Virtual life

I am not sure if we need to make a blog entry for this week or not but I am going to do one anyway.
I thought that I could go without ever talking about these virtual avatar sites, but I guess not. There is a scary digital world out there and we are all getting caught up in it. More and more people are spending more time and money on-line and virtual websites such as second-life are all making this happen. We live in such a complex world today, and digital images of ourselves on-line are the next step forward. The most interesting part about the virtual sites that our class logged into was that there is a whole on-line community that holds discussions of legal topics and people can interact in all of them. This is creating a different type of learning environment for everyone and could potentially generate on-line classes for universities. As the professor said, "There might not be any more excuses for sick days anymore with classes that can be held strictly on-line" where you must be logged on in order to show proof that you were "there". These websites are gaining more interest from the younger generations and I can only wonder what this will mean for the future.
A downside that is among us everywhere and in this case there is no way for people to monitor who people really are in a digital form. They may say that they are twelve years old, when in fact they could be forty. This creates legal questions of privacy and identity theft problems as well as a whole slew of parental concerns for their children. I can only hope that this will somehow be weeded out of the systems or that the sites do not gain enough popularity to maintain a digital second-life.
This may be my last entry for the semester but I must say that the whole blogging experience has been very enlightening and I may maintain this blog for further conversations. I have never had a blog before and this has been a lot of fun taking about and learning about on-line worlds.

No Confusion

Just so there is no confusion with the amount of entries for my blog, I missed one week in February which was my freebie. I missed another week in March which I made two postings that week for. Lastly, I did not do an entry during the week of spring break. I'm not sure if we needed to that week but I will do another posting if I have to. I just wanted to clear that up.

College and Congress

I guess the saying goes, "Kids will be kids." Colleges are now threatened by Congress over copyright infringement if they do not provide information or "acceptable answers" for measures that they have taken to prevent students from illegal downloading and file sharing. Umass being one of the schools on the list of 20 that Congress has posted does not have me worried because I have not downloaded anything music or video related over the Internet. It's not that I would not like to download songs for free like so many other students do, it's just that I don't have an mp3 player and putting things into a digital format for me is not important so I don't need to download any music.
It would make sense for Umass to make Napster available for students to use if they are a current member of the student body to download legally the music and making it available to students to play songs from their lists but only if they are a member of the university and enrolled. Other colleges use Napster for their students, free of charge, making access to all of the songs available on the server available for play. Songs can be played in their entirety but can not be downloaded. This seems like a sensible solution to at least cut back on the number of students that are downloading illegally from the campus, and it could make the university less likely to be a threat from the illegal downloading scene. With such a large student body, it is difficult to control so many students, but this could be a step in the right direction.
The penalties for the downloading crime should be severe because I don't see the importance of listening to music all of the time when the industry is constantly coming out with new songs all the time and the songs live out their existence usually over a two month span. The solution that I have suggested may not fix the entire problem, but they didn't build the Great Wall of China in one night either.