From one life to two..

Ever wonder what it would be like to live a different life?  If you were given the opportunity to be the opposite sex for a day would you seize it?  I think there have been times where I wished I could pretend to be a boy, or pretend to be older for a day to see what life is like but it was always just a thought.  Never in a million years did I think a software program would be designed that allows people to live another life.
According to the Second Life website, it is an online virtual world that was developed in 2003 to allow people to interact with each other through avatars.  Second Life allows people to participate in individual or group activities.  It also allows avatars to create and trade virtual property.  As a class assignment I was asked to make a Second Life (2L) account and browse around.  Wow, Linden Lab, an internet company, did a really great job creating 2L. So, I am sure you are wondering how was my experience, right?

First, I had to pick a name for my avatar.  I remember in class someone asking about using their first name and it was frowned down upon.  Afterall, if you were trying to create a "second life" why would you use your real name?  I had to google the proper netiquette of names for Second Life.  There were so many rules!  I just decided to go with "Kristin Partini."  I picked Kristin because it is kind of close to my name (I know, I didn't really branch out and away from my real life or "first life") and "Partini" because it was this awesome game sitting on my island as I started my account.  You're right, I probably should have thought a little more outside of the box, but it is my first time!  After making my name, which took probably 15 minutes, I had to pick an avatar.  I wanted to be a girl and I wanted to find one that looked like me.  Perfect!  The girl with black hair, sunglasses, a shopping bag, black heels, a jacket and jeans on, that definitely represents me.  Next step was to actually play or participate in Second Life!

I had a really hard time navigating and walking through Second Life.  In fact, it was so frustrating I gave up and had to come back to it the next day.  Once I kind of got the hang of walking around I found my professor, which was cool to talk to someone I knew.  While being in Second Life I was asked to join someone on an island, I figured why not!?  Bad idea, it was cannibal island!  I quickly got off and went somewhere else.  I tried going to a shopping mall but there were so many that it annoyed me.  I tried to change the clothes on my avatar, but could not figure that out either.  I left her in the standard clothes she came in. 

Overall, although my time in Second Life was short, it was very interesting.  The idea of being able to live a life in another gender it kind of a neat idea that people can actually do it!  I recommend Second Life to anyone who has not tried it just so you can say you did it!  So go on and live another life for a day!

Technology Take Over

A little over a year ago my younger brother came to me and expressed his disinterest in school.  He was not doing great in high school so after deep consideration he and my parents agreed to enroll him in Cyber School.  At the time I thought it could be a great thing for him, but I do not feel that way now.  It did not take long for him to fall behind in his class work because it was so independently driven.  I did not think of the comparison until later, but it is the same thing as taking a class online in college, which is not a decision I am thankful I never had to make.  I am very against online classes because I appreciate and value the student-professor relationship that develops face to face in a traditional classroom setting.  After a year of Cyber School my brother re-enrolled back into public school.  But what do we honestly think about the idea of learning online?

In an article published by the New York Times on Oct 8, Trip Gabriel and Matt Richtel, dig deeper into online learning (Carnegie Learning).  In the beginning of the article the two discuss how the Cognitive Tutor software program did not significantly affect test scores of students.  I do think it does have something to do with the measurement of success, maybe they have not come up with the proper way to measure the increase in learning properly.  Nevertheless, I still am not a fan of online learning.  I also get the feeling that teachers could be using as a replacement to them teaching the students, which in my mind could be a reason it is not working like schools want it to.  I think that the online learning should be used after a teacher teaches a lesson to their students; it could be a review tool.  I cannot help but ask myself why schools are paying so much money for this software if it is not even working. 

In the article it says that the full curriculum can cost nearly three times as much as a typical textbook over six years.  THREE TIMES!?  What, that is an insane amount of money to be wasting on a program that hasn’t been proven to work better than traditional teaching.  Later in the article it talks about the history of the program.  It was founded in 1998 and the founder, John R. Anderson recipient of the 2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science award, seems to be a credible and honorable man.  It was nice to read about a success story of a school using the Cognitive Tutor, but it does not make it seem dependable when the school stopped using the software in 2007.

I am a firm believer that students need the teacher-student face to face interaction to help them learn.  After all, at the end of the day, a computer is stupid.  A computer does not have feelings and does not know what you are trying to tell it to do.  It is merely a system that uses binary code to say if it understands what you are typing or not.  I may not have ever taken an online class, but I know I would never want to.  As I said earlier, I value the relationships I have created with my teachers and professors over the years.  I know I have been successful because of these relationships and I will continue to be successful because of them.  It has been proven that online relationships take three to four times longer to build than one in person does.  The relationship and bond you create with a professor is on a different level then the one you have with friends or family.  A professor experiences your academic and professional side and should help to shape those sides while they have you in class. 

My Very Own Web page!

I remember when I was younger and Myspace was the popular form of social media, well, it was pretty much the only form of social media.  I never knew that when I changed my background color, my pictures, my fonts and my text it was I altering the HTML of my Myspace account.  Seriously, how cool is that?  Myspace created a place for users to go and utilize HTML.  Gosh, I used to spend hours and days changing the layout of my Myspace because it was so fascinating to me. 

It is an understatement for me to say I was excited to have this assignment.  And I was always excited to know what it was I was doing to my Myspace account many years ago.  To begin my HTML web page I needed to think of what it was going to be about.  I picked something very close to me: Phi Sigma Sigma and The National Kidney Foundation.  Each year we donate time and money to support the NKF so I thought it would be a great thing to highlight in my web page.  After I chose my topic of information it was time for the fun to begin; yes, it was time to code!

Coding to me seemed relatively easy.  I used a learning guide on http://w3schools.com/html/, a website Dr. Bock provided for us, to create my hypertext markup.  For me, it was a lot of copy and pasting and then taking out what did not apply to my page and inputting what did.  For example, to create my heading I used <h1>My First Heading</h1>, took out “My First Heading” and put “Phi Sigma Sigma: We Walk To Save Lives.”  The most challenging part was adding an image.  I found it difficult to add an image from Facebook because my pictures are private; therefore, the image was not able to appear because it was not a public JPEG.  I had to save the image, open it in a web page and then copy the JPEG image file for it to work.  What I found to be most fun and interesting was adding a link.  I chose to add two links into my text paragraph.  I created a hyperlink to the Phi Sigma Sigma international homepage and to the NKF Walk homepage.  I thought it was awesome that I was able to create links within my paragraphs.

The most important parts of the hypertext was always remembering to put ‘<’ at the beginning and ‘>’ at the ending of each section.  If one of these were forgotten all the text would appear.  I thought it would be cool to make the background orange because it is the color associated with the National Kidney Foundation.  Just as I did for the other parts I copy and pasted the code from the website and changed my desired color to “orange.”  Overall, being able to use HTML was a great experience and brought back some great memories.