not like the voice recognition systems that exist today, but where I can have multiple thoughts and have the ones that are meant to be in a paper appear rather than all the things that I go through my mind. Not the thought that this could happen more that this will one day be a reality is what scares me. How will our families be able to communicate with one another, let alone our children be able to have what today is consider normal social behavior.


So for the sake of lives let’s keep going with Cyber kinetics and the potentials it holds but at some point in our future we are going to need to examine where we want things to go and draw the lines of what is too much.

Buffy

While watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer we as a class were asked to look at some of the connections we found between the Computer Mediated Communication today and what exactly the producers of the program were trying to achieve. Most of which is based on our personal observations between the two.


On a personal level I felt that it covered a few things throughout the program. The first one was and is a major concern to people today and that is getting connected to others. Not only are people today continuing old relationships and helping to maintain them but they are also forming new ones. Some of which they are not aware of whom they are meeting. Such is the case in the film where one of the girls meets a demon online.


This has all come about because of the transition to the electronic age. This is exemplified in the world today by Westminster College, part of this being the renovation of the library, to ensure that it stays up to date. This updating process does not include new reading materials instead it is a physical space most of which will be taken up by student using ht computers.


Also is it not odd that during the program the cyber world of the internet became the physical though the actual incarnation of the demon. Is that to say that our thoughts dreams and face book accounts instead of being just something online will become our only means of communicating with people in at the desk next to us?


These are just a few of the thoughts that occurred to me. It is tough to say exactly what the producers were trying to secretly say through Buffy’s adventure. However it is quite probable to say that it was more a means of having the program air that it is to foreshadow their personal opinions on what the future of the Computer mediated Communication has in store for us that we have not yet found out yet. My belief is that they simply are trying to send a message that we need to make sure we look at our information systems as they develop and make sure they help more than they hinder.