Archive for December 2006

Finals are over, free for Christmas break

Well, finals are over. I have the next few weeks off before the winter ‘07 semester begins. I survived the first semester, and actually managed to get pretty good grades.

In Strategies for Online Learning—which was, I think, the dumbest class I’ve ever taken—I received a 91.84%, a solid A minus, with 349 of a possible 380 points. I can’t remember dreading homework as much as in this class. I think I even enjoyed high school biology more (and I didn’t like high school biology at all).

I fared slightly better in History of Popular Culture, with a 94.27%—329 of 349 possible points. I think I should actually have 10 points more than that, and I am contesting my grade. The instructor graded the final assignments before the end of the 24-hour school day and before I turned my assignment in. She gave me a zero for the 10-point assignment. So, if I were given full credit for that assignment, my final grade in the class would be 97.13%, with 339 of 349 possible points.

Final project: Week 6 research

History of Popular Culture—Week 6, Assignment 2

Since 2000, there have been two major developments in American music: the so-called “bubblegum pop” genre and garage rock bands. Bubblegum pop is a genre of popular music that usually includes catchy melodies, simple musical progressions and harmonies and repeated hooks or riffs. It is popular among preteen and young teenagers, and often features less-than-meaningful lyrics. Garage band rock is characterized by its raw, unfinished sound.

But more has changed in the technology of music than in music itself since 1999. MTV is no longer the only music-centric television or cable channel available. Apple Computer’s iTunes Online Music Store sells millions of songs each year, eliminating the need to buy whole albums by a single artist. Music production is almost strictly digital now, replacing tapes with hard drives and mixers with computers in most recording studios.

Finalizing your career portfolio

Strategies for Online Learning—Week 6, Assignment 2

Table of contents

  • Career goal
  • Vision statement
  • Career portfolio
    • Samples of Web site design work
    • Transcripts of education
    • Writing samples
    • Diplomas, degrees, certificates
    • Newsletters

Career goal

It is my ongoing goal to work in the field of Web design and development—either as a self-employed business owner or a full-time employee.

Vision statement

I desire to further my education to better serve my employer as well as to learn more about emerging technologies and make myself more marketable to other potential employers.

Presently, I am employed in my field of study, and have been for the past 4 years. I enjoy my work, and am pleased that I am currently pursuing education that will better equip me to better and more efficiently accomplish the daily tasks before me. However, with more knowledge, both broad and deep, in my area of expertise, I will be able to market myself more effectively to other potential employers. It will also enable me to better serve customers in the event that my own personal business grows large enough to wholly sustain my family and me.

In some ways, the reality of what I currently do at my present job matches my expectations; I wish to work in Web design, and that is what I do. But at the same time, there are areas where I know I need improvement. It is frustrating to me to know there is a way to do something, but not know how.

I plan to move my present reality toward my goals by continuing through The Art Institute’s Interactive Media Design Program. I also plan to continue to research and learn about emerging technologies through other online sources—blogs, news sites, research, etcetera.

Career portfolio

Samples of Web site design work

Transcripts of education

  • Unofficial transcripts from University of Alaska Fairbanks
  • Transcript from Frontier High School

Writing samples

Diplomas, degrees, certificates, awards

  • May 2001 — Diploma, Frontier High School

  • May 2005 — Society of Professional Journalists award for public service Web site

    Alaskans win media awards

    Staff Report

    The staff of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner earned an honorable mention in the 2005 Northwest Society of Professional Journalists Awards for its single-day comprehensive coverage of the Boundary Fire. Four staff members earned additional awards.

    In addition, Fairbanks public radio station KUAC-FM and the Anchorage Daily News earned several awards, which were announced Saturday.

    News-Miner online coordinator Jon Bourne took second place in the public service on the Web category for the News-Miner’s “Senate 2004” Web site.

    News-Miner photo chief Sam Harrel earned third place in the spot news photography category for his photograph, “On thin ice.” Staff photographer Eric Engman earned honorable mention for “Wired for a fight.”

