JoJo's Blog- Peek into my Life

Week 3

When it comes to Shneiderman’s idea of e-learning there are apparent advantages and disadvantages. Since e-learning does not appeal to everyone’s needs or preferences technological advances such as that should not eradicate current teaching methods. Real life face- to- face interaction still has its own advantages too. E-learning does indeed resemble some of the goals Montessori and charter schools share. Advances in education seem to be inevitable when e-learning is discussed but equality within school systems still have to be addressed because only the economically capable schools will have the ability to finance such educational tools. Even if the school were able to fund a sufficient amount of computers how are less fortunate, poverty stricken children be able to do their homework if they do not have their own computers at home.
Completely unrelated is The Wall Street Journal article dealing with the copyright issues. It is odd that a compromise has not yet been reached. Making stricter laws and enforcing them through strict punishments placed on a few unlucky people is apparently not making much of a difference. This may be a long shot but this might be similar to the prohibition if indeed it becomes legal to share music. During the prohibition it was useless to remain that way since so many people were breaking the law by making bootleg alcohol and now people are making bootleg CDs and movies. The big difference is that before the prohibition drinking beer was legal and to my knowledge “sharing” music has never been. It is in my opinion their fault for undermining people by providing them with the technology and capability to do exactly what they prohibit and expect it to not be done.
Illegal or not people do not relate to the musicians and producers of the music they “steal” through piracy because how can I put this they are extremely rich and do not know what to do with all the money they already have so whatever amount of money they are losing does not seem worth crying about. People say if it were the other way around people would feel different but that may not be the case. It basically is greed because it is not right for people to buy an entire CD whose album only has one decent song and $.99 seems cheap but that adds up really fast if you are trying to use up the majority of your space on your iPod.
Lastly, Leonardo’s Laptop was actually a good book to read. The spin it took by including so much biographical information about Leonardo DaVinci made it very interesting. It was difficult for me to see us getting close to many of the technological advances mentioned because of the few misspelled words that could be found. If the spell-check is still not up to par after so long it is hard to imagine being so developed technologically. It would be nice though if people could always feel comfortable knowing that no matter where they are a doctor has access to their medical records when needed. Then people would just have to feel comfortable knowing that they are only being viewed when necessary.