A Great video culture of learning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg&feature=player_embedded

Dating Game

While I find the aspect of on-line dating odd, I have to admit that I am in a long term relationship with someone I meet on-line.
I got divorced after 21 years of marriage. I am older and the bar scene just didn’t appeal to me. I was fine being alone. Many of my friends and relatives were dating from places like match.com. My initial perspective was always the same, “How bad does it have to get to resort to meeting someone on the internet.”
The article Assessing Attractiveness in On-line Dating Profiles was interesting on how they assessed attractiveness from profiles given. They talk about the face-to- face being a rich medium. While you can meet interesting people on-line, face-to face cannot even compare. I met or more “reconnected” with old class mates and “connected” on a very intellectual level, but some that I finally did have a face-to-face meeting with would never have worked out on a romantic level. The multiple channels of communication were opened up when I finally met with them. Things like how they held themselves, their voice, body language and so on. Thees channels of communication were more revealing as far as a physical connection.
I eventually signed up for Face Book. While this article classifies this as a social networking Web site, I found that it was a good source for dating or meeting people. I had cousins suggest friends that they thought I was compatible with. I had read too many articles about on-line dating disasters or really scary situations. I knew that meeting someone that a friend suggested that it was like getting a personal referral rather then a complete stranger. While I never did find a date or meet up with any of these suggested friends, I did have some great conversations.
On Face Book it was obvious who was single. Their profiles were very detailed as well as pictures of themselves. The article talks about the importance of posting pictures to increase potential dates. I myself found it vain and sometimes funny. The person that I am with had no pictures of himself on FB. He had pictures of his kids, a car that he had rebuilt, and of different activities he enjoyed. I found that attractive because he came across as not being vain, which is my personal perspective of people who post hundreds of shots of themselves.
I don’t think that using on-line dating source is as odd as I use to. If something happened and I found myself single again, I still do not think I could do the match.com thing. I got lucky in a flukey sort of way through this internet phenomena.

MUDD was a little bit muddy...

I tried, I really tried. I read and reread the instructions and still could not enter this MUD world successfully. I cheated and had my nephew do it. He did a really cool name, devinedevin, well cool as you can get with little time and pressure from your Aunty. It took him no time to figure out what he was doing, I sat in amazement as he maneuvered all around the places that I was completely stumped. He got high fives and cheers, from who I have no idea. He got weapons and ammunition gifts and then after his half hour he bid them Aloha and left. He did get some negative feedback at that time.
I had originally tired to sign in as Lisalove, an obvious girl name. It was obvious that I was stumped. It was nothing compared to my nephew. I am not sure if I got kicked off because of my warring illiteracy or that I was a female. I am pretty sure it had more to do with my illiterate skills. I got no high fives or cheers. I got a few, “Huh?” or “Is this person serious?” or “Good-bye” No reference to my obvious female name, but comments of my complete skill level.
I am not a person that would stay and play these games. This assignment was a bit painful.

When I was first introduced to the Second Life world I was fascinated with a real world that revolved in fictional world. I originally thought that it was made to facilitate long distant learning. Universities had set up classes that were taught by avatar professors and attended by avatar students. http://www.hawaii.edu/secondlife/
When I looked more into the Second Life site I soon realized it was much more then just a University setting, it truly was a complete second world.
I found several aspects of this world to be quite amazing, one in particular is that when you leave the Second Life world things that you have created stay and function while you are not present. The world functions independent of your presence. That in it self is hard to fathom.
The Second Life phenomena has proven to have both good and bad qualities, much like the real world.
Good Aspects:
Individuals can experiment with their creativity.
People with debilitating deceases can function as whole beings with no disabilities.
Opportunities to create business and make money seem to be limitless.
While choices have less to no consequences, this can be viewed as both good and bad.
Your new self or altar ego can experiment with things you might not in the real world. Your avatar can do so with no stigmatism that would affect your real self in the real world. Examples of this would be choosing to experiment with clothing, line of work, or how you might choose to look physically, changing your sex to be male if you are female and vise versa.
The movie Avatar, while the story line is completely based on colonialism, it is a great example of how the real life crossing over to a 3-D life. It is a small sample of becoming another being and entering into another world.
I enjoy human contact too much.
I also watched a documentary on people that have entered this Second Life. Kasi Nafus entered the Second Life world to just experiment with the avatar. She found that she did not like the clothing available for her avatar so she created a clothing line and started ab business.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=S2yGqDecBzs&feature=PlayList&p=57AD5CC0252818E7&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=21
From what I could see she had a hard time being taken seriously in the real world. She seemed to be a little frustrated that people did not understand how hard it is to create and that she really had a talent that is valid. I am sure that the money she is making is validation for her own self validation.
Another man, Yaniv Wolf, entered the Second Life world completely. He completely left or gave up his real life. He talked about leaving the “carbon based world.” He quoted Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I can not see this as healthy at all.