    And news editor Chris Talbott took third place in the environment and energy category for “Born to burn” about the black spruce tree.

    KUAC reporter Dan Bross took two awards—a pair of third places, in spots news for “Pogo” and “Oil tax” in investigative. Fellow KUAC reporter Sara Neal took second in the investigative category with “TIFs in Fairbanks, Alaska.” Coast Alaska Radio News’ Ed Schoenfeld made the investigative category a clean sweep for Alaska, taking first with “3-11 Plasma burner.”

    Among the Daily News’ award winners was former News-Miner sports writer Josh Niva, who earned second place in the business category for “A penchant for parties.” The ADN staff won for its Web site while George Bryson and Tom Kizzia picked up first-place awards in education and personalities respectively.

Newsletters

  • Company-wide newsletter mention for Web site traffic record

American popular culture and you

History of Popular Culture—Week 6, Assignment 1

You’re in the last week of this course and have learned a lot about American Popular Culture from 1900 onwards. How has this information helped you, and how will you use this information in your particular area of interest in the arts and entertainment industry?

In my field of work and study, Interactive Media Design, it is important to know the history of elements of visual design that might be incorporated into my work. This course has shown me how visual design has affected popular culture and vice versa. Also, knowing where popular culture has come from visually helps to know where it might be headed.

What suggestions can you make for the betterment of the course?

Actually, this course exceeded my expectations. I don’t think I would want to see anything changed. Obviously, though, the course will need to evolve with popular culture as it progresses.

Goal-setting

Strategies for Online Learning—Week 6, Assignment 1

Discuss how you might have adapted the techniques described in the text to work best for you. Next, summarize how the techniques may best work for you in an online environment.

I have always been a realist, which I believe differs from a pessimist: a pessimist expects the worst while a realist simply accepts the worst as a possible outcome and plans accordingly. While I do set goals, I try to make them as realistic as possible. Realistic goals increase the probability that they will be attained.

For school, I use a calendar to schedule my assignments on their due dates. These small weekly accomplishments are realistic goals that I can achieve. With each one successfully completed, I have finished a small goal for that week.

Use at least two specific examples of how you can turn “up to” goals into “through” goals. These can either be goals you’ve already presented in this course or different ones that come to your mind.

But just getting my assignments finished and turned in on time is not enough to achieve true success. Granted, this technique will help in getting a good grade in the class, but psychologically, all that is accomplished is the accomplishment itself. After that, there are no goals.

What I need is a shift in my thinking. I need to see these small “up-to” goals as part of a much larger “through” goal to move from an assignment-to-assignment mindset to a class-by-class, and eventually a year-by-year mindset. Ultimately, this could become a degree-by-degree mindset.

Transforming my “up-to” assignment goals into “through” goals could involve aligning them with my professional goals. For instance, learning to use Ruby on Rails, a Web software design framework, to streamline my Web development work is a professional “through” goal. It can be achieved through smaller, more palatable “up-to” goals such as completing assignments in a class in Ruby on Rails.

It’s kind of like the movie “What About Bob?” where Bob is encouraged to take “baby steps.” Bob’s ultimate goal may be to get home, but it is easier for him to do that if breaks up that goal into smaller pieces, ie. baby steps out of the office, baby steps to the elevator, baby steps out of the building.

Another “through” goal involves my children. Daily, small “up-to” goals can be simple things like reading at least one book to each child or talking with them about their day or my day. Larger goals can be to have good communication with them. My ultimate, “through” goal is to raise my children well, which all of smaller “up-to” goals support.

Final project: Week 5 research

History of Popular Culture—Week 5, Assignment 4

With the late 1970s’ and early 1980s’ punk rock movement fading, music in the U.S. again saw a resurgence of creativity and expression. Many new genres of music came to the mainstream market between 1984 and 1999.

The term “New Wave” was given to a new style of music that evolved from punk rock. Sire Records’ cofounder Seymour Stein coined the term because he saw punk rock’s mainstream popularity fading and wanted a new term to market these new artists separately from punk rock. The genre is also known as synthpop due to its prevalent use of the synthesizer.

