Week 9 - Tute Task

·        Sign an e-petition.

<a href="http://www.gopetition.com/petition/43687.html">Save Gold Coast Parklands Show Grounds Petition | GoPetition</a>

I signed the Save Gold Coast Parklands Show Grounds petition, I was the third person to sign on for it.

·        What is Barak Obama up to today? Can you send him a message about the importance of freedom on the internet?

According to his twitter account, on the 21^st of September 2011 Barack addressed the United Nations General Assembly. The link to the video feed: http://www.whitehouse.gov/live?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl

·        What are the Australian Government's plans to censor the internet (the so-called "Clean Feed")?

The Australian Government's plans to censor the internet with the program dubbed 'Clean Feed'. It is a filter with the intended target of protecting children by compulsory censorship of all websites showing child pornography and other material considered offensive.

Info from Anti Clean Feed Petition - http://nocleanfeed.com/

·       When will the NBN get to your place? What are the benefits?

The National Broadband Network make its way to Brisbane in the second rollout after its installed in the ‘trial town’ of Townsville. The service has been promised to deliver positive improvements for the Australian public in the form of superior access to business and job opportunities, health, education and government services.

Official National Broadband Network Site - http://www.nbn.gov.au/

·       Find out who your local, state and federal representatives are.

In respective order Mayor Ron Clarke, Peter Lawlor and Steven Ciabo are the current local, state and federal representatives for my area.

·        Look up the Queensland or Australian hansard to find the last time your federal member spoke in parliament.

September 15th 2011 was the last time Ciabo spoke to and with the House of Representatives and it was about the crime surge within the Gold Coast region of Moncrieff.

Week 9 - Response To Content

Slowly approaching is the Research Essay, for which we can choose to research and discuss any of seven topic questions or create our own. After some contemplation the essay question I connected to the most was: Does the extensive use of computer/video games have an adverse impact on the health of young people? When reading through the question quickly it is easy to assume that the answer is yes, however to full understand the topic analysis and research needs to be done in these three main areas.

1.     A greater reasoning of the key words in the question to grasp a better understanding of the argument as a whole. For example how do words or phrases such as extensive, adverse, young people play a part in narrowing the topic down to make it a bigger issue?

2.     Investigating the ‘For’ argument i.e. Barrie Gunter states in his book The effects of video games on children: the myth unmasked that, “…the role of video gaming in the lives of children and teenagers can be destructive for both their physical and mental health, a problem that needs to be rectified.” (p. 74, 1998)

3.     Then investigating the ‘Against’ counter-argument from a few medical and behavioural research groups that children’s use of video games can be ”may improve a player's manual dexterity and computer literacy” (p. 19, 2004)

4.     Drawing any and all comparisons or similarities between the two in the attempt to reach a conclusion   

The question/task requires a detailed and in depth research from the most current papers and asks that both sides of the argument be granted agency and their opinions be taken into consideration before coming to a final conclusion that is reliant upon the facts found within the research. It is my intention to begin my research into this topic through use of online journals and communication publications with the probable support of news article and official statistics.

Gentile, D. A., Lynch, P., Linder, J. & Walsh, D. 2004. The effects of violent video game habits on adolescent hostility, aggressive behaviors, and school performance, viewed 24 September 2011, via Journal of Adolescence.

Gunter, B 1998. The effects of video games on children: the myth unmasked, viewed 24 September 2011, via Google Scholar.

Week 8 - Tute Task

Over weeks 8 and 9 we finalised our ideas and began to create and put together our audio visual presentation. Below are the lists of components (parts of the presentation), the software and online programs used to create and assemble it and the key obstacle we faced as a group to complete the task well and on time.

Components of the presentation:

·       News report video

·       eHarmony I love… video

·       Images (Man and Logos)

·       Text (Rules and Guidelines)

·       eHarmony – Mad TV spoof ad

Software or programs used:

·       Creative Commons, eHarmony, Zoosk, RSVP and YouTube for initial research on the topic

·       Screen-o-matic – to capture video footage from YouTube, Vimeo and eHarmony

·       Windows Movie Maker – to edit footage together

·       Prezi – to present and put together footage and text

Major Obstacles:

·       Scheduling – getting all three task members together to brainstorm and create our idea.

