After a long day at school or work, many people want to go home and crash, watch a TV show or movie to relax. Yet if you have a hearing impediment, this may not be possible. Many channels do not provide close-captioning which is imperative to fully understand the show with the same clarity unhindered individuals enjoy. CNN does not provide close captioning. NBC does not provide close captioning. MTV does not provide close captioning. VH1 does not provide close captioning, nor does ABC, TBS, TLC, HGTV, or Food Network. Even with TV shows which are posted online on sites such as Hulu, it takes up to six days to provide close captioning. This seems like an obscene amount of time to type up the captions for a thirty minute to an hour program. Individuals who have a hearing impediment deserve the same entertainment as the rest of the viewing population, and with such an easy fix as close-captioning, it seems absurd to not provide it.

Thankfully, some companies have realized this problem and are taking the necessary action. Google is working on adding auto-captioning to their sites and affiliates, most importantly; YouTube. Auto-captions will have clear benefits for the deaf and hearing-impaired population, who now will be able to better understand dialogue on uploaded videos. Up to now, this group had to rely on the goodwill of YouTube users to manually add captions to their videos. A time-consuming process, most users didn’t bother to do so. http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/

This simple fix will undoubtably help and assist those who deal with a hearing impediment everyday. Adding close-captioning is something the internet should have required long ago, but thankfully the discrepancy is beginning to be rectified.

Years ago, college students could be found holed up in the library, especially during finals, surrounded by piles of thick hardcover books and binder paper scattered throughout the workspace. While this may be a bit of an exaggeration, it is far from the typical scene today. On the weekend before finals at Cal Poly, the number of students doubles in the library from 5,000 to 10,000 people a day, filling every available desk on all five floors. Technology abounds. There are laptops at almost every other desk, ipod headphones in everyone’s ears, cell phones handy, calculators, and charger cords sprawled all over the floor. Research is now primarily online through search engines and article databases provided through the library system.  This progression is a generational change into the digital world where our dependance on technology is phenomenally indispensable.

By elementary school, individuals of this generation were prolific surfing the Internet and watching DVDs. Personal computers were a part of everyday middle school and high school life followed quickly by laptops, cell phones, instant messaging and digital cameras in to college. Our dependance on technology for education is clearly seen upon reflection.

Some times technology can become overwhelming even to those familiar to its quirks–

“Several months ago I decided to turn over a new leaf and start using better passwords.  So when I got this cool new Sony Vaio laptop, I set it up with a really good password that I had never used before. It was long and it contained a bunch of mixed case letters and numbers and funky punctuation. I made sure nobody was ever going to guess this password. Not even me.

And then I immediately forgot it.” http://www.ericsink.com/entries/Technology_Dependence.html

While technology can be a huge pain and hassle, the benefits it gives to us is indispensable to our generation. Students across the country during finals will testify.

Movies that were originally released on VHS or older formats are slowly being converted into DVD and electronic forms, letting us preserve them for generations to come. While this is not a terribly difficult process, there are so many movies and TV shows, the project is intimidating. Thankfully the task can be shared by many people, even yourself with a simple machine that converts from VHS to DVD or a cable to burn the picture onto a disk. http://video-editing-software-review.toptenreviews.com/copy-vhs-to-dvd.html Today, our picture quality of TV and movies in high definition and blue-ray is excellent and we can now transfer the quality to older recordings, enhancing the movie watching experience to the fullest.

The restoration of music has been a long-time project as well, due to the relevancy and importance in our culture. The recording industry has changed its formats for music over time. Recording began in the 1850’s in France and eventually came to America in the 1870’s with turntables. The progression of materials used in sound recording varied enormously, from shellac, vinyl in 1948, disks in 1949, audio tapes in the mid 1960’s, CD’s in 1983, and now in electronic form in computers and on ipods. While the popular genre’s of music have definitely progressed over time, the importance music has played in society is unchanging. Thus securing the best quality sound we can provide is a constant goal for the recording industry, both of current music and music recorded throughout its history.

Thanks to the new technology we have created and developed over time, we can now preserve and save the music and movies of our past to celebrate and cherish.

<a href=”http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1768292/Technology“

title=”Wordle: Technology”><img

src=”http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/1768292/Technology“

alt=”Wordle: Technology”

style=”padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd”></a>

Sexting v: the act of text messaging someone in the hopes of having a sexual encounter with them later; initially casual, transitioning into highly suggestive and even sexually explicit http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sexting, phone sex, the use of skype for visual aid, vibrators, digital pictures, and internet personals all contribute to the increase of sexuality in our society, especially in younger generations. While these tools can be deemed helpful and beneficial in adult relationships, primarily in long distance relationships. Without the stimulation of your loving partner, people are prone to stray, but with the help of these aforementioned tools, couples can stay together with more ease and affection. However, it can easily get out of hand and turn into addictions and abuse. In our society today, increasing and expressing our sexuality has become a focal point. In past generations, sexuality was a hidden part of life and not expressed publicly. But thanks to the increase of our society’s norms, and the progression of technology, our sexuality can now be expressed verbally, visually, or audibly with the press of a button for better or for worse.

Many people also engage in pursuing sexual relationships with strangers with the help of personals on websites such as craigslist. http://slo.craigslist.org/cas/ . The individual can post the request online, and potentially have a response within minutes. The ability to pursue these whims and requests with the help of technology astounds me. In years past, people had to engage in social conversations and win the trust and respect of other partners. Now these websites are considered fairly normal and straightforward, due to our increasing dependance on technology to replace some social aspects of life.