New Wave music was diverse. Initially, artists who were considered New Wave included Blondie, The B-52s, and Elvis Costello. But as its popularity grew, New Wave groups became identified more by their common beliefs—strong anti-corporate, anti-establishment, experimental musical attitudes—than by the sounds of the music they played. The style grew to include better known groups such as The Police and R.E.M. The artists’ music reflected their mutual distaste for and energetic reaction against the “supposedly overproduced, uninspired popular music of the 1970s.”

The New Wave era began to die out around 1986, but the style and thought affected American popular music until about 1992. Even today, references are still made in mainstream movies such as Ace Ventura and The Wedding Singer to the hairstyles of New Wave poster child group A Flock of Seagulls.

Other punk-influenced genres popped up, with moderate successes and followings throughout the nation. These included Gothic rock, post-punk, alternative rock, emo and thrash metal. These are more generally described as heavy metal, punk rock and hardcore punk.

Hip hop saw its beginnings in the mid-1970s, but rose to widespread popularity in the 1980s. Hip hop music became a large part of pop culture in the 1980s. The style was characterized by two key components: scratching, a turntablist technique involving moving a vinyl record back and forth while playing; and rapping, a style of music that merges speech and poetry with very loose melodies, often with the backdrop of sparse, synthesized instrumentation.

The early 1990s’ musical evolution was mostly through two fronts—rap and grunge.

Grunge music replaced “hair metal” bands, so-called because of their tendency to tease their long hair into a large, puffy mass. Inspired by punk rock, the grunge genre of alternative rock was itself characterized by the heavy distortion and feedback of “dirty” guitar, strong musical riffs, and heavy drumming. The style embodied the typical teenager’s feelings of the time—anger, frustration, sadness, fear, and as such was fully embraced in the early ’90s.

Rap music—or “gangsta rap,” as it is sometimes called—while closely tied to the 1980s’ hip hop movement, took distinct steps in the musical evolution of the early ’90s to become its own independent style. Its lyrical focus is on the inner-city lives of gang members and other affiliated criminals. It is from the “gangsta” culture that ebonics phrases, such as “da hood” and , came into popular usage.

Sources:

You are the sculptor

Strategies for Online Learning—Week 5, Assignment 3

Based on your experience so far, how do you think your opinions of others are formed in an online environment?

My opinion of others online is limited mostly to their academic abilities. All I know about them is through their schoolwork and in-class participation. All I see as a representative sample of them is their writing (and in a few cases, their drawing). As shallow a conclusion as can be drawn about someone as through their writing, I have done.

I am a stickler for grammatical and syntactical correctness. I don’t appreciate people misusing the English language, whether it is through misspelled words or improper punctuation. As an editor of my high school newspaper for my entire high school career and teacher’s assistant in my grammar class, I have been taught to appreciate good writers, those who value and show appreciation of our language by caring enough to learn it carefully and use it effectively. Of them, I form a much higher opinion than those who obviously have no regard, those who do not even care enough to check their spelling.

While not mentioning any names, give an example of an opinion you have about someone from another online class, preferably a comment that is less than positive. Discuss how you arrived at this opinion and talk about what you can do to turn it into a positive opinion.

Just yesterday, while reviewing another student’s work, I came across some very familiar material. The student had directly copied from a “source” and pasted to the class discussion board, presumably as his own work. While the student did cite his source, none of the work was his own. Of him, I hold a low opinion for his lack of ingenuity and creativity, for not holding himself in high enough regard to trust his own abilities to achieve an acceptable, passable grade in the course.

My response to his post:

[Student’s name], is any of this your writing?

Your first three paragraphs are written by Joseph P. Ulibas from Sacramento, CA as evidenced on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/usercomments. This is his copyrighted material.

The rest of your post is copied from your second listed “source,” Wikipedia. Luckily for you, there are no copyright issues with copying directly from Wikipedia.

