Seeing Through New Eyes

I have mixed feelings about this weeks assignment. I really enjoyed the time I spent in Zork playing. I remember my older brothers playing games like this when I was younder. I would watch them type in commands and then map out on paper where they were. It was fascinating. The hours of playing in Zork were fun. I found that for that sort of game I loved to explore the world and try to map out where I had been, like I had seen my brothers do. I found it hard to navigate the game without mapping. LambdaMoo was a different story. I never had problems connecting with the server, but I had problems once inside the world. It took me quite a bit of time to grasp the commands. In the mean time the other people in the rooms with me laughed at me, jeered. At one time someone had mentioned that they were new (like me) and that they were a student. Someone who obviously was well known to the world said, "No one is holding class here. We're a small community that really resents untrain...

Reputation, trust, coopertaion, and incentives: there are many ways to build these up, and just one bad stroke can tear them down quickly. Buying more and more online is creeping into my life. Until just the last 6 months or so I have never thought of problems with online purchasing like fraudulent dealings. Most of my concerns have stemmed from any paranoia about identity theft. In my online dealings, mostly ebay and Amazon.com, I have found that reputation and trust play very large roles in what I feel safe doing. Incentives I find to purchase online fall into cheaper items that come right to my doorstep. I usually have to wait a few days before they arrive, but Amazon.com offers free shipping for purchases over a certain amount, and that adds to the incentive. It hasn't ever been hard to purchase from Amazon.com because the company has a good reputation and I trust them. On ebay, looking at the reputation system there (the feedback) is important to me as well. I won'...

I need to clarify what I had written in a previous post . David had made a comment to me that my question showed, "a pretty pervasive bias toward knowing "like we do offline", and that knowing should always be like that. I think we should recognize the legitimacy of completely online relationships...". After reading his comment I realized that I had not written or conveyed in my writing very well what I was really thinking. I do that so much. So, I am trying to redeem myself in some ways because I love online learning and interactions, and I guess I don't want people who read my blog to think that I believe online interactions and learning should be like face-to-face. I realize it is different, and I actually appreciate the difference. In my personal experience with online vs. face-to-face I have noticed though that the online relationship changes some once you've met face-to-face. That change usually isn't bad. So back to my original post about the ...

First I want to say how excited I have been about Fanfiction. This site has so much potential. It was sometimes hard to pull myself away from reading so many great writings. I found that just like gaming this site can capture you and keep a tight hold for a long time. Authors followed : 1. The Village Girl :This author wrote based on the movie The Village. I read the story titled The Attack. I really enjoyed the realism the author inserted into the scene and the thoughts of the characters. 2. Dolce Notte :This author wrote off of the movie The Prince of Egypt. I read the story titled Side By Side. The story is great because it focuses on societal issues of the past that still exist today. 3. Galathilion :This author wrote from several ideas. It is interesting because it was an assignment for school. It incorporates a couple of books and a holiday. The stories title is An Elven Christmas. For the restrictions set on the writer from the teacher, the creativity in the writing is wo...

Tonight I spent dinner with a portion of my Understanding Online Interaction class. It is so amazing to me how different interactions take place in face to face environments versus online. For the rest of the semester I will now read my classmates postings with a different perspective. I've met most of them and have a little bit of knowledge about them as people rather than just online students. I had wondered before dinner if this would 'taint' or change any interactions we had online or not. But then I realized that most of these people already knew each other. So their online perspectives have already been different than mine. I guess I'm not sure how to explain this, but communicating 'outside of school' has always opened up different doors for me. I'll admit that there are opportunities for me to interact with these people away from 'school' per say, but I have not taken the opportunities to do so. In the end it really is my own fault for not t...

This week has been quite interesting. Once again I am learning more and more, and I am really enjoying it. David introduced the class to Sharp Reader , a RSS/Agregator. I was struggling with keeping track of my classmates’ blogs, but this software allows me to read them easily. The blogs I have followed this week for my assignment will definitely be ones to follow. Here are the topics I find interesting and that came up in the blogs I browsed. Topics of interests: • Learning Management Systems-this area seems to have some controversial aspects and I want to hear the whole story before I have a good idea of what is good for education and what is not. • Distance Education and E-learning-I am fascinated with distance education and e-learning. There is so much within this area that I just can’t seem to get enough, and I’m always finding new resources, like the link from Dorothy Little’s blog to E-learning guru , a great blog full of resources. • Educational websites and resources-T...

In browsing through some EduBloggers tonight I found a fabulous blog by Anne Davis about ways to use blogs in education . It is a great list that anyone interested in education and blogs should look at.

My professor, David Wiley, asked me a question back in one of his comments to my blog (oh one way far back before I posted the same blog about 25 times!!) Anyway, he wanted to know how much value I was finding in reading other people's blogs. So to answer that question more fully, I would say that finding blogs with subjects that I am interested in adds a lot of value to my experiences (and especially for the class he is teaching, since I am being introduced and using blogs and other online communication tools.) It is a great educational experience to read from bloggers who have been blogging for quite some time and are part of the culture of blogging. There is a lot of information that can be gleaned from others. Although some of the blogs I tracked for my assignment last week were not necessarily educational in nature, I have found that even just reading the blogs of my peers (well, I like to think they are my peers-most of them are PhD students, which is a level much higher than...

Well, looks like my Blog Hopping post shouldn't be missed! Wow. Oh well. I shouldn't leave writing my blog until Monday morning. Wiley shouldn't have a hard time finding my entry-heehee. Just for some clarification, my post was posting. So after trying many times I opened another brower and it finally posted my blog, and posted my blog, and posted my blog. I wish I had had the feedback from blogger saying it was posting my post even though nothing happened in my window and when I opened up my blog and refreshed it nothing changed either. Now I know. Thanks for the help Bekir, I have successfully taken off all the extra postings.

Ok, so another week gone by and I have been looking at blogs. Below are the five I have followed this week. Some of them have been a little boring because the people only posted a few times, but others have been actively posting everyday. It is interesting to see that those who post everyday seem to use their blogs as a way to vent or reflect on what is happening in their lives, at least for the personal blogs. The Blogging of the President has been quite an interesting one too. It appears that the people posting there are writing a little more formal, at least with less explitives involved. Each personal blogger seems to be adding whatever options of their personality there are to their blogs. Images and animated images were prevelant too. I found it amazing that I could go in and read what people had to say and then feel so connected to them. It made me want to go back everyday and read more, which made those who posted irregularly disappointing. I also found myself going through the...