Lessig

The Kodak article was extremely informational. I love photography, whether I am the one taking the pictures or looking at other’s work. I just love it and reading this article explaining how it all began was fascinating. I think that Lessig wanted to give his readers the background information on where “technologies of expressions” started. Today, we are all about making things simple, easy, and quick and with the new Kodak camera and film, this idea was born. Anyone could use this equipment with or without formal training and that’s why this invention took off like it did and still is today. I was really interested in the part about the legal battles with capturing images back then. I started thinking about how different my life would be just because of a camera. I thought about how many memories probably would have been forgotten without pictures to record them.

I was actually very surprised that I had never heard of the Just Think! Program, considering my parents have both been teachers for 50+ years combined. I guess these busses just haven’t made their way to Iowa yet. This program is excellent! I worked in a middle school for a year as a teacher’s aide in a Level 1 Special Education classroom, so I have seen the problems that kids have learning when the instruction is so traditional. I loved Daley’s quote about giving these students ways of constructing meaning. This program gives them something to look forward to. Young kids today are much different in the sense that they are constantly surrounded by distractions. Teaching from a book isn’t going to cut it anymore; the students need other ways of understanding. Feeding the information in a way that is familiar to them or letting them “tinker” with it in order to improve their understanding will be much more successful. Just Think! is a perfect name for this program because it is asking students to open their minds to create new ideas.

The news is something I usually do not pay attention to, but when something big happens I am glued. After reading the section on blogging, I can see why September 11 played a large role in the beginning of blogging. Personally, I have never blogged anything, unless it was school related, but I do enjoy reading some of the things that people post. The reason people are able to be so open in a blog is because there is no one to tell them they are wrong. Blogging perfectly defines freedom of speech in all issues. Lessig’s quote, “We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say”, really made me think. In a social, public setting that statement is 100% correct. We are afraid of not being accepted or excluded. With blogging there is no constraint, say what you want to, and read what you want to.

I really do not know much about Open Source software, and I feel like in this article, Lessig used it as a way to tie all four topics together. Each is allowing people to express themselves through creative thinking and through some kind of technology. I had no previous knowledge of FS/OSS so I made a visit to Wikipedia and it told me a few examples such as Mozilla Firefox, the internet browser, and the GNU/Linux operating system.