Working at CAT and Info Commons has been going alright. This past week I had to finish up on a video editing project for Paula Saffire. The main thing for this was that she had short documentaries (about 15 minutes each) that she wanted cut into sections so that when presenting them in class she didn’t have to fast-forward and guess when to stop to show a certain section. She was not showing the movie in sequential order, so the clips would allow her to jump from one topic to another within the movie very easily. This was not difficult to do in iMovie, simply cut the clips up. The problems (of course there is always something that comes up) is that once these clips were done, they took much longer to export than previously expected. Also, she only had a 2 GB USB drive to put them on at first, but then I asked for something larger and she gave me a 4 GB. Regardless of these issues, as well as the fact that we could never get our schedules straighten out, the project is finished.
As far as technology overlay in my life; three of my classes now are using technology in two different ways, all three classes are Poli Sci class. For Dr. Brabant’s PO490, we still have three people assigned each week to work with technology. One person is to be a webmaster that shows a clip, article, picture, any sort of media to the class and then we discuss it. The other two people are notetakers in class that transcribe the discussions in class then post the notes on BlackBoard. That is the extent of the technology in that class, but it is a great leap forward from what used to happen in a Brabant class. My other two Poli Sci classes are now actively using Facebook for class discussion. Dr. Craig Auchter and Dr. Su-Mei Ooi both have begun using Facebook as a forum for class discussion. It very much surprised me that 1) Dr. Auchter had a Facebook and that 2) he used it with such ease. He must have took our emails and found us online because my privacy settings make my profile unsearchable. But nonetheless he found all the students, created three separate groups, invited us, and now twice a week we have student led discussion on the groups wall. Likewise Dr. Ooi has just switched from using BlackBoard discussion page to creating a Facebook profile specifically for the class. I feel this is not as nice and neatly done as Dr. Auchter. Dr. Ooi created an entirely new profile for use to post and comment on. I get the feeling that people will be less active commenting on a profile made for a class rather than a group made for a class. Group activity is more easily displayed on the sidebar of the newsfeed, a profile just acts like a profile. It may or may not notify me when a new post or comment is made; it would definitely notify whomever’s profile that is. A group will let me know in my notifications that ‘so-and-so’ made a comment/post. Either way it is reflective of our professors to realize that BlackBoard is not something we check regularly (not as regularly as expected). I see functionality of BlackBoard, but it’s not something that a student is gonna check twice, thrice, or more times a day. Using Facebook keeps me more in the loop of both with my friends and with my classmates. It only makes sense to me to facilitate discussion in a forum that is already being used for conversation. It is the commonality between real life and digital life. Just as in the public sphere of my day to day life, conversation with my friends/classmates may be personal but it might also pertain to discussions so too may the digital sphere of my day to day digital life reflect what my real life is doing. Often it has without incentive/requirements by my professors. My friends and I already have a Facebook group for just us that we post links to, create discussion threads on, and generally come up with ideas for the next Thursday meetings or weekend plans. Since we are all Poli Sci, IS, Philosophy, or Anthro majors much of what we discuss is relevant to not only to our personal lives but also to our educational lives. Therefore the fact that professors have caught on to the forum we already are using to communicate makes the incentive/ease to communicate in class discussion that much easier and more likely than on another forum such as BlackBoard.