If you are trying to crash the class, the Cal Poly system allows one to find the class that they want to register for, and add the class to your schedule, only if you have the special permission number given to you by the professor themselves. Https://cmsweb.calpoly.edu/psp/HSLOPRD/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/SA_LEARNER_SERVICES.SSS_STUDENT_CENTER.GBL?FolderPath=PORTAL_ROOT_OBJECT.CO_EMPLOYEE_SELF_SERVICE.HC_SSS_STUDENT_CENTER&IsFolder=false&IgnoreParamTempl=FolderPath,IsFolder&RL=&target=main0&navc=2398?cmd=login&languageCd=ENG&userid=PS&pwd=z&ticket=ST-968456-4aX6Blz6YoimplduBUyA-129.65.64.40

 It would be so much easier to register on a less technological level. I am wondering how did we used to register, and was that process more efficient than the current digital way about of registering? I decided to investigate. For a detailed discussion of how the Cal Poly registering process is conducted, you can check out this handy website: http://records.calpoly.edu/registration/reg_information_ps2.htm

I decided to use proximity to my advantage, and so I interviewed my mother who had graduated from college in the days when the digital world did not exist; the world was a simpler analog time period. She began to explain that teachers would have a certain amount of seats that they could fill up and that they had the same number of passes that they could give out to the students on a first come first serve basis. Also, there are no holds on registration because there is no computer that can lock you out of the system. Accordingly, there are prerequisites for classrooms as a guideline, but if you feel like you have the skills to take the class and have not taken the prerequisite, you can still do so at your own risk. This registering process is simple and effective. If you really need a class, you can camp outside of that teacher’s classroom the night before, and be guaranteed a spot in that class when you need it most. The cheeky idiom, the early bird catches the worm, very much applies to this situation. With the current system I could not get a class even if I thought about it days before and was ready to camp out for it, it’s not possible to do so because everyone has a rotation slot and technology dictates not only when you register, but how you register, how much you can register for, and what you register for.

 I think that the current registering technology at Cal Poly could be improved if we took off the holds that classes have, if you have not met certain previous requirements; they should just let you into the class regardless (we pay for it, believe me!) and it is your problem whether you have the skills necessary deemed appropriate from the prerequisites. Once again, technology is recognized as a great tool that can facilitate learning, and can bring about a smooth education experience, but with anything there are consequences to everything, and it seems that sometimes technology in its position to make things easier for us, in all honesty, is creating more of a digital headache than we once thought.

What does this mean for college students and education?  Well according to the Science Daily, college students score higher in classes that incorporate instructional technology than in traditional classes. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080324125154.htm These new classes are being labeled as hybrid classes, that is they are a cross between traditional lecture and other various ways that technology is incorporated into the curriculum. Along with independent online study, I feel that students could incorporate new technologies with the services of Skype, as an important tool in taking learning to the next level. Skype is a free website that allows users to make online video calls to each other using two webcams on both parties’ computers. Used primarily for social purposes, I feel, that students could take advantage of this technology in the classroom as well. For instance, imagine that you were feeling a little cramped in your current city; you desired a change, and so you decided to travel abroad for a semester overseas. Maybe you decided to study abroad to broaden your horizons, learn some Italian, or maybe you just wanted to eat pasta and drink red wine with every meal. Regardless of your choice for going abroad, you are still responsible to be learning. Studying abroad, in and of itself, is an extension of college education known as independent study. With Skype, a student could never miss a beat with projects and the like back in the states. A student could be anywhere in the world, and be enjoying new cultures, but be able to still be a part of group projects and discussion with their peers back at their mother school. For instance, a meeting time could be selected that takes into account the time difference and all members in a certain group meet online at the same time. They could make a video conference call to each other and be able to communicate not just verbally, like a conference call, but with a video component as well. Skype can definitely be utilized for these type of educational experiences, because the video quality is crystal clear, there is little to no lag time between the video and the audio, and the service is completely free and only takes minutes to sign up for the website and download the software to ones computer. http://www.teachingdegree.org/2009/06/30/50-awesome-ways-to-use-skype-in-the-classroom/  As we can see, Skype is definitely a fantastic candidate as a technological tool in new hybrid classes, and as compared to other methods, it seems to be a better alternative. It is a great device to expand educational practices, and for those starving college students who need to stretch a dollar; it’s free!

Let’s imagine a typical day in a class room, so that we can understand what the capabilities of a Smartboard are, and how they would be a successful addition to traditional whiteboard lecturing. For example, let’s say that we were in a classroom who was reading one of the classics, maybe Plato’s apology or the Iliad for example. The text is very long and tedious, and very hard to understand when compared to contemporary English. The teacher could put up text on the PowerPoint that is being displayed on the board, and when he or she finds something that would be of interest to the student to know, or something that would be important to know for the test, it could be circled or underlined. The professor could even add his own notes in between the margins, or write his own footnotes at the bottom of the page that is pertinent to the situation. The professor could instantly erase what he wrote leaving the original text, or he could save the new screenshot into the board’s internal memory and upload it again when he needed it for another class section. Some students at the university level, complain that handouts or even syllabi are outdated from teachers, and that they suspect that these documents have not been changed or altered since 1989, just simply reprinted and re distributed. With the Smartboard, one could scan an old document onto the screen, and manually alter it by adding necessary detail or removing false information.

What does this technology mean for education? Students are more apt at paying attention to lectures when they are fun and engaging, and I feel that the Smartboard allows for an interactive experience that uses technology to the utmost; the Smartboard is a very innovative and educational way to help supplement lectures. Thus, if students are more engaged and feel challenged to be a part of the learning experience, better grades are more likely to follow. http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/06/03/keeping-students-engaged-with-classroom-assessments.aspx