While I find this entire phenomena fascinating, it holds no interest to me what so ever. I can not help but think of the movie Wall-E. I can’t recall the entire story line but the people were stuck in chairs with computers in front of them. The people were completely obese and could not even walk, they got around on moveable chairs. I know this is a great exaggeration of becoming obsessed with the on-line world, it does have it’s point on living a physically sedentary life.
I also think that I like the human side of life.
I am in Boise, Idaho where HP, Hewlet Packard, is located. I was able to talk to a executive about Second Life and the business aspect. He said two years ago that the Vice President of the company held a meeting and said that Second Life was going to be come one of the biggest things on the internet. He wanted everyone to get an account with Second Life to look into how HP could take advantage of the business aspect and opportunities. Within one year it was completely shut down as the majority of the computers were full of porn. He said that the porn on Second Life was really the biggest thing and everyone was on it.
It is sad that a great product can be ruined or taken over by the bad stuff.
For me, I enjoy the human side too much in the real world.

Readers

The assignment for this blog was to go to Google Reader or RSS and start an account. I have most of my work on Google so I started the Google Reader.
After I watched the tutorial on Google Reader and RSS I took the precaution that it can be addicting. I went to my favorite web sites, those having to do with Hawaiian Issues and added them to my Google Reader. While they do not have a lot of movement or daily posts, it was nice to just check the Google Reader and see the newest articles when they did post, instead of me having to constantly check to see if there is anything new and sometimes missing events when I didnʻt check.
Currently I am visiting family in Boise, Idaho. I have not been able to keep up with what has been happening at home in Hawaii. I added the new Hawaii paper to my subscription list, The StarAdvertiser. I have been able to just scroll through daily and read the articles that interest me.
I also have all the web pages that I am following from our class listed on the reader. Instead of me having to go to each individual page to see what has been written, Google reader gives updates of when people post.
This has been a great tool for saving time from clicking on to several places, I can just go to one source. It was also good advice from the tutorial to not become addicted to just sitting there for hours.

Finding Information on the Web

I have used the internet to do the majority of my research. I have used the ideas and information presented on this site, mainly the way to narrow down research by asking the search engine exactly or as close to the information that I am looking for.
I think that the more we use the internet and the more we become comfortable and we tend to forget to evaluate on a consistent basis were the information is coming from.
I also think we need to remember that the internet has the least amount of control and the least amount of protection when it comes to the first amendment of the constitution. Monitoring of information is too daunting and cannot keep up with the constant change of technology.
This article gave a great criteria for evaluation of the Internet.
Scope-What is included in the resource?
Breadth-Are all aspects of the subject covered?
Time-Is the information in the resource limited to certain time periods?
Format-Are certain kinds of Internet resources excluded?
Content-Is the information factual, or opinion? Is the resource an integral resource, or has it been abstracted from another source?
Accuracy-Is the information in the resource accurate?
Authority-Dose the resource have some reputable organization or expert behind it? Examining the URL can give clues to the authority of the source.

It is vital to know be vigilant as to where we are getting our information.

The Virtual Community

I started a Facebook account two years ago. I must admit for the first two or three months I was quite obsessed about it. My kids even got a little leery of my activity. My oldest would recite statistics about people putting more value on virtual relationships than real ones. I was a bit embarrassed. Like the article Identity and Deception in Virtual Community addresses our physical self: one body, one identity.
My physical self was a newly divorced mother of six and was home alone most of my time. I worked part-time and went to school full-time. I felt like I was invisible most of the time.
When I started my account I did not know at all how it worked. I started to get all these friend requests and just accepted them all. Half of the people I did not know who they were. I was in a sense just collecting and counting the number of friends I had. I was creating my virtual self. I was catching up with old friends, classmates, relatives and old boyfriends I thought I would never see the rest of my life. I could include the positive great part of my life, leave out the crap. I eventually had to put the brakes on. A close friend of mine and I started figuring out what was private, what was public, I started deleting the people I really did not know. We started looking into the “usernet environment,” as the article calls it.
It was at this point that I really started to look at what I now know is the “Social Network.” I realized that the people I went to high school with that I thought were total geeks were actually quite interesting from their posts on Facebook. This is were I noticed, like the article talks about, that people were establishing their identity and often had issues that they were presenting or wanted to have a forum to write about their political views, social views, or moral views. It was a place were they felt they had a voice. As the article states, “There are people who expend enormous amounts of energy on a newsgroup: answering questions, quelling arguments, maintaing FAQs.”
This article was quite an eye opener as to what we are involving ourselves in concerning social networks. Too many of us enter into this virtual world blindly without realizing the consequences of our involvement.
This article was a great information tool on the virtual community.