Where are you Going?

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Final Project Idea

For our final project we are making an interactive Google map of where students are going over the summer. Each dot will pinpoint where the student is going, and have a clip of audio telling what they are doing. It will also include a picture of the student.

Writing Center

Most LSC students are probably aware of the Burnham Academic Support Center, that small room connected to the library. Many have probably also been in it, even if only to sample the free food. But how many students really know what goes on in this room, which many call Bob’s Place or simply “the Writing Center”? As it turns out, a lot more than writing happens in Academic Support.

Academic Support is home to two programs: Project Excel and Student Academic Development. Project Excel is a federally-funded program that works with students who come from low to moderate income families, who have learning disabilities, or whose parents have not graduated from a four-year college. The program offers testing accommodations for students with learning disabilities, help with note-taking, tutoring, laptop lending, help with tax preparation, counseling for both personal and academic issues, financial aid assistance, and a scholarship program. Project Excel at LSC is run by Bob McCabe, Director of Student Support Services, and also employs Angela Ryan, Special Services Counselor; Mary Etter, Learning Specialist; and Lori Drew, Tutor Coordinator.

Students who do not meet the eligibility requirements for Project Excel but would still like some academic help need not despair, as they need only contact Student Academic Development. This program, run by Debra Bailin, is open to all LSC students and has many of the same features as Project Excel, most importantly tutoring and help with academic issues, such as test anxiety and time management.

Tutoring is one of Academic Supports primary services. Tutoring is conducted on a course-by-course basis, and both students and faculty can request that a tutorial be set up for a specific class. Project Excel students seeking tutoring will be assigned a personal tutor. Other students will be directed to the tutor for their class, whom they can see on a drop-in basis (no appointment needed) whenever that tutor is on duty in Academic Support. Academic Support also runs the Writing Center and the Math Resource Room. The Writing Center, located in Academic Support, offers writing tutoring regardless of subject, while the Math Resource Room, located in Vail 450, offers math tutoring and stocks educational math materials. Math tutoring has also recently become available in the Writing Center. All tutors are fellow LSC students, and students interested in becoming tutors should contact Debra Bailin.

Students who wish to participate in Project Excel can call Academic Support or stop by. Instructors can also refer students to Academic Support.

Video Comparison

Cape Cod Times: This website has quite a bit of video options, but most of them lead you to other websites. They have a multimedia tab which had sports video, cape cod videos, Times Videos, and Cape Web Cams. Most of the video links led to other websites, such as YouTube. I thought this was pretty unprofessional. The only videos that were actually on the website itself were the sports vdeos. i Had a hard time viewing these because of the horrible internet connectin, but I can't blame that on the website. What I did see of the videos looked okay, but a little unclear. The camera quality to not appear to be very high, and it looked as if only one person had been working on the videoing.

Washington Post: Since the Washigton Post is a more prestigious paper than the Cape Cod Times, I expected the video quality to be better. I was right. The videos were really difficult to find on this site, which is probably not a good thing. I searched videos in the search bar and I finally found some videos. The videos were of very professional qulaity, and to my delight, when I clicked on them I did not find myself on YouTube. The quality was much clearer and it looked like it was recorded by someone or multiple people who really knew what they were doing.

iReport

I thought iReport was an interesting site to look at. It covered things that ranged from seemingly unimportant things as Easter dogs and national pillow fight day to things with a much heavier impact such as torture within the Islamic prisons. Some of it was very random, but I don't think that any of it was boring. It had videos and pictures of a lot of different things that you wouldn't normally see on the news. I liked this aspect of it a lot. I couldn't tell which videos had actually aired on CNN, so I'm not sure what the difference would be between those and the rest of the videos on iReport.I imagine that the ones aired on CNN would be of a higher quality, and as the box that popped up upon entering the site said, they would be fact-checked so they would be more accurate.

Campus Tour

Fox Vs. CNN

At first glance, the sites aren't too different. CNN has a bolder layout while FOX seems much more neutral. I may be bringing the stereotypes I've learned about FOX and CNN into this, but that can't be helped. The two top stories featured on the home page for CNN are about flooding and the militia preparing to kill. The top story on the FOX homepage is also about the flooding. So far, no real differences are seen. They both have standard pictures, videos, and stories. Perhaps the content of the stories is more different.One thing I noticed in the stories about the flooding in Rhode Island was in a sentence that was meant to say exactly the same thing. CNN said, "Obama extended a state of emergency on Monday for the entire state, freeing up federal dollars to help with relief efforts." Whereas FOX News said,"President Barack Obama issued an emergency declaration for Rhode Island, ordering federal aid for disaster relief and authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate relief efforts" With just the slight difference in words, they tell the same story, but convey a different meaning. CNN made it sound like Obama was being a hero freeing money to help, whereas FOX made it sound like he was demanding money that wasn't rightfully his to demand. Overall, they are both interesting sites to look at.

Super Slideshow

Slideshows/Photo Gallery

Tour de France
This slideshow was a bunch of pictures of a guy in France, and many of the famous attractions there. It had a slow French song playing in the background that made it seem a little sad, whereas I think it was meant to be captivating. With the song in the background the number of pictures displayed was limited, whereas the one with just the pictures seemed like it could on forever. However, I thought this was a little more effective than just the slideshow because the multiple things (music and pictures) kept my attention better. Sound really sets the emotional mood to go along with the pictures.

Massive Earthquake Strikes Chile
This was a slideshow of 793 pictures of the aftermath of the earthquake in Chile. The pictures conveyed what was going on, and what I like about them most was you clicked to go on to the next one, so you could look at each picture as long as you wanted to. With just the pictures, and no sound, the pictures alone influence your mind, so you get to more purely understand the pictures.

