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September 26, 2006 Podcasting and the World

Podcasting seems to be a great way to share music and other audio files with an audience. Being a music concentration, I think podcasting would be a great way to teach lessons and share certain musical examples. For teaching music especially, I think there is a definite educational value to podcasts. Education should use the five senses to teach each lesson. Podcasts allow the listener to pick and choose which audio files to listen to, and how many times they need to listen to something to understand it. I can definitely see myself creating a podcast in the future and I think that my students will enjoy the availability of them as well. Because of the potential of this technology to be manipulated and molded into so many uses, I think this technology will become more and more common.

September 19, 2006 Mass Media Laws

Copyrighting came into being because of the invention of the printing press. With the invention of the printing press, plagiarists were able to mass produce stolen works and pass it as their own and make quite a bit of profit off of it. With each new media, copywriting has become more and more necessary and more and more inclusionary. A copyright gives the author or holder of the copyright the right to reproduce, distribute, perform, display, prepare, and record the piece in question.

The Fair Use Act allows teachers, scholars, and critics to use small parts of copyrighted materials in their work as long as it advanced science, the arts, criticism, and so forth. There are four factors that can be used to tell if something is a Fair Use material:

1. The Purpose and Character of the Use (noncommercial/not for profit use)
2. The nature of the copyrighted material (availability, consumable work, informational vs. creative, published or unpublished)
3. The amount used compared to the whole work. (includes paraphrasing, based on percentage of whole work)
4. The effect of the use on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. (will a fair use harm the value of the original)

Plagiarism is essentially taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own. To be guilty of plagiarizing has the potential of completely ruining an individual’s career and reputation.

I have never done peer to peer file-sharing. Being a musician, I wouldn’t want someone stealing from me. I think that P2P file-sharing is something that should be discouraged and those that do it deserve to be criminally held responsible for their actions.

September 10, 2006 Adaptive and Assistive Technology

Being a Communications Disorders and Sciences minor, I have already begun to be more familiar with many alternative and augmentative communication devices (AAC) and adaptive and assistive technologies (A&AT). What was nice about going to Student Support Services, however, was that I got to see some things that I have never seen before. One that quite surprised me was the Braille printer. It seems so obvious that of course there is a Braille printer, but I never considered it before. I also never considered the costs and knowledge the technology required to ensure that each student gets the most out of their education. I’ve learned about the laws involved in making education more accessible to everyone, but at Student Support Services I saw it on a more personal level. I never thought about what happens after you get these new technologies. What do you have to do to use them? What do you do if they break? I never quite thought, until this visit, about these questions. The trip over to Student Support Services was definitely a learning experience.

I see A&AT becoming more commonplace in our society. It becoming more compact, user-friendly, and more realistic. I would like to see A&AT better understood in our society. While so many people are reliant on these assistive technologies, many people do not even know what they are, advances in them, and how essential they are to our neighbors, or even to ourselves in the future. With understanding and knowledge, we, as a society, will also begin to accept and strive to enhance. For this same reason, it is important for industries and work places to support A&AT programs. It is very likely that individuals will be working in these companies that use or need these devices.

I never thought a person who is blind could use the internet without assistance. Watching these videos was definitely a learning experience. They don’t use mice, and it takes them a while to just learn the layout of a page. They also have to begin reading without knowing how the page is set up. Knowing the page purpose can then be difficult. It really is important for web developers to include alternate text for images, because it can drastically help the individual who is blind to understand the page.

September 7, 2006 The Internet History

Over the past year, I have noticed my online habits have been changing more and more. I now use the internet to check the weather, read the newspaper, listen to the radio, watch the news, do research, shop, etc.

Some things that learned from the readings is the beginning of the internet. I knew going into the reading that the internet was started in the 1970’s, however, I didn’t know about things like Teletext, Minitel, and Ceefax.

A see the internet as a medium that brings people together, and also divides societies. On a global scale, there are still many people, many cultures, who do not truly have access to the internet. It is a medium that really divides communities and societies by an individuals socioeconomic status. Going into education, I will have students from families who cannot afford a computer or the internet, while on the opposite side I will have students whose families have the state of the art computer with all the greatest software. I think as time goes on, computers will become a more commonplace in our societies, but I think it is important to remember that this technology may not be available to all my students at home.

I expect that peer-to-peer sharing of music and other media to be a continuing problem. I also see the internet growing even larger and becoming a more integral component in our society. As the internet grows and evolves, I would like to see the internet go even faster and be less likely to display messages like “Page Cannot Be Found.”

The internet has drastically changed since the 1970’s, and I am sure it will keep on changing and evolving for the years to come.

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Rachel C. Bark
BARK2869@MAIL.PLATTSBURGH.EDU
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Last Updated On 12 September 2006