This is Programming?

So as I was messing around on “Scratch” there was only one thing that I could think, WHAT IS THIS CRAP?! Excuse my foul language but this “programming software” just annoyed me to no end. The idea that people spend hours of there day putting virtual legos together just to make an ugly cat dance and change colors makes me so angry. This is NOT PROGRAMMING! This is virtual Lincoln Logs. Programming involves calculations and brain function and even so education in the field, but my five year old brother could use this program.  I just dont understand how people from MIT could pass this off as a technological advancement. I am not a programmer in the slightest, im a teacher. But I feel like this is a dumbing down of the art and practice of programming. So I do not have much else to say about this except that I couldnt “explore” this for more than 20 minutes until I got annoyed by the dancing cat.

How to keep what you have.

We’ve all been there, losing pictures, videos, music and documents to cyberspace. How can we save ourselves from this catastrophe of losing all of our content? Upon reading the content for this week I realized that there are precautionary techniques that we can take. As far as pictures are concerned, save them on external memory formats, such as flash drives or external hard drives. Make multiple copies of your pictures in multiple places, and upload them to facebook, twitter, or flikr. This will allow further safety precautions to ensure  your photos are safe. This will also be true for audio files, upload them to youtube or other media sharing websites to secure their presence. People lose their files because they do not take the proper preparation to ensure their security, so if the pictures and music and videos were that important, maybe they should take better care of their stuff.

Looks Can Be Decieving

The way something is presented, how it looks, is almost as important as the content itself. Whether it be a formal presentation for a class, the way you dress for work, even convincing your parents of something, what they see can sometimes be more powerful than what they hear. Take the article  by Edward Tufte for example. His example about the use of powerpoint, he said, “The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”  When I was in high school, and even now in college, whenever a teacher uses power point, I cant really pay attention. I feel like im being talked down to. Dont get me wrong, power point is great for talking points for a speech or presentation. I just feel like teachers and professors sacrifice the act of teaching in order to get through material. This pint again is reinforced when we look at the Gettysburg Powerpoint and see that the actual speech is much more powerful than a powerpoint. Besides the technical side of powerpoint and other visual media, the excecution of using it in cohesion with your presentation must have a perfect balance. So basically, just because you have use a powerpoint doesn’t mean your content and presentation is valuable and good. You must actually know what your talking about, instead of being good at using powerpoint.

Reading Statistics

As I examined the 2008 and 2007 Felton Reports, I was confused. All these graphs of different shapes and numbers. I prefer bar graphs, simple pie charts, even histograms I can deal with. I tried to follow along the information that the reports were trying to convey, I just found it too confusing. However there was some information that I did see that i found interesting. The number of itunes track played in 2007, which was only 25,000. As opposed to 2008 where that number was 34,000. I went back and found it very interesting how I could compare statistics like that between the years. I dont know why there was so much data about alcohol though. The data looked really nice and colorful though.