You should not hope to get a good grade—or any grade at all—if you simply copy someone else’s work. I don’t know whether you are planning to turn in your own work, but surely this will not cut it for the assignment.

Working at a newspaper, I have the privilege of working with people who know the value of words—in a very real, monetary sense. A simple typographical oversight can result in an onslaught of phone calls and nasty e-mail messages berating our establishment for its carelessness. It has been rather difficult at times to have been forced by the mandate of the course requirements to read other students’ work. At times, I have encountered sentences whose meaning, despite my best efforts, I truly could not decipher. Even the course lectures themselves are in places, albeit few, poorly written.

In the case of this person’s writing, I see nothing that I can do to change my opinion positively other than to lower my own literary standards, which I am afraid I cannot in good conscience do. What he could do to better his own standing in my eyes is to show the work ethic required to turn a complete, cohesive assignment that utilizes, not copies, his sources to reinforce the points he attempts to make.

Discuss your strengths that have been pointed out by other students in the class.

People have noticed my attention to detail as it pertains to my writing. Yesterday, Tiffany Martinez, a classmate in this course, stated that she “did not see any grammar or spelling errors on [my] paper,” which she had reviewed. She also said that my school Web site “is well done and easy to read,” implying that another of my strengths is my adeptness at Web design.

What can you do to turn your negative attitudes around?

I don’t believe that my high standards should be misconstrued as negative attitudes, haughtiness, or self-absorption. Therefore, I also do not see a need to change.

Angel child movies

History of Popular Culture—Week 5, Assignment 3

How has the socio-political climate with regard to children changed from that of the previous generation?

Movies such as About a Boy and Big Daddy show a resurgence in the importance of children in parents’ lives and a renewed parental interest in participating in their childrens’ lives. These films emphasize the simple values that children have to teach if adults are simply willing to learn from them.

John Rosemond, a successful family psychologist and author, says that childrens’ keen sense of right and wrong is often a stark contrast to today’s society. In a June 2006 interview, ArcaMax Publishing’s Publishing Editor Hugh Spain quotes Rosemond as saying, “Children are simple, they are not complicated. But we have made something that’s simple into something that is complicated. We have made a process that is not through the heart but something that is now done through the head.”

Into what type of environment were Millennial babies born?

In the family, Millennial children were born into a culture rebounding from the liberality of the 1970s. 80s parents were often hippies recovering from the freedom and abandon they had exercised in the previous decade, leaving that lifestyle behind in favor of raising their children. They left their social and political views favoring reform and progress in favor of more conservative values, placing an emphasis on the family and home life.

Politically, Millennials were born into the years when Ronald Reagan was president. His platform of smaller government and lower taxes was in large part successful. Reagan intentionally withdrew federal government interference and allowed free market society govern the nation’s economy. It was a time when businesses thrived, and, much like the 1920s, so did the stock market. As a result, many Millennial children grew to become the entrepreneurs of the dotcom era of the late 1990s.

Do you think this change had any affect on the collective personality of Millennial babies? How and why?

Yes, the effects of involved parents in childrens’ lives will always be profound, and whether that involvement is position or negative will equally affect the children positively or negatively. In my perception, Millennial kids were very confident individuals, sure of their talents and abilities. They were raised to know their own limits while at the same time pushing the boundaries of possibility. This, along with a thriving economy, is why the entrepreneurial spirit was and is so high among this group.

Materialism in the “Me Decade”

History of Popular Culture—Week 5, Assignment 2

After viewing Wall Street, discuss how this film reflects the materialism that dominated the Reagan Era.

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” said character Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street. This one sentence from a speech he made to a company which he planned to buy captures the essence of the fast-buck, “me” culture of the 1980s.

Bud Fox, the main character of the story, is a young stock broker who wants to make his mark on the world. He desires money, fame and power—the American dream. Gekko is his role model. Forsaking his traditional, hard-working, blue-collar roots, Fox shuns his own morals for the pursuit of what is, in his mind, success.

