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 :)

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~

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

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...

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

More weblog stuff

I forgot to add in my weblog questions posts that I completely echo Sugardaddy's question about the blogs, so I post this to encourage someone to answer him soon because I have that doubt too. There MUST be some way of keeping track of everyone's posts and who answered whose blog and when...

Weblog questions/confusion

I'm not clear at all about how the guidelines for the blogosphere participation work. Do our blogs have to definitely be class related to count for participation? For instance, would ranting about something in the Business School that doesn't really have anything to do with the class, but WOULD affect, concern, or interest my classmates not count? Also, I'm assuming blogging about sports or, say, the Apprentice, or cool mainstream web sites, would not count (or woud it?), but are we ALLOWED to post blogs like that just for our own fun? Or would that be like spamming the blogosphere? If people have answers and/or opinions to some of these issues, please reply.

Jason

Packer Fan

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