Advice to Baruch College

Baruch college, since it has rebuilt its buildings years ago has been an icon of modernisation with in the cuny community. It has come to put in to use many of the new media technologies. But what I would advice Baruch college to take up that doesn't already exist are the following:

1. There are all kinds of students in this college. Some are very good at interacting some are not. Keeping those people in mind Baruch college should create a virtual Baruch world where people that are shy can interact and get to know people. The same can be used to help freshmen get used to the campus and ease them in to the college life.

2. Some professors already have a twitter or a facebook where they can interact with students. This should be done college wide. If students and professors get to know each other outside oft he classroom it wld help create a better learning environment.

3. A blog should be started for every single class and the professor should blog if not everyday once or twice a week. This would give the professor a chance to get his/her concerns or appreciation to the class as a whole. This is specially useful for lecture classes.

These are some of the most important things Baruch College should consider taking up.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

In our class wiki, I have taken up the responsibility to be the editor of the New Media Ethics and Law page. Though I haven't contributed a lot to this page yet, I have gathered up neccessary resources to make this page much easier to understand. New media ethics and law is a very broad topic and so it is a hard task to keep the information conice and interesting. The former contributors and editors have done an excellent job collecting the data and placing it under sub headings. What I am going to change and to an extent did is the layout of the whole page. It seems a little bit unorganised with so many thoughts and definitions all around. I have read most of the page a couple of times and i noted some errors in either spelling or the writing, that is going to be fixed by the time I finish editing. There are a few links in the page that do not work anymore, I am going to replace them with links and part that do work. In the end, the new media page is a great source for information about the relationship betwen New media and the law and ethics. I am going to be adding a few subsections to the Ethics part of the page because it is just as important to know the ethical issues concerning New Media as to know the laws behind it.

NM Class so far

So far this class is the most interesting of all the classes I am taking this semester. I never get board reading the articles for the class and I never get tired of listening to what every one in the class has to bring to the table. It has given me a new insight in to what new media is all about. I better understand the concepts of social networking, blogging, using wikipedia and many other things. I know the many pros and cons of many existing forms of new media, I understand the huge role they play in our everyday lifes. But so far the most exciting thing about this class to me has been the work on wiki. It is just so fascinating to be able to contribute to the knowledge of everyone else. The inner workings of the wiki is interesting in itself. To be able to put in the content everyone would read is time taking and a huge responsibility. So to me the New Media class so far is a great experience and has been teaching me a ton of things I would otherwise have no idea.

VIRTUAL WORLDS

Virtual worlds are one of the newest ways people all around the world can collaborate. The first thing that pops in to our minds about virtual worlds is that, a person can talk, interact and do the stuff he/she wouldn't be able to do in a regular world. So the first and the most basic use of virtual worlds is to create a place where people with disabilites, problems or merely shy could break out of their shell and talk without being worried about people judging them. There are many ways virtual worlds can be helpful. Huge companies these days are using virtual worlds as a interaction center where they could train their employee's. It is helpful to the employee's too in a sense that they get to do or practice the stuff they don't understand over and over again without being embarrassed about it. Similarly, the army has also started using the virtual worlds to train the newly joined army officers.

Virtual worlds help foster social networking skills, it gives people a chance to escape to a place where they wont be judged. It is time saving in the sense that the army and the companies dont have to spend a lot of time training their new employee's. It also saves resources, like the space and money that they have to put in to train these new officers or employee's. It also saves time for many high profile people by being able to conduct conferences over these virtual worlds. While these are some of the pros of virtual worlds, the cons are not ignorable too. The first thing that virtual worlds tell us is that it is a waste of time. Poeple spend hours in front of the computer doing and taking to people they do not know and doing stuff that isn't productive in many ways. People start living in a very unrealistic world with unrealistic expections. And their social skills suffer even more.

Virtual worlds of the future would look in my opinion, very real and I think we'll advance in a way where people can change their apperance and enter these worlds themselves without the use of a cimputer.