I was legitimately shocked at how much I learned as a result of this project and from the other presentations as well. However, I felt as if the order in which they should have been presented should be switched around so that the flow of topics could make more sense. I believe we went from Textual Harassment and Sexting to Digital Safety and Privacy to Pharming and Phishing to Fair User Practices (FUP) and Copyright Issues, and ended with Cyber Bullying. I know that order seems a trivial thing, but I believe that they should have been ordered in such a way that they could build upon each other. It felt like we were just jumping around topics. If we were presenting these topics with the intention of teaching an audience about these issues, I believe that presenting them in a coherent order is important. Otherwise, the information might be hard to process all at once.
If I were to teach this to my students in the future, I think that I would probably teach them the topics in this order: Digital Safety and Privacy, Phishing and Pharming, Cyber Bullying, and Textual Harassment and Sexting. In terms of presentation tools, I’d like to use prezi and make it an interactive presentation and assignment as well. However, I don’t believe I would go into all these topics in the same day. I would probably section it off to one or two topics a day, and only combine topics that are similar to each other. I would probably not include the copy right issues, but would address them later under a different context because I feel as if those issues are in a completely different category from digital safety.
I felt that while the Fair User Practices (FUP) and Copyright Issues were important to address, this particular topic did not feel relevant. I felt as if the theme of most of the presentations was about keeping you safe online, but I did not feel as if this topic resonated the same theme. It felt more like something that you should be wary of, rather than something to protect yourself from. Perhaps it may have been just because of the way that the group presented the topic; they just explained what fair use practices (FUP) are and pointed out some copyright issues. But, I wish that they illustrated the consequences of not adhering to the copyright law or fair user practices. Maybe if they had emphasized the consequences, I would feel more urgency.
Also, although they mentioned what actions constituted as a violation of these laws, I wish that they illustrated some big examples of these infractions. I remember in my introduction to mass communications class, when it came to this issue the textbook mentioned “Peer to Peer” file sharing, which are sites where people share files of everything, whether it be their intellectual property to share. In terms of this topic, I felt as if addressing these sorts of sites is important because the people who typically run these sites are typically very smug about finding a way around copy right laws. I feel so strongly about this that below I’ve included a link to statements from a very popular sharing site called the Pirate Bay. They have been accused of breaking copy right laws and they blatantly mock it. They’ve compiled e-mails they’ve received from various companies concerning the distribution of their material and included their responses. They have also been raided by the Swedish and American government, but somehow have survived the ordeal basically unscathed.
In terms of the other topics, I wanted to mention that I particularly enjoyed the textual harassment group’s interview with BJ Cruz. I like the fact that they looked at their topic from a local perspective and illuminated that there are local laws concerning this issue. I had no idea that we even addressed issues like this, so this was a pleasant surprise. However, it is sad that although it has been put into law, it is not being enforced.
I felt as if this group project was slightly easier to do, compared to the last one, because this time I knew who I was working with. Unfortunately, the workload was not equal ( I had set up the prezi, did the content research and e-mailed it to everyone in the group, wrote half the information on the prezi, and put together 2 out of the 3 activities at the end. Jem did the videos (edited, voice acted, and edited the original script) and wrote the other half of the information on the prezi. Cathleen helped voice act the video scenes, and Roque did the short quiz at the end.), but at the very least the presentation came out much better than our first one. It was hard meeting up, even on the internet, but luckily with prezi we (Jem and I) were able to edit it separately and concurrently. Google chat and cellphone texting was our main means of communication in addition to e-mails. If I could change anything about this assignment, I would change it from a group project to an individual project, because it seems to me that whenever there’s a group project (perhaps this only relevant to my experiences) only really one or two people do the work. What I would also change is perhaps point out specifically which concepts concerning each topic should be mentioned in order to illustrate their importance.
Overall, I feel like these presentations were very informative and changed how I will now go about using the internet. In the past, I think that I had been quite careless with my information, but luckily I have not been attacked in anyway yet. I think that just the one topic I mentioned is the only topic that I felt somewhat irrelevant in this context and should be considered as something else completely all on its own. It’s something that I feel very important to address, so here I’d like to share a song by Weird Al concerning this issue and part 1 of the documentary mentioned above.
Steal This Film part 1 (it may contain some cussing. I haven't watched it completely through)
