Research Plan

Research question: Are teacher’s privacy and rights being violated over the Internet? How much authority should administrators have over teacher’s personal, non-affiliated school website? Should their school district have access to the teacher’s myspace, even if it is set to private? Do they have the right to check up on teachers “off-of-school grounds” personal lives? Should there be punishment (ex: loosing their job) for the teacher if they find something they feel is inappropriate? Is that an invasion of their privacy? Or should teachers not be allowed to post anything considered inappropriate (ex: pictures of a teacher at a party, not necessarily drinking) on their home webpage? Also, there is information saying teachers are warned not to have a myspace. If you are a teacher, should you not be allowed to have a social network, such as a myspace or a facebook?

I want to show that teachers have lives outside of school and if they are not friends with their students on myspace, why should they have to watch what they post? I understand they are role models for students, but if the students do not have access to their page, I feel they should be able to use a social network to connect with their friends, if it has no connection to their job.

I need to gather information on what teacher’s rights are and the violation of the 1st amendment, Freedom of Speech. I also need to find more cases where teachers were punished and/or lost their job because of what they posted on the internet. I found a quote online from Eschoolnews.com that was a warning for teachers to delete their websites if they had them. It basically said that the dangers of having a website outweigh the benefits.

Sources:
http://personalweb.about.com/b/2006/04/04/teacher-investigated.htm
http://itwire.com.content/view/11772/53/

Topic for Project

I am going to do my project on teachers and students on myspace. There is a lot of debate over whether teachers should get in trouble for being friends with students on the computer. Also, teachers are getting into trouble for material they are posting on the web, even if it is dealing with their lives completely detached from school. Should teachers have to watch what comments or pictures they post on the web because of their students? Should they be punished if their bosses come across their page and don't agree with their webpages?
In class, I came across different sites regarding this topic. There was a case that I found from "The Chronicle of Higher Education" involving a students and her Dean at college. They came across a picture of her drinking with a pirates hat on with the caption "Drunken Pirate." The Dean found this unacceptable and banned her from getting her teachers degree. Should he be allowed to do this? I think her profile was set to private too but he "went around that."
There are many other cases involving the same situations. A senior lacrosse student was held responsible for pictures of him drinking that were posted on the web. For every picture, he was banned for 2 games. This happened to over 100 students who were suspended from activities because of the alocholic pictures.
The web sites regarding this topic were a lot of new sites and forums. Members were allowed to give their comments and feedback about each situation. I found that a lot of parents were in concern over the the irresponsiblity of the teachers who posted the pictures. My personal opinion is that teachers should be allowed to have their own private websites where they can concerse with their friends and post pictures of their lifestyles if they wanted too. As long as the children are blocked from viewing their pages, why does it matter?

Blog 4 continued: Jenkins

Why Heather can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars

Before reading this article, I was unaware of anything related to fan fiction. I learned people may write fan fiction for therapeutic reasons or maybe just for fun and to use their imagination. Jenkins writes about the Potter wars, which involved two problems. Companies wanted to ban access to books containing material around magic and wizards, and they also didn't want people to write fan fiction because they wanted to preserve the author's rights and ownership of the characters. I learned that this deal with a lot of disagreements involving freedom of speech. It's off how a parody of something can be legal while fan fiction can be illegal? I think as long as you are not making money off of someone else's work, then you should be able to write whatever stories you want involving the author's characters. It is a way to be creative.

Scott McCloud: From the Vocabulary of Comics

McCloud begins his article "From the Vocabulary of Comics" with a picture of a pipe. He does this tho show his audience that the picture is not actually a pipe, but rather a "printed copy of a drawing of a painting of a pipe." He wants his readers to understand how we interpret cartoons. We use icons to resemble subjects. The picture on the page is symbolic of another subject. He calls humans a "self centered race" which I agree with him on. Majority of humans are self centered and always relate things to themselves. His comic strips made me think about what goes through my mind when looking at different images. I don't put as much thought into what the picture is symbolizing and how it's on the page.
So far, for my project, I have been somewhat indecisive. I was really interested in learning more about fan fiction, and what determines what's a crime by violating copyrighted material. It's interesting how far some people can stretch the law and how others break it out of innocence and fun. I was also considering learning more about the boundaries of myspace involving teachers. Should teachers and students be friends in the myspace world? Should they be allowed to look at that part of a student's life? Should a student be allowed to see the teacher's life out of school? There are a lot of different perspectives that can be looked at.

