Warren12a

I felt really good about this weeks assignment for the hypothesis and outline. Because research projects usually seem to overwhelm me into this big ball of stress, I thought it was wonderful that we were required to create an outline. I feel like my outline may change a little after I more research and writing, but it feels really good to know I now have a step by step guide on what to do. Again, I still have my annotated bibliography and hypothesis/outline on the same page on my site, so if anyone reads this and knows how to split the two please email me. Other than that I have no complaints, and it seems like my stress has been reduced!

Warren 11a

11b was tough for me because the entire time I felt like I was doing everything backwards because I am so used to doing a bibliography at the end of the assignment. But it worked out well, it was just time consuming. I am having a problem, however, on my website. My hypothesis and my annotated bibliography are on the same page under the name of  "appendices" rather than being a link off of a link (if that makes any sense). I have tried several times, but because I am so worried I will delete my whole site by doing something wrong, I don't really know what exactly to do.

10a Warren

Research projects always make me nervous. I have no idea why, but I get anxious and stressed just from the words.  Narrowing down the idea of what exactly I wanted to research was the hardest part for me. It was between cyber bullying and violence caused by television and technology.  I wasn’t too sure which topic would offer me more information and an issue to dig deep into. In the end I chose to go with media causing violence in youth. I thought it would be good to get to the bottom of how many violent acts are caused or related to violence in media. I want to know if maybe there are other activities that children are involved in that may also cause violence and if these activities could be worse than watching a violent movie or playing a violent video game. I would like to compare and contrast these activities and come to a conclusion if violence on the television is really teaching these children to snap or if there is or could be another trigger. I'm hoping I am successful in getting the information I need and coming to a conclusion on my questions.

8b Warren

I am honestly shocked that we have already finished reading Born Digital, time really seems to fly! I think the main purpose of this book was to educate its readers on the good side and the bad sides of the internet and technology. To bring light on what can happen with the tool that we use everyday, but we do not put enough thought into. I am a Digital Native, using the internet everyday, and I can honestly say I have learned things from this book that I was totally unaware of. And, I'm not too certain as to why after 20 years of my life no one has ever brought some of these points to my attention. I think Born Digital would be a good tool for many parents and other people around my age to use to educate themselves better and for parents to keep them aware for their children sake. I think many of the adults out there who are not Digital Natives may be naive to some of, or most of, the technology out there and they don't pay attention to their children's internet usage. For example, my mother can't even work the DVD player, she has to ask me how to use anything technology related. When I was younger, she didn't really pay attention to my internet usage, because she wasn't aware of the issues or problems that could arise. That doesn't make her a bad mother it just makes her unrelated to the technology world. However, I feel if she had a tool such as Born Digital, she may have been monitoring me more and could have learned more about the internet for herself, to better herself.

7a Warren

After getting through a good chunk of Born Digital, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot make up my mind in regards to the internet and technology. Being a Digital Native seems like a bittersweet thing to me. In some cases it is just fantastic when you think about it, you practically have the world at your fingertips. Everything is made easier and faster as the days go on and technology evolves. However, you read this book and everything that you never knew or never bothered to think about comes to light. Technology has been blamed for bullying and even murders. Internet sites are deemed unreliable and then duplicated again and again and you don't know if you can trust the information you have looked up. Then again it's a great way to be creative and really express yourself. But, websites such as Facebook are taking away from relationships. I haven't come to the conclusion as to what point Palfrey and Gasser are going to make after dishing out all of this information, but in my opinion I think, since we are living in the digital age, we need to try and keep a balance of non-technology based life with a technology based life. Since it's there we are all going to use it, but I think we need to take time off of Facebook and away from out televisions to just read a regular book or paint a painting. We should not let technology consume us, but we should not fear it either.

6b Warren

Chapter 8 briefly mentioned how much information over the years and months and weeks and days and even seconds gets copied and reformatted and resubmitted to different websites. I found this to be incredible, and have never really given it much thought that the internet is basically a ton of the same information. And the scary part is, when other internet users use websites, Wikipedia being an example, they can come across incorrect information and they reissue that same information that is inaccurate. And from my understanding, that same information gets copied and reissued again. To me it seems like a big web of incorrect information.

I think a good example of this is celebrity news. I am sure plenty of us has heard some sort of gossip about one of our favorite singers or actors and has decided to get to the bottom of it and google it. And plenty of times you will see different conclusions being drawn about the same piece of gossip. I recently did this when I heard that an actress what really born a man. I was in shock and had to google it and find out for myself, as silly as that sounds. I then realized how crazy it was for me to try and get an answer about such a thing from the internet because it was so unreliable in that sense.

What I worry about is the amount of information that I do research and it is incorrect, but because it sounds so good on the website and the website looks very professional I just believe it. I think there are many of people out there, including myself, that need to be taught what websites really are reliable and will not overload you. 

4b Warren

From this weeks reading I found it funny that Wikipedia was being looked at as  an unreliable source since in Born Digital's previous chapter, Creators, they said how great of a website it was. I understand that in a creator/creative sense it is great because it gives its users a way to give out information by wiriting it and being creative, but this is also its downfall because users give out the wrong information which makes it unreliable. In my opinion if there were a website out there that was reliable and used the same tactics as Wikipedia, where users could interact and be creators, I would think it would become one of the most used and successful internet sites used for researching. I have no idea if this is possible, but I really think it should be done.