Claire Baumgartner

Honestly, when I heard we’d be doing programming at the end of term, I was terrified. I have friends that write code and program for fun, and it never even remotely interested me or looked like something that I could do. It was sort of looming over me all term, until we actually got to Scratch and the Blockly Maze it actually wasn’t so bad. The Maze was pretty fun and I really like the concept of using Scratch to get school children into programming from a young age. It made me wonder how my feelings towards code and programming would have been different if I had experienced this when I was eight or nine, instead of as a college student. It probably would have made everything a lot less intimidating!

The Blockly Maze really was a lot of fun. I didn’t even try to do it using the Logic function, but stuck to the Commands because that seemed a lot more simple (if a little longer and less useful). Maybe sometime when I don’t have a lot to do, I’ll try to figure out the Logic  side of it.

As it was, it didn’t take me very long to figure out the maze, once I figured out how to use the controls. The only thing I had a little trouble with was judging the “Move Forward” distances; I could never tell if I should use one command or two because I was never sure how far one command went.

Roy Rosenzweig’s article Scarcity of Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era brings up some really interesting points about the shelf life of websites and other digital media. Websites are quick, and images can get anywhere on the internet faster than you can blink, but they can also be deleted from existence with the push of a button. Books, magazines and other hard copies take longer to publish and get out to the consumer, but they also stick around longer. This just goes to show that we need to be very careful about preserving our digitized things; anything can happen and a backup is always a good idea.

Articles like these make me think about how future generations will see us. If we manage to preserve all of our online data- everything- what conclusions would they come to about us? Everyone always jokes about the latest pop culture fads and how people 1,000 years from now will view them, but I seriously wonder what part of our history will be left. Will we find a way to preserve this information, creating a fluid way for it to move from one advanced technology to the next? (i.e. CDs to DVDs to… whatever we use now. Thumb drives?) Or will our history become static? Will future generations be unable to access anything of ours because they simply don’t have things like disk drives or USB ports anymore?

I definitely agree with the sentiment of Edward Tufte’s article “PowerPoint is Evil”. Every teacher and professor I’ve ever had has bemoaned the existence of PowerPoint and my high-school Geopolitics teacher even threatened (jokingly) to fail anyone in the class who used PowerPoint in their end-of-the-year presentation. I understand that it’s a useful tool for supporting a presentation, but it’s really, really boring to look at while someone else is standing at the front of the room giving a lecture or presentation. I also understand that it’s easy to use; third graders can make excellent PowerPoints and I must admit that, however hypocritical it is, I generally use them too. They’ve become a sort of crutch for a lot of people, especially those who don’t know any other alternatives.

Another issue with PowerPoint, I think, is that most people don’t seem to understand how to use it. It’s not meant to have a word-by-word script of what you’re presenting! I have a lot of professors who don’t seem to know that and it makes the class so incredibly boring that I wonder what the point is of even showing up. A PowerPoint is supposed to have your main talking points, if that. It’s not a complete script.

I did a (very boring) PowerPoint on the wives of Henry VIII

I really wanted to show just how boring PowerPoint can be.

Feltron Reports acre actually really confusing to me, I must admit. There’s a lot of information in each one, and the way Nicholas Felton sets them up makes them difficult to read. The concept is really good, and Felton is quite brilliant for putting all of this data together in an interesting way (he’s also quite patient, tracking and entering everything like he does). It’s clear that this is just a novelty  thing that’s done for fun, but it’s still an interesting way to showcase how versatile and fluid digital media can be. I think that there is probably a less confusing way for these Feltron Reports to be done  but I really like the idea of them.

I made a chart of the prices in the inventory of Mr. William Willoughby of Norfolk, VA in 1803. Most of his possessions were worth less than nine or ten dollars and only two items were over fifty- 14 mahogany chairs and 3 sets of bedroom furniture. This is a very simple chart but it still shows just how much cheaper things were over 200 years ago.

The Brigham Young University’s Time Magazine Corpus website is amazing. Suddenly, every issue of Time since 1923 is at your fingertips, accessible on a relatively easy to use website. You can see which nouns or verbs have increased or decreased in a specific time period, see changes in the English language itself, even see how the meaning of words have changed over time. This could be an invaluable tool to millions of people! Except it’s unethical.

Now, I can’t say with any certainty that Time-Warner (or whatever the parent company is now) hasn’t seen this site and chosen to ignore it. That’s entirely plausible. I also don’t know the exact copyright laws the magazine has, but I’m fairly sure that Time is not entirely public domain. There’s something a little weird about the fact that the website contains every issue from 1923 onward. This makes it seem like the author(s) of this website are thumbing their noses at copyright laws a bit, even if what they’re doing isn’t technically illegal. Copyright law has always been a touchy subject but people must educate themselves if they believe they are going to be in a position where it could be possible that they will violate a copyright.

That being said, I’ll be the first to admit that I really like finding free stuff on the Internet. Stuff that’s easy and accessible and doesn’t cost huge amounts of money is always a good thing. But I also know that people who are choosing to knowingly violate copyrights need to understand that it’s not cool, it’s not ethical, it’s not morally right, and they probably will get caught and fined.

Testing, testing…