Rheingold "Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many"

In class, we discussed Rheingold's article on smart mobs AKA flash mobs. He discussed how mass texting can lead to physical world actions of mobs. They use mass communications by use of media to help carry out there goal. I learned that they work by a "ad hac social network," which means they communicate by what goes on here and now. Rheingold discusses a cooperation threshold, which is basically the personal effectors that decide when they follow their leader. He also explains the concept of emergent properties, which are features of a group that characterize them as a single unit.
After discussing Rheingold, I searched on the Internet for different political smart mob events that may have occured recently in time. In 2006, there were student protests in Chile called the Penguins' Revolution. They were protesting for free bus fare and waiving a test fee. It was interesting because this information was found on a new search engine called Exalead, which I have never heard of or used before class on Wednesday.

Glister Summary

"The Nature of Digital Literacy"

Glister begins his essay, “The Nature of Digital Literacy,” by showing how times have changed from the past. Instead of scrolling papers of papyrus, we are now scrolling pages on the internet. The Internet has become a core place for digital information. Glister continues in his essay to explain digital literacy, which he defines as the ability to understand and define information in multiple formats. Digital spaces, such as the Internet, have remediated the way people read. Digital literacy on the Internet shows interactive pages that can provide social networking. Also, Glister explains in his essay how print and technology are both intertwined and support each other. Digital networks simply extend print.
Glister continues on to discuss “The Great Paradigm Shift.” This is when you move from print literacy to digital. He explains how when one is watching the television, certain inappropriate material can either be filtered out or will not come on until past a certain time. On the Internet, however, nothing is blocked and majority has access to anything. Because of this, Glister calls the television an exclusive medium while the Internet is inclusive. The Internet has changed how the world works. More service providers have come out since the Internet was first established.

Summary of Hein, Bolter, and Grusin

Michael Heim begins his essay, “VR 101,” by explaining that virtual reality, also known as VR, is a technology and not just an idea. This is a different way of portraying and perceiving the world. There are three characteristics that make up virtual reality. They are known as the 3 I’s, which are immersion, interactivity, and information intensity. Immersion makes the audience believe they are actually there. Interactivity hides the audience from knowing when the scenery or time is changing. They never know who they are interacting with. Information intensity shows the different techniques and qualities that are used to make the experience perfect. The term telepresence is often associated with information intensity. The idea behind telepresence is a control by a remote and knowing that technology is more in depth than we think. Heim continues on to discuss the different levels of immersion. He gives the example of helmets, which are head mounted displays and the CAVE, which is a surround screen and sound, projection based system. By understanding the three components of virtual reality, immersion, interactivity, and information intensity, you can see how virtual reality is real.

Bolter and Grusin write in the article, “Introduction: The Double Logic of Remediation,” about multiplying media and erasing all traces of mediation. By this, they are simply saying they want to “outdo” the previous technology set forth before it. They focus on the idea of immediacy, the feeling as if you are there, and hypermediacy, which is a whole bunch of media. Bolter and Grusin say that “Immediacy depends on hypermediacy.” By this, they are saying a lot of technology and media is behind everything in the world, especially what we see on television, for example on the news, and computers. Everything moves from one medium to another. We learn that a medium is a system for representing reality. Overall, Bolter and Grusin are writing on how there are lots of media out in the world, but they don’t want the audience to be conscious that they are there. The world is filled with people feeling immediacy, and little know the great technological advances that are behind it.

Meat-space versus Cyberspace

I think writing in cyberspace is completely different than writing in meat space. When you are writing in general, you are doing it to get some sort of a reaction from your audience. It may be just to reveal information about a particular topic or to release feelings about a major event. When writing for these reasons in cyberspace by posting blogs of replying to topics, you are letting your feelings and responses be reviewed by others. Generally, everyone (unless the page is blocked or set to private) can get access to your page and read what you wrote about. Also, when writing on the Internet, your writings come up with many different search topics, meaning the audience can view many different opinions on the topic.
While writing for the real world aka "meat-space," the audience is different. Many things written in the real world can be acted out or read out loud by a news anchor. The media affects everything that is written in the real world. Television shows and movies all have lines that were written by writers but are not read by them. Credit is not given where is should be due. On the other hand, when writing books and novels in the meat space, many people can enjoy the writing but can not openly criticize or relate to it as they can do online.