Jade's presentation - Facebook and MySpace causing school board administrators to act like parents...

For Jade's presentation, I chose the following article that ran in USA Today on 10/26/06:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-10-25-school-blogs_x.htm

The article is entitled "Students, officials locking horns over blogs" by Alan Gomez and talks about the fact that all over the country school board administrators are bringing their attention to MySpace and Facebook accounts of their students. They are usually tipped off by parents or students about some derogatory or explicit comments/images that are on another student's page. What students don't like is that they are being governed by the administrators of the schools, having their free speech/expression being stepped on by someone other than their parents. Some students have gotten expulsions from school because of the material on their page. What do you think about this situation? Do you think administrators are going too far with their authority, becoming the pseudoparents of the students? Or do you think that students should be more cautious about what they share on their social space?

Dan's presentation - Comments on metadata and tagging

Kudos to Dan for his presentation this past Thursday about reusable learning objects. We use metadata all the time in libraries in order to organize information into manageable sense. What I thought was most interesting about Dan's presentation was the mention of tagging and organization. While I was browsing my bloglines account, I noticed that there is a new study going on at Penn State that is exploring the tagging of images. But it's not just the tagging of images by the user, but it's the automatic tagging of images done by the system itself! HELLO! Talk about your timesaver! In my KodakGallery.com account, I spend at least 30 minutes on top of the download time (at least 30 minutes) to add tags to my pictures for quick finding later. Imagine a system that does it for you...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/wp-trackback.php?p=398
I'm interested in finding out how this type of system works. How can it recognize that a photo has a background that is made of up trees and other natural elements, such as water?

Beefing up the bibliography

After talking with Dr. Dawson last week, I decided to refocus and beef up the bibliography that we had to turn in last week. The reason I am doing this is to hopefully get an article published about the use of virtual learning environments in engineering education. I did a literature search today and found 20 articles that initially match the search criteria. I will have to read them over to see if they all pertain to what I want to write about, and if not, I will exclude them.

Technical Development Project - complete

Hi everyone,

As you may know, my technical development project was to use Dreamweaver to create a personal and professional website. Since I am presenting in class this week, I decided to finish my website today so that I had time to work on my presentation for Thursday.

Here is a summary of my thoughts on my technical development project:
While doing this project, I found it difficult to remember and apply new things I learned from one work session to the next since I worked on it mostly on the weekends only. I did find it fun to explore new tools in Macromedia Dreamweaver that Contribute does not have. While the NetG classes were helpful, I felt as though there were some things that I should learn more about before trying to incorporate them into my website, such as CSS. I found that using the blog and asking questions to people who are more experienced than I am was very helpful. I received great tips to enhance my website by using the blog. All things considered, I feel like I have learned enough about Macromedia Dreamweaver to make a functional website. For the upcoming year, I will work on the accessibility of the website and try to streamline the HTML so that it’s cleaner than it is now and will optimize it by incorporating style sheets.

Here is the final product: http://grove.ufl.edu/~kkenned/pages/kathryn_kennedy.htm