Mandurro

Two more things, real quick

1)  Sugardaddy's Post has what I feel is a great suggestion for blogging: the optional weekly topic.  He says what I was TRYING to say, much more efficiently.  That myself and some others at times "forced" blogs just because it was required.  I think that optional weekly topic would be a fantastic response to that. 

2) To echo Sarah's sentiment, GO MOZILLA!!! You would not believe how much IE aggravated me, the friggin espn.com page froze 66% of the time on IE, it seemed, and arghhhhh the pop-ups.  Mozilla, and hence this class, may have made my eventual middle-age heart attack be delayed a few years :)

December 18, 2004 in Class Issues | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Clearing the air about prev. post + Project 2 Final Thoughts

    First of all, just a couple of quick closing thoughts on Project 2.  With our project all but done now, something that has really struck me now, and BBA2's will understand this better, is how this project ended up tying in with what we did in BIT 301 in the form of FrontPage (For those of you who are BBA1's, the final assignment for us in 301 last year was to create a web site using FrontPage).  I found it really cool and useful then, and even more so now.  I know that Prof. Gibson emphasized functionality and not appearance, but from what I saw in presentations, everyone seemed to go the extra mile to make their pages look pretty impressive anyway, and to me it was much clearer how what we were doing could be so useful for organizations.  When I saw all those layouts it was easy to imagine how the pages, with all the functionalites, would actually be used by an organization (way more so than just seeing a Parent directory and whatnot).  As far as I know, most groups used FrontPage to design these pages, and it was cool that in our group myself and the other BBA2 already had knowledge of FrontPage from 301 and so we were able to get the job done more quickly and efficiently. Another thing that sticks in my mind after doing this project is that I finally understand how organizations's IT costs for databases could be as staggering as they are, seeing how much work and resources (not to mention Oracle which we conveniently had available to use for free but in a company this wouldn't be the case)  it would take to design a full-fledged functional databse for a college organization like Dance Marathon, it's easy to believe the millions and millions of dollars a behemoth multinational corporation has to spend.
            And now, I want to clear something up.  It's become clear to me at this point, through some blogs and emails, that there is a strong possibility that some misconceptions going around about the intent of my last blog, about the blogging experience in this class. So I wanted to make sure to clear this up, juuuust in case: I cannot emphasize strongly enough that my intent was absolutely NOT to get the percentage of the grade determined by blogging to be lowered for our term.  To me, that would be like spitting in the face of the many people who went above and beyond what was required of them in passionately blogging like crazy all semester, and most were very useful and insightful blogs for the class I might add.  It would basically amount to me saying that I think these people should get less credit for something they gave 110% on.  I am shocked and disappointed to see that my comments may have been interpreted in this case.  When I stated that I believed blogging shouldn't count for such a large % of grade I was talking about in the FUTURE, since Bud had asked us to suggest possible changes in the future. However, going over my blog again, I can see how this misconception might have been made and understand that my choice of words may not have been the best, and for that I apologize to Bud and my classmates.  I ASSURE you, i was NOT campaigning, or trying to make a play, or any other way it could be called, to get blogging's weight on class grade lowered for this term.  To use a cliche, I have too much respect for my classmates to do that.  Bud asked us to provide feedback and opinions on our blogging experience, and I thought that's what I was honestly doing.  A positive lesson probably comes out of this for me:this does go to show how bloggers should be careful about what they write when a lot of people will be reading what you say.  I should have gone over that blog before I posted it.  Anyway, let me close by restating that I did enjoy the blogging experience, thought it was a very value-added activity for the class that greatly enhanced the spirit of the class as a whole, and should definitely be a part of not only this class but other classes in the future, and I regret that the part about my blog that stood out was the one about the grading policy.  Have a fun break, everyone!
~Jason~

December 18, 2004 in Class Issues | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Comments on the Blogging Experience this year - lots to say so bear with me

    Well, after reflecting on the blogging experience for the year as Bud asked (had my inspiration now so didn't want to wait till Thursday), I have lots to say about it.   All the pluses first:  Bottom line, I thought it an awesome concept and not only did the blogosphere turn out to be a huge asset for the class, but for me personally it got me to start my own private blog eventually at blogger.com which I enjoy lots now -and so do my friends :) - and also to try Firefox at the urging of many bloggers and their good experiences (and I'm THRILLED with it now, GO MOZILLA!), and of course most importantly it is the most helpful tool I've ever had in a class to keep up with everything that is going on, especially if you have to miss class which is the case for many people with interviews and traveling this term.  Also lots of information that was exchanged be it on a class problem or a current issue in the world relevant to class, I thought was all very useful.  Basically I found blogging to be a very positive experience and I think it should definitely remain a part of the class in the future.  BUT, there was ONE major drawback in my opinion and my experience: the relationship between blogging and the class grade.  My experience was that while I like blogging about many things that were relevant to the class, I'm just not the kind of person who will blog about a question about class material and such...it's just not my style and never has been so it was tough for me because it limited what I could blog about, because while I meant in my heart to post questions, question would never come to me to ask, not because I knew or understood everything but just because that's just never been the way I've come to understand things in school since I was little, I sort of like figuring as much as my own out as I can.  Maybe I was just one of little faith or maybe it's that blogging was new for me, but that's my feeling.  There is only so much you can blog about other things that are relevant to class before you feel it's cheapened for you because you're forcing it...I mean some blogs I forced, and some blogs I would have posted whether it meant anything for participation or not.  However, I do feel that asking questions about class material you don't understnad IS the style of many others, as we obviously saw throughout the year...so I don't think removing the high percentage of grade up to blogging would severely hinder blogging, that is, many people would blog anyway and the blogosphere would still work.  That is just one man's opinion, I have no idea of whether anyone agrees.  In fact, I think if your grade were less dependent on blogging the blogosphere might actually become MORE dynamic, with less filler from people "forcing it" and even more useful stuff and responses to others.  So, again, my experience was the blogosphere and blogging in class was very positive and I found it inmensely useful and wish other classes had a blogosphere, and the only issue I had was not with the blogosphere itself but with the grade that was attached to it.  Hope that made some sense because I might have rambled a little.

