Where the Buffalo Roam

Original story line :

Internet dominates campus life, but little use is for academics
By Maryanne George
Knight Ridder
The South End Newspaper (Wayne Univeristy)
CAMPUS:  Apr/21/2005

When the rent on his East Lansing, Mich., apartment is due,
Mark Herberholz logs onto an Internet poker site for a few
hands. He says the income from his winnings helps to pay
the bills and pass the time.

The Michigan State senior says he spends about four hours
a day playing computer games, instant messaging with friends
and surfing the Internet.

But he spends only about six hours a week on the computer
doing his homework.

http://www.southend.wayne.edu/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1322

The article then goes on to explore how computing basically defines student's social life ... computers are more useful as a communication tool .... students use them that way, but the school doesn't ...

CNN reportedlast weekend on a British study of 1,100 email users

Almost two out three people check their electronic messages out of office hours and when on holiday

Half of all workers respond to an e-mail within 60 minutes of receiving one

One in five will break off from a business or social engagement to respond to a message.

Nine out of 10 people thought colleagues who answered messages during face-to-face meetings were rude, while three out of 10 believed it was not only acceptable, but a sign of diligence and efficiency.

But the mental impact of trying to balance a steady inflow of messages with getting on with normal work took its toll, the UK's Press Association reported.

In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day.

He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana.

CNN, E-mails 'hurt IQ more than pot', Friday, April 22, 2005 Posted: 8:08 AM EDT (1208 GMT). http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq/index.html

Glenn Wilson, Kings College, London. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/ppro/experts/expert/244

「ブログってなに？」と思っている方はたくさんいると思います。 ブログは簡単に説明するとウェブログ（ＷＥＢＬＯＧ）の略で直訳するとウェブ上の記録です。

URL : http://blog.fc2.com/start.html"

A bookstore in Tokyo displays books on blogs or their postings.THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

Some notes for a language lab workshop - based on my experience as a student trying to use Japanese audio materials.

The Tapes: the text we used was "Situational Functional Japanese" from Tsukuba Daigaku (University of Tsukuba), and it has an accompanying video tape and audio tape series. The text is divided into "Conversations" and each conversation has four components - a model conversation, grammatical practice (word or phrase level), conversational practice (variations on the conversation, and then conversation comprehension tasks).

Usage history:

1997. Plain Language Tapes. I found these very difficult to use. I couldn't distinguish side A from side B, had a hard time locating track 1 from track 2, and was never sure if I had the right tape in the deck. The biggest problem was locating where on the tape you were - there was no indexing capability.

1998. Putting Tapes Online. Converting video files to MOV files was easy; converting the audio tapes to MOV took a bit more work, and occassionally I missed a cue. Not really usable from home.

1999. CD Tapes. Converting the audio tapes to CD was easier, partly because I had located a nice windows program that allowed me to edit the audio file into the right chunks. The program, Acoustica, also had a great noise reduction function. The major difficulty was trying to fit the tapes onto a CD. CD's were, ta da!, indexed, and this made them much easier to use.

2000 - 2001. Improved CD

2002. Experiment with MP3. Argh, the first MP3 player lost the indexing. Although it was easy to go to the next track, sometimes the previous track was hard to reach. And if you got lost, you had to turn the machine off and start again.

2003 - 2004. Improved MP3. Indexing is back, and we uploaded all of the tracks into WebCT.

2004. Podcasting. Trying to find downloadable audio material on the web.

2005. PSPcasting. Exploring the Sony Play Station Portable.

Comments:

1. Indexing was key to usefulness - if I couldn't find the lesson, I couldn't use it. iTunes is a nice way to manage these tracks, ans to manage them on an iPod or an iPod Shuffle.

2. Language learning vocabulary - I was slow to pick up on the Japanese words describing the exercises, etc. The text focuses on the model conversations, but could do more with the daily classroom conversation, especiially the ones about "assignments" :)

3. Additional material - need to get podcasting working, news, weather, sports, and music :)

For the obvious reason.