·       Working against a tight timeframe, deadline Week 9.

·       Screen-o-matic – trying to record the videos with little to no background noise posed as a difficulty as the software is very sensitive and takes a while to get right.

·       Attempting to decide what and what not to leave into the final product to get the tone and message right.

·       Shannen’s computer got rid of Windows Movie Maker, so the editing took much longer than expected and had to be done in class in week 9.

·       COPYRIGHT –this was a big issue for us to overcome as mentioned in previous blogs. We had decided to use Prezi to conquer our problems with copyright infringements but was unaware that this solution was only applicable is the video footage we were intending to use was in its original unedited condition. Our only solution available due to the closing deadline was to continue but not upload it to our Blogs or YouTube as originally planned, but instead email it to our tutor and keep it with the intention of only using it for private viewing as the pubic alternative would get use into trouble. If we had had more time on our hands we could have perhaps written to the ordinal owners of the video footage that we used and asked their permission to use them in our presentation.    

·       The music overlay we were hoping to put over the presentation was canned due to the fact that it would no longer be exported into one video due to the copywriting issues mentioned above.

***Our presentation has been emailed to Lauren by Shannen.***

Week 7 - Tute Task

Unfortunately neither I nor another member of our group could make it to the tutorial for this week, which posed as yet another hurdle for us to overcome. However in our absence our remaining member was able to discuss with the tutor our ideas and the problems we might encounter with them. We found that unless we could find our relevant video footage on an open licensed site like Creative Commons or unlicensed YouTube clips copyright was going to be our major concern. With some research and assistance from our tutor is was decided that the free online presentation site Prezi was the best route to avoid our copyrighting issues as anything that goes into Prezi presentation removes that problem.

Week 7 - Response To Content

Week 6 - Tute Task

This week we were split up into groups of three and set upon the task of creating an audio visual presentation/video addressing some aspect of New Communication Technology. In our group we choose to do ours on the hot topic of online dating and the sites associated with them such as eHarmony and RSVP.

In our initial brainstorm we thought through a couple of ideas, with us all circuiting around the idea of  people editing their personalities, interests, beliefs and even their faces with the hope of meeting that special someone. One of our main ideas was influenced by the now infamous Evolution advertisement by beauty giant Dove. (linked above) We were ambitious and liked the idea of creating a scenario situation were two people meet online and one or both of them had altered their profile picture to the point of complete misrecognition, with a similar ‘Dove’ video sequence showing this.

However after looking through Creative Commons and finding little to none relevant materials as well as the conflicting problems of time began to think of alternative ideas. For example, filming and editing together clips from different eHarmony members and completely exaggerating their online lies e.g. man cropped identical twin out of profile photo etc. We decided to do some more research before settling on one idea.

Week 6 - Response To Content

Whilst I agree with this week’s lecture theme that ‘illegal downloading is killing Hollywood’, I believe it’s also important to note all the legal downloading and internet use is hurting Hollywood and the film industry just as bad. Just over three years ago the WGA (Writer’s Guild of America) went on strike for just over three months over the future of digital media in the film industry, effectively shutting down Hollywood for roughly the same time.

The focus of the dispute was payment for entertainment content distributed over the internet, mobile phones, iPod devices and other forms of new digital media. Although nobody knows exactly what the business model for the digital future will look like, the writers were anxious to establish the principle that they should receive an equitable share of any profits. As the video above shows writers were only being paid 4% of the dividends from reruns (and were asking for an modest extra 4% increase) but we being paid nothing for the online sales and on-site “promotional” releases.

The broader grievance, though, was that the writers have felt cheated out of revenues from video and DVDs since the early 1980s – an issue that prompted them to launch their last major strike in 1988, which sadly ended with little change. The bruised and battered entertainment industry then had to set about restarting hit shows that had been forced to close down Grey's Anatomy, Desperate Housewives and the US version of The Office for instance. Incredulously that year’s Academy Awards were also in jeopardy until just two week before they were to air.

Gumbel, A 2008, Hollywood writer’s strike deal brings back hit shows, viewed 5 September 2011. < http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hollywood-writers-strike-deal-brings-back-hit-shows-781039.html>.