Two new categories
I’d like to direct your attention to two categories on the sidebar: app shout-outs and random cool stuff. Remember, you can earn bonus points for extra entries. Here’s two ways to start mining the gold in them thar hills.
App Shout-Outs give you an opportunity to talk about applications that we’re not covering in the course. (After all, there’s only so much time and space in the syllabus.) For instance, we could have talked about del.icio.us or de.lirio.us when we read about folksonomies, but we worked with Flickr instead. A couple of you mentioned social bookmarking in passing, but we never really discussed it in depth. We could do with a stand-alone post that explained what it is and why it's useful for people like us, if one of you wants to write it. As we move through the semester, feel free to post about other apps that fit the weekly topic. You probably know about some things that I don’t!
Random Cool Stuff: If you see something on the Nets that applies to technology and might be useful or funny to the class, you can post it under this category with a few words of explanation about its relevance. For example, the Blockbuster Super Bowl ad is funny and technology-related, but it doesn’t really fit in with our lessons. (Except it does — I think it says a lot about the digital divide and the trepidation a lot of people feel about understanding computing technologies.)
(You might want to hold on to your YouTube links, though, unless you have several. A future assignment will ask you to post a tech-related, YouTube-based blog entry. But there's lots of stuff out there on the Net besides YouTube.)
You’re also welcome to post about random “Hmmm” moments that have to do with the lessons, like Mike did when he wandered how The Matrix fits in with our current conceptions of avatars or William did with this post about Jimmy Carr.
Good luck! And if you have questions about grades or bonus points, drop me a line. If you’re still confused about how this works at this point, we need to get that cleared up so you can have a successful semester.