Fox managed to schedule a meeting with Gekko and offered him some inside information on an airline for which Fox’s father, from whom he had obtained the information, worked. Gekko used the information to make a small profit, and he consequently began to mentor the young Fox in his underhanded business dealings.

Ultimately, Fox decides to stand up for what he believes, for the traditional values with which he was raised, but not before getting himself indicted for insider trading. Fox was willing to risk everything to gain everything.

Also discuss the reasons that, in your opinion the film, could foster this materialism in the “Me Decade” of the ’80s.

The 80s were a time when individuals’ focus was in large part on themselves. It was the common American dream to obtain money, fame and power. The film put a face to that dream, helped to make it seem attainable. It showed how a little information could be turned to big profits.

Sources:

Researching a career

Strategies for Online Learning—Week 5, Assignment 1

Researching a career

If you are a non-traditional student that is employed, complete Internet research to compare your current position with those of similar career responsibilities. Compare roles and salaries with that of what you expect after you complete your program of study, run a few comparisons on the same expectations and salaries for different geographic locations as well. You are to write a 1-2 page paper summarizing what you’ve found to the Discussion Area by Day 3. Along with your paper, include all of the web sites you used in writing your paper. For this assignment, don’t worry about posting a final “polished” piece of work. At this point, simply post a “rough draft” of your findings.

I am currently employed in my field of study, Interactive Media Design. I manage the Web sites for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the largest daily newspaper in interior Alaska. I have held my position for four years, in which time I have received three raises, sales commissions, numerous one-time and monthly bonuses, 2 weeks paid vacation per year, a large office, a laptop for home, and new computers and monitors at work, as well as the health and life insurance policies offered to all employees. Additionally, my employer has agreed to fund my further education here at AIO.

My employer is a relatively large company for the city where I live, but is still small by most standards. The News-Miner employs roughly 150 people. I, however, am one of only two resident IT staff members. Though most people do not—or cannot—distinguish our separate roles, they are very different. While the other staff member manages the company’s computer systems, I maintain the company Web site. To confuse things further, I help to cover his job responsibilities when he is out sick, is on vacation, or is simply busy.

At salary.com, a Web site that aggregate salary information from sources across the nation, I conducted a search for my generic job title, “Webmaster.” While my job description is slightly broader because I work in a small company, the job description on the site accurately describes what I do on a daily basis.

Webmaster
Develops and maintains the company’s portal. Performs backups and ensure user accessibility to the site. Monitors site traffic and helps scale site capacity to meet traffic demands performance. Improves the company’s efficiency and designs the look and feel for the site. May require a bachelor’s degree and 2-4 years of experience. Must have a working knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and SQL. Relies on experience and judgment to plan and accomplish goals. Performs a variety of tasks. Works under general supervision; typically reports to a manager. A certain degree of creativity and latitude is required.

The scale of actual salaries in my occupation seems a little high to me, though. Perhaps my expectations are too low. My salary falls slightly below the low end of the scale that was generated:

Fairbanks, AK:
Salary for Webmasters in or around Fairbanks, Alaska

I also looked at the same the position in Seattle, Washington, and Mountain View, California, in the heart of the Silicon Valley.

Seattle, WA:
Salary for Webmasters in or around Seattle, Washington

Mountain View, CA:
Salary for Webmasters in or around Mountain View, California

As can be seen in the graphs, the salaries for Mountain View and Fairbanks are very close, differing only by $24 at most. Seattle offers Webmasters roughly $4,000 to $8,000 less annually.

Another source gives information on the status of the industry rather than my particular occupation. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics offers an Occupational Outlook Handbook, in which can be found a Career Guide to Industries. There is a page in this career guide that outlines the nature of the industry, working conditions, employment, occupations in the industry, training and advancement, outlook, and earnings for Computer Systems Design and related services.

Apparently, my position in a company of 100 or more employees is rare; 78 percent of workers in this industry are employed by companies of 5 employees or fewer.

Number of workers employed by establishment, March 2004