hodge podge of ideas

I have been trying to decide what article to post on, but all of them seemed to speak to me in one way or another. Thomas’ article had me thinking more about the division between mac’s and pc’s vis-à-vis viruses. As more and more people start to purchase mac’s, will the desire to out-code each other start a movement to create viruses? I understand wanting to challenge each other and create programs, but why can’t virus-makers make happy programs? Programs that help people and not destroy them.

Kvasny and Igwe’s article really struck me because it was very similar to what I am attempting to do with my seminar project. I found the layout of their article and the headings very helpful and encouraging since they were very similar to the headings I was thinking of using. It made me feel not so out in left field. Though I would have liked more about the methods, as Jon comments below, did they attempt to more or less create their own methods? I don’t have a direct person that I am following, instead based on what I have been reading, I have created a list of words that I am looking for and if the post has that word (or words) then I classify that into one category (and I have 4 categories). So, I see Kvasny and Igwe’s methodology very similar to mine. As in, what to look for on the blogs and comments? As I said in a comment to Jon, I found two of their articles that they cited in the methods section and will let ya’ll know if there is anything in them that makes the methods more clear. Fingers crossed!

Wikipedia has always been an interest of mine, mostly because I find myself using it more and more when I don’t know something. Our Wikipedia entry has been revised since our last class and it seems as though it was revised to fit more within the “standard Wikipedia format” (which when writing it I didn’t even know a standard format existed!). I wonder how students would benefit from seeing the revision process in work. If I asked my students to search an article and look at the revision history, would they understand the difference between macro and micro revisions better than my higher order and lower order distinction? Would being able to see the difference make the point clearer? I may try this out next semester. I like the idea of students revision Wikipedia articles, but I never thought of using it as a point of contact to teach what revision is. Pure brilliance John Jones.

The end of Banks’ article brought up some good points: the idea of not just wanting to get people dependent on the internet, but to get more farmers, blue collar workers and families online. If we got everyone online (which with Obama’s broadband wireless for everyone, may happen… though there will still be an issue of who has a computer to get onto the broadband) what would that mean for view of community? How would having all of America online change what we view as writing? Our views of writing has already changed with the internet, so by having EVERYONE on, I can see our views changing even more.