Jason

December 07, 2004 in Class Issues | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (1)

Another article, this one from CNN.com, on bloggers' impact on the news

    Cnn.com has this article  that talks about how bloggers posting exit polls on Novmebr 2nd were frowned upon for potentially "Affecting results.  It also talks about how bloggers are making news organizations' jobs harder, and urges bloggers to have some ethical standards. 
    Bloggers' impact is definitely being recognized everywhere now,  and the impact will only increase.  It'll be very interesting to see how news organizations and other entities significantly affected by the emergence of bloggers react in the future, because at this rate they're going to have to do something eventually.  On the other hand, when blogging fully latches on to kids, what's going to happen when they have a new avenue to easily communicate in large groups, anonymous to outsiders...what I'm referring to, is what are the implications going to be for high schools (which operate much differently from colleges, there are many more rules and stuff...)?  Hmmm...

November 15, 2004 in Information Business | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Problem caused by class software?

Ever since I installed the Java (from the link provided on the BIT page) on my laptop my IE has been freezing up a lot in the midst of loading pages, where the only way to un-freeze it is the ctrl-alt-del...IE stinks and I'm definitely making the swtich the Mozilla soon, but this is still really annoying and I'm wondering if it's just a coincidence or if something with the Java is causing this problem, because it has definitely been a noticeable increase in IE problems for me since around the time I installed that Java...

November 14, 2004 in Information Business | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Agree with "Lacking Knowledge"

I want to express how I totally agree 100% with jrtrana's recent post about HTML.  We had a mini crash course of sorts in HTML before our project in BIT 301 last year, but don't remember much else other than boldface/italic and href...Maybe if we had one class for an HTML tutorial, or better yet, a handout with lots of common HTML tags we might use, it would be VERY helpful, especially for our project...

November 09, 2004 in Class Issues | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

E-mail down!

For those of you who don't know why e-mail is down, here is the reason: http://www.umich.edu/PowerOutage.html
As many of you obviosuly know, this is a serious problewm; personally I've had two group meetings/projects disrupted or made impossible by the incommunication. It sure would be nice if those classes had a blogosphere like this one, then we could probably communicate through there. But then I wonder, could there come a time when a class having a "blogosphere" would be a standard thing? How would it be moderated in terms of sharing information on homework, for instance? Where would the line be? There would be many issues, for sure. But right now it seems it would be really cool if all my classes had a "blogosphere."

November 07, 2004 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Laptop Tomorrow?

OK So I have a question, on the front page of the site Bud suggests bringing out laoptos tomorrow; I assume we would need to have the wireless smoothly up and running, right? See I have a wireless card but I've never used it in the B-school, is it really a pain to get it set up to work in the b-school? Or can they do it real quick for you in Kresge?

Jason

October 25, 2004 in Class Issues | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (3)

Search Usefulness

I was unaware that there was a search functionality in the blogosphere that we could use until it was mentioned today. I was very glad becuase I find it to be INMENSELY useful. I have been hoping for something like this since we started blogging, because whenever I thought of asking a specific question about class or posting a comment I wondered if someone else had already posted that and I'd just be repeating it, but had no way to find out except gonig through all posts one by one. Also, I think the search functionality is ESPECIALLY money now that the midterm is coming up because it allows us to search the blogosphere for answeres to specific issues we might have (say, a certain exercise) that has already been blogged about! So all in all I think having the search functionality is a huge boost to the usefulness of the blogosphere for our class.

Jason

October 14, 2004 in Information Business | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

How to get my own blog?

OK so doing this blogging stuff has really whet my appetite to keep my own blog where I can rant about stuff that bothers me, curse, talk sports, etc, stuff that I can't do on our class blog. My friends always like reading my online journals and stuff but for my tastes and style blogging would seem to be much more efficient. Which begs the question: Does anyone know where I could sign up to have my own blog,without TypePad's undesirable feature (Read: A FREE blog...hehe yes I'm very cheap)? I didn't know much about blogging before this class so I wouldn't know where to start looking but I figure maybe someone here already has their own blog that they're very satisfied with and is FREE.

Jason

October 04, 2004 in Information Business | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

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  • Two more things, real quick
  • Clearing the air about prev. post + Project 2 Final Thoughts
  • Comments on the Blogging Experience this year - lots to say so bear with me
  • Another article, this one from CNN.com, on bloggers' impact on the news
  • Problem caused by class software?
  • Agree with "Lacking Knowledge"
  • E-mail down!
  • Laptop Tomorrow?
  • Search Usefulness
  • How to get my own blog?
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