I have been working all day on a paste up for my newspaper. I am going to take pictures of the people who have submitted their works for me. I am going to make my comics but I am not sure if I will do them in one big picture or in frames like I did this summer. There are a lot of topics I could address such as poverty, child advocacy, treaties, reform of the child welfare system, children in care, etc.
This has been a very exciting week for me technology wise. Last week \\\i did my very first powerpoint and I was amazed at how easy it was to access and use. Linux Open Office has a program for the web called Impress which is a clone of powerpoint but for open source users (like me). When I have time not dedicated to school work i am going to experiment with it to see if it is as easy as ppt. Also i was veery impressed (ha ha) with the students nin my class and the work they submitted for their projects – they utilized many aspects of the program that I did not know how to access. Such as the use of clip art – I made acollage and scanned it and added it to my project but they got pictures off of the web and added them and they looked excellent. Also they experimented with colour backgrounds, text, and graphics too. I will be more open to using thes themes now that i know a little of what powerpoint bcan do.
I have also been using google to find out about things that I would normally look for a book to reference. For example, i was playing poker with my roommate and we were not sure of the sequence of cards and their worth so I googled it and we kept the visual list on the screen while we played through the night. It is this kind of instant answers to questions that makes google so useful to me. I would not depend on it for academic referencing but a source to find out anything about just about anything it is superb!!!
I have been avoiding signing into facebook here at home. I feel as if it is too invasive of my privacy and even tho it probably does not make a difference I am keeping my use to the computers at the college. I see the computers at the college as different from my own home computer. I feel protective towards my privacy and my space here at home. At the college I feel as if everyone is on-line and I am just another one of many. Here at home I feel as if I am under surveillance for my use and that the trail that I leave electronically leads right to my inner sanctum. I know it sounds paranoid but that is how I feel. Of course doing technology at the college means I have to have a relationship with microsoft and one of the things I notice right away at the college is how long it takes to boot up and allow me to use it. I clocked it at 1:55 mins. one day. Here, with my linux – openSuse OS I am on-line in less than 30 secs.!!! OK so its slow – but the moodle tech told me it is because it is loading all of my personal settings – so that is why it takes so long. Who would have thought that there would be such a technological discrepancy between the two systems.
This monday in my poetry class we got into a very loud and assertive conversation about facebook. The teacher, who had asked students in two other classes to sign up to make communication between the group easier but when she asked our class we rebelled and said we did not want to do it. That was at the beginning of the semester when we refuse the sign in and now she says that she is very unhappy with the invasiveness of the site. She did not get the benefits she was looking for and many of the students refused to keep up their correspondence because of the endless e-mails from people they did not know asking them to join groups they would never think of joining and sending messages to their fun walls and all sorts of popular culture stuff that hopefully I do not have to get involved in after this class is over. My room mate has assured me that I will be able to close my facebook account and there will be no repercussions or continuing attachment to the site but I will believe that when I see it. Well gotta go and do some work on my page. heres a rough idea of my layout
Tags: term project
