Nate’s Weblog

This was a very tedious assignment that took a lot of time.  Although it was not a 10 page paper it felt like it.  It felt like it was somewhat of busy work but at the same time I can find it useful.  On the other hand I don’t see myself anywhere in the future to use MLA style or having to cite ANYTHING.  It is kind of like cursive that I learned in the third grade that I have not used since the fifth grade.  As a Criminal Justice major I will never use anything like this, but for someone else that wants to be a librarian than they would have some use in this and would probably even love it.  I am going to be honest and say I hated it.  Although some of the information I found about copyright and some of the cases I saw were quite interesting.  In all this class was a decent elective but I would not recommend it to someone like myself that is using it just because I needed to fill a spot.  I would recommend this to someone that is truly passionate about learning how to use databases and citing sources, and blogging.  I know that I will take away a good bit of information learned but don’t know if I will ever use it again.

Privacy is a big concern with some and not so much with other.  Take me for example I don’t care who keeps track of my information and what I look at on my computer it is is going to be used to stop criminal before they commit a heinous crime like blowing up a school then let them track us.  They are doing no harm to you by keeping track of what you have visited in the past year.  You have probably been to some websites that have even tracked you and remembered where you visited.  The only way I would have a problem with this is if they started using this information to send a pop-up to my computer or to the website I am visiting about something I researched a couple of days ago, but really what harm is is doing to you if they do not even use any of the information they have gathered from your websites you have visited?  Yeah thats what I thought…nothing, so why not?  If it is that big of a deal to you don’t visit the site that keep track or even you think might keep track of you.  It is that easy.

Youtube now shows tv shows, music videos, and other clips that some and most of us would consider copyright.  Although these you cannot copy these videos from youtube they are still not considered copyright which I think is unheard of.  We make such a big deal about copyright and how all these people are breaking the laws and then they go and put all of these shows and things on youtube for the whole web to see.  I know I cannot take a video off of youtube and put it onto my computer but I am sure there are many people that can and do this.  With time warner, BMG, and other big companies signing the deal with youtube for the release of these materials should not happen.  In my mind it is ludicrous because these companies are putting these things on the websites where people view millions of videos a day and expect us not to take them off of the website and use them at our own leisure, whether it be copying them onto a dvd or putting them on your ipod to view in class or show to others. With youtube and now google just throwing these materials out there at the public of course they will be pirated and used illegally they are just asking for people to break the law at least in my opinion.

It seems like the Chinese government has a lot to hide from their people.  They block sites that could tell the people about the past and what is going on in their country that the people who live there should need to know.  There may be even some sites here in the US that is blocked from us but not something that we need to know about the past history of our country.  I cannot really see why they do this.  Maybe to keep their country safe and keep from wondering eyes seeing something that might change the way they see their country.  Although these are things that don’t need to be blocked, blocking the Olympic Games on the internet in china is stupid.  Our world today is running off the internet with each and every one that is old enough to type.  The internet should be a mandatory thing for people because it would help with learning and staying in contact with others.  I can see why they wouldn’t want to hold the Olympic Games in China but you can’t change that now it is too late and we only have a few months anyway.  There is nothing wrong with having the games there and getting along for this short amount of time, yeah they may have done some bad things but don’t let it ruin this event that only comes around every 4 years.

We had our class presentations today.  I felt mine and Drew’s was good we had a decent presentation I thought.  I didn’t think I was very nervous but it seemed as though Drew was a little scared.  haha  I liked seeing how all the other groups did their presentations and how diverse they were.  Everyone seemed to do it a little different.  We were one of the only ones that didn’t have a power point to go along with it but I don’t think that was a big part of it.  I felt that ours was more directed toward the audience rather than looking at the power point and reading off of it.  We read and talked toward the class, although it didn’t take up the whole amount of time we managed to throw a little extra in there to squeeze by.  I thought all the groups did a good job of presenting their presentations and they all seem to know what they were talking about.  All in all it was a good day in LIB 103 and we accomplished a lot.  I also seemed to learn a lot by doing these searches for this project myself and seeing other groups actually do the searches on the different databases.  Now I see that all these databases are much different and they is a lot of information out there about any topic the question is where do you find what you are looking for and I think I am ready for that.

