Global fantasies and realities

One of the biggest internet fantasies is that of self-policing. Some say the internet is democratic because it allows the majority to monitor and filter the activities of the minority who might be in need of policing. This is evidenced through the different ways of reporting people who misuse common sites, such as Facebook where you can submit someone or an activity for review or AOL who used to employ and enforce TOS (Terms of Service) for misbehavers. For sites like those, the fantasy is able to be a reality.

Yahoo's territorial actions remind me of this concept. For Yahoo, the fantasy can be only that for its search features. It can realistically monitor its features for their discussion boards, but search can't be regulated. The reality is that the results of the searches should monitor themselves, the way Facebook and AOL have. It is the responsibility of the individual sites to monitor themselves in regards to the regulations of the countries they are based in, rather than the responsibility of Yahoo, who has a global obligation to return results for the searches, regardless of where the results are based in. It's impossible to make blanket statements for fantasies and realities because of examples like this.

Course Evaluations

Everyone hates doing course evaluations. Lots of us just throw them out, others scribble down the fastest thing they can write and get out of there like the room is on fire. There are some other times, though, when we actually put effort into them.

Have you ever looked at the results on the CUA evaluation page? I like to check it once and a while when a particular course has struck me in a very positive or very negative way. I find that my peers and I share similar opinions when it comes to certain professors and their teaching methods. I realized that their methods are evaluated by the students in a very similar way to the university personalization standards that we discussed.

For instance, the teachers I've had that utilize new media methods, engage the students in their teachings and are often on the younger side of the age spectrum get considerably higher marks than the old-school style teachers who lecture and write on the board get lower marks. So, even without discussing university personalization in a formal class setting, it would appear that our peers already have expectations of it.

Tethered Generativity

After studying for the midterm, I was thinking that even though a technology is technically tethered, it sometimes can still be generative. The first example that comes to mind is AOL Instant Messager.

This became apparent to me when I was playing with my new Blackberry, and I had five different instant messaging applications to choose from. Now, I'm sure that there was an instant messaging program that preceeded AIM, but whatever it was, I now have the capability to instant message from AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, Windows Live and Blackberry. They all have different features that make them unique. Google Talk can be used in conjunction with Google Wave. Blackberry can be used anywhere, even overseas, with access to a phone line. So, I think that they are tethered technologies, but their ideas were clearly generative.

I imagine the same goes for all software. Before I had this idea, I did not really have an opinion on open source or private, but I think if things were open, we really would have a lot of good ideas floating around on the WWW. Knowing the codes definitely make the software easier to adapt, therefore granting endless possibilities of what it is capable of doing.