Lara Skolnik

***this was written 9/25 in response to the lonely girl 15 article 

Before this class i was aware that there were small series on youtube, but i did not know abuout Lonely girl 15 specifically and I definitely did not know about its popularity.  It amazes me taht Flinders and beckett could create such a convincing set of a 16 year old’s roo, fabricate a lifefor her, put it on youtube, and gain the popularity that it did.  it is even more amazing tthat after the viewers discovered that it was all fake, nothing changed.    It is interesting how the article shows the difference between TV shows and vlogs.  The author says that on tv, an episode airs at a specific time and is meant to make sure that the audience gets hooked on the show.  However, since vlogs can be viewed whenever, the creators get a very good, clear idea about what is attracting viewers and waht is not.  Also, Flinders and Beckett state that the internet is a new medium of enternatment. Although TV reality shows are popular, even more reality is required for successful vlogs.  Since Youtube is a palce for normal, every day people to post their own creations, Lonelygirl15 would have to look like improv. the filming techniques can not be advanced.  The videos are usually only a few minutes.  In addition, what makes Lonelygirl15 so realistic is the vlogs of other characters. On a tv show, a team sits down together and carefully plots out what contributuions each character will make to an episode or season of the show.  However, Lonelygirl15’s characters add their own, seperate vlogs, basically creating subseries.   I am now very impressed with the thought and effort that was put into lonelygirl15.  I was really unaware of the major differences between interne,t and traditional entertainment, and also the reasons behind those differnces.

This weekend my parents came for family weekend and they brought me all of my scrapbooking supplies. My dad also brought nails and he hung up a bunch of our picture frames. We made a collage on the wall with frames and the live, laugh, love words. It makes our room look much better and finally decorated. This weekend we also went to walmart and picked up new pictures from this semester and my roommate and I are planning on making a collage boarder for our room. Besides this i recently got a photo cropping program so that i can enhance my pictures and i am very excited to get to use it

-Melissa Ninni

Last week in my Inquiries to Teaching class I had to do a report on a theorist and was assigned to Albert Bandura. I had always heard about him from my other education classes, but i never knew exactly what he was known for. He was actually considered the “father” of the cognitivist movement. When he researched he specialized in the social-cognitive theory and self efficacy. He was also responsible for the bobo doll studies. I found these studies very interesting when i was reading about them. Basically what took place was, Bandura had one of his students beat up and yell at a bobo doll. Then the young students watched a tape of this and were then directed to a room which had bobo dolls. The students acted exactly as the lady in the video had and they beat up the doll. This is what Bandura called observational learning or modeling and it might not seem all that amazing to the average person however it was an amazing accomplishment for the cognitivists. This was all very interesting to me and i plan on using it when i become a teacher to try and have my students model the right behavior in the classroom and for different projects.

-Melissa Ninni

My second observation in the kindergarten classroom was about a week ago. This time when we were there we had to draw a layout of the classroom and write down their daily schedule. When i was writing down everything that they were doing, it was like writing a book, i had so much information. These children accomplish so many little tasks in a short amount of time.

Another thing that i noticed while at this observation was that the children will focus on one thing that happened during the class time and all they will want to do is talk about it. On the day before i came to observe one of the children in the class was holding the flag for the flag salute and he passed out. Since i was not there when this happened all of the students wanted to tell me all about it. Then when they went to their music special for the day and they needed to tell that teacher all about it. Children love to tell stories about things that they found interesting and know that people will want to hear.

-Melissa Ninni

Basically all of the groups were talking about the same topics. However, many different peoples views came into play during the “annonymus” chatting session.
To me one of the most interesting topics during the chatting session was the dialogue about interent plaigarism. It seemed to be a gray area to many people. In some groups people were saying that they had no idea that internet plaigarism was actually an issue, whereas others were stating that internet plagarism is getting worse. I actually believe that eventually internet plaigarism will be more strictly watched as technology becomes more and more advanced especially when you take in to account the fact the we might be “teaching” computers how to “think” like a human. Machines will be better at detecting plaigarism and stopping it. I also believe that there will more services and software implimented to help writers and publishers to not plaigarize. This is definitely always going to be a controversial topic with ongoing dialogue, but out of respect to historic authors and publishers people should be more aware of plaigarisng, and seriously putting forth efforts to not do so.

Autumn

I am absolutely loving Netvibes!!!! I am learning so much more about the RSS feed services and I am now hooked please check out my general feed page i hav made 12 different tabs with over 30 RSS feed in them! http://feeds.feedburner.com/AdvertisingAge/Talentworks

Autumn Clark

This year i moved into an off campus house with my friends. There are eight of us girls living here and we all love to take pictures. Since the beginning of the semester we have all different pictures from all of the different things that we do together. We also have a lot of extra wall space in our living room and no pictures hanging up. So, we all decided that we are going to make a collage of all our pictures together. We are going to go to Michael’s and get a huge frame. Then we are going to send pictures to Walmart and get a bunch of pictures developed that we all like. We will cut up the pictures and paste them to the frame and then add quotes and stickers that relate to our pictures. It will be a fun project for us all to do together.

-Melissa Ninni

When we were assigned to read a comic, i was not exactly sure what to think haha. But, while i was reading it i realized that i read it much faster and it was much more enjoyable then reading just plain text. The pictures went along with the reading and they were very helpful to understanding the text. I also really enjoyed the article and how it discussed how a simple smiley face is really just a few lines. But, everyone knows what it is and when we look at other things we can see faces too. Like the front of the car or an outlet. It is was just interesting the way things were explained in this comic. I really did like it and i was not expecting that.

-Melissa Ninni

Lara Skolnik

By looking at the different tag clouds of the group discussions, I found that each group took their chats in different directions.  In group one, the most used words were authors, authorship, publishing, internet, idea, and yeah.  this group stuck to the topic of authorship.  By looking at group 2’s tag cloud, it is less obvious what exactly was discussed. There are less big, bold words, which leads me to beleive that the group jumped from topic to topic because one word was not used over and over.    In group 3’s discussion, they must have spent a lot of time talking about the internet, because “internet” is the biggest and most bold word in the cloud. Group 4’s discussion appears to be a more casual discussion because i see a lot of big, bold, haha’s, true’s, and yea’s. Tag clouds are a perfect way to get an overview of what a blog is about because instead of reading the whole thing, you can easily just see what words are used the most and waht words are used the least.

I cannot believe this second life site that Lisa posted about. People basically make up their own online virtual lives and live them out on this site. I think this site is crazy. People basically make their life into a cartoon and live out their fantasies on it. It is probably a lot of fun but at the same time i think that it is a little creepy. You never know who you are really talking to. I definitely have mixed feelings about this site. I don’t really know what to think.

-Melissa Ninni