I have noticed lately and over the past few years that the news has not been showing many deaths or even talking about the deaths of our soldiers.  We have been censoring things such as the bombings and our troops running through towns and shooting people just because they look threatening.  You know all this stuff happens we just are not shown these things they choose what we see.  The military can choose not to send a reporter to ride along with an important to mission because ti may compromise our position or our plans.  One main reason the news has been censoring its broadcast is because of the military will not let them do stories on certain things and also the fact that if a soldier were to die in Iraq and they put that on the news it may be seen by the family before they are even told that their son has died in the war.  We must be very careful of what is put on the news.  Iraq can also use this information as we talked earlier to put on Youtube and other forum sites of them killing our troops and letting the American families see what they are doing to our military personnel.  I really thing this is a great idea, because their could be many things that are put on the news that could hurt on number of people watching.

In class we are still working on Boolean searches and honestly it is very boring stuff, although helpful when searching for specific areas of a topic and want to filter out all of the other useless garbage.  I think I know what to look for when thinking of these phrases to search by Boolean but I don’t really know what I might find and what each of the links will take me too.  I like the fact that class is canceled today but we still have some work to do!  I wish this was more of like a half web based class.  I feel like it would not be hard to understand based on the worksheets we are given.  If we were to do that every other week and meet in class .  It almost seems like it is a web-based class anyway will all of these posts and online work.  The project that is due coming up is still a little confusing to me.  I am not sure what we have to do and even what my topic means or what I am suppose to find out about it.  I am a little worried about the project and just hope I understand it when the time comes to present and doing the research.  Well I hope you have a good time at the conference and thanks for going so we could have this day off!

Well  in this post I dont really have much to say so I guess I will talk about everything that has been going on in class.  The test was very basic and I liked it alot I studied alot worrying about it and thinking I would do horrible.  Although I did very well on it, much better than I expected.  I guess I need to work on my decimal system and how the books are arraigned in the library.  That is the only one I missed.  I also think the review the class before the test was very helpful, and even though I didn’t seen very enthused I was ecstatic.  No, it really did help me out because library does not come easy for me and I never really got into reading and the library when I was little.  I have to be honest I only took this class because I thought it would be a breeze and me being a senior I am very lazy now and just wanted this to be over.  To my surprise this class is not easy and I was actually worried the first couple of days because I didn’t know if I was going to know anything and it was not common knowledge at all to me.  After this first test I feel much better about the class and feel like I am getting the hang of it and lets not hope it comes back to bite me in the…

I have learned a lot through the classes we have had lately.  Learning about the Boolean searches and the words to add to do a more defined search.  I know it may be boring but it probably cant be made fun.  We have to be taught this stuff for the course so I think that the teaching methods and strategies are good and make me understand what to do when test time comes.  I am not sure if I will ever use anything like this but I guess it is good information to know if I have too.  Also the test today I thought was a good one it wasn’t to hard and not to easy and hopefully I did well enough on it.  I have told many of my friends that I am taking a Library class and they don’t even believe me they didn’t even know we offered that at UNCW.  I didn’t either until I heard one of my friends was taking it this semester.  I think that the exercises we do in class with the games and things are fun and help me when preparing for the test.  It is actually very hard to write 200 words just about class for one of the blog posts.  I think we should be able to talk about anything, but not so far out there that is has nothing to do with anything others wouldn’t even know about.

I think that filtering is great for schools and even Pakistan.  I wasn’t real sure Pakistan even had internet, but that is new.  When I was in high school I had filtering on my internet.  They blocked certain sites and some that were not even bad but some that need to be blocked.  Some that even the teachers or the IT guys didn’t even know about that they should have to keep some of these kids off of them.  If these filters were not put on computers in high school and other public places where these certain things shouldn’t be looked at who knows what some of these people would be looking at out in public.  Yes, we as American are fortunate that we do not have to be blocked by our ISP’s from getting on Youtube and other sites like that.  Especially in our own homes.  I guess if Pakistan could get on youtube it could post terrorist threat videos or even watch something other people have put up and get ideas or even make threats to certain people about the videos that are posted.  They also have something like that on most tv’s now.  Where parents can block certain tv channels because they don’t want their kids watching that kind of tv.  I think this is s great idea of regulating things that need to be regulated just don’t take away so much freedom from someone or some country.