Zoom-Worthy Academy Award Photo Gallery
This was a bunch of pictures of people from the Academy Awards. The cool part about it was that you could zoom in on the pictures to catch flaws, so we can all see that celebrities have flaws too. I thought it was a really cool setup, though it didn't really tell a story.

Podcast -- Why We Are Here

Nearly two weeks ago, our team sought to answer a question: why are we here? While we knew we weren’t about to solve the mystery of existence, we hoped to learn why we, the student body of LSC, had chosen this school for our higher education. We interviewed several random students and asked them why they came to LSC. We then compiled these interviews into a podcast, which you can listen to by clicking on the title of this post. As you will hear, the students gave us some interesting answers.

Not surprisingly, several students cited LSC’s television studies program as their reason for attendance. All the television studies majors we interviewed mentioned the program’s quality; one mentioned how hard it is to find this major at other schools. One of our interviewees hopes to become an anchor for ESPN and was attracted to LSC’s television studies program because it has sent 24 grads on to ESPN. Such answers have confirmed our suspicion that LSC’s television studies program is widely known and a big draw, and it appears we have many future news anchors and sports casters in our midst.

Other answers were more humbling. One student reports coming because of the relatively low cost; another picked LSC because he claims not to have gotten good grades in high school and was unable to get into other schools. Clearly, LSC is a place where even those who might not otherwise go to college can feel welcome.

Yet not all came to LSC out of desperation. One student reported having the option to go to much more prestigious schools, but he chose LSC because he liked its small classes and friendly atmosphere. Apparently, LSC has some special qualities that belie its small size and lack of grandeur.

So why are we here? We are here because we want to be on TV, because we have nowhere else to go, or because we simply like the place. But no matter why we came, we all seem happy we did: all of our subjects gave enthusiastic answers. But don’t take our word for it. Listen to the podcasts, and hear the real words of your colleagues as they reveal why they are part of the LSC community. We hope you will like our set-up, but most of all, we hope you will connect with what you hear, and perhaps see some of yourself in our subjects responses. Above all, we hope you will agree that we belong in this school together.

podcast test

podcast mp3

podcast

For our podcast, we are going to interview students about why they came to LSC and make a podcast of their responses accompanied by a story.

Podcasts

Grey's Anatomy

I picked this podcast because I used to be pretty addicted to Grey's Antomy, but I've missed the past few seasons. I thought it might help catch me up, but I found that I was pretty lost. They talked a lot about each one hour episode for thirty minutes, so it was a pretty in-depth analysis. There were two people having a conversation so it wasn't completely one-sided. It was just an audio podcast. The draw-back was that you really needed to be following the show to understand the plots that were going on. You can't just listen to the podcast without having a clue about what's going on in the show. I probably won't listen to it again without watching more of the show, because I was so confused. I did not listen to any of them on my iPod.

Happy Tree Friends
This was under the cartoon section on iTunes so I thought it would be cute and fun. No such luck. It started with happy kid music, but then somehow turned into a vending machine popping the eyeballs out of this fuzzy bear with a lazy eye that wanted nothing more than a candy bar. It was violent with the facade of innocence, which made it pretty grotesquely funny. It was a short little episode with video...less than two minutes. I would watch it again.

Fifth Ave Sounds
I searched music and different genres came up. I picked reggae for something fun and different. This podcast just plays music from this band. It was decent - good for bacjground noise.

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Vtdigger.org

At first glance, I thought that this would be a pretty interesting site. The graphics caught my eye made me want to look around more. It reminded me of an elaborate scrapbook page with stickers and torn paper. I went to the Business Model tab and found how they were non-profit and that I could easily made a donation through PayPal. That is always a good idea because when using your PayPal account, you don't even need to enter your credit card number so it feels like your not even spending money. I tried to go to the Comic section, because that sounded appealing to me, but their were no comics in it. This disappointed me a little bit. I enjoyed the Opinion section which seemed to have stories from a broad ranger of people. My favorite was by a high school student by the name of Luna Larkin. I liked that these opinion pieces ranged from serious to upbeat and funny like hers was. The stories do seem to be all around well-written. If i were to assign them a political leaning, I would say liberal. I went to a story about the deployment of the Vermont National Gaurd, that included a video clip of the speech that Michael Dubie gave. I thought it was a decent unbiased story, however a man (Rod) did not agree. He stated that Obama was just as war-crazy as Bush and that this was horrible reporting. Four minutes later a response to his comment was posted by Anne Galloway. I think that this shows how dedicated that she is to this website. She is monitoring all activity on it very carefully and responding immediately to the reader feedback that comes in. I think that this site has definite potential for success. It is well-organized and varied greatly, from the writers styles to the story topics and layouts.

Tuition Break

Blurb: Students are finally going to pay less

Text: In the first ever LSC tuition decrease, tuition will be going down 10 percent starting fall semester.

Harold R. Drazsnzak, LSC vice president for finance, made this announcement at a news conference in the new auditorium in ASAC.

"Without a doubt, this decrease is long overdue for students," said Drazsnzak. He said that this decrease is possible because of increased revenues from the state.

LSC Student Goes to Jail

Blurb: LSC student turned bank robber?

Text: LSC senior and reigning Miss Vermont, Cathy Bensen, was arrested yesterday for robbing the First Vermont Bank, police say.

Bensen is the daughter of local attorney, Jim Bensen.

The amount of money stolen was not disclosed by the police, but police said the Bensen was wearing a mask during the robbery.

Bensen is the daughter of local attorney, Jim Bensen and she has been planning on going to Dartmouth for medical school after he gets her Bachelor's degree from LSC in Atmospheric Science.

TV Punched or Stabbed

Blurb: Public safety works to prevent continued vandalism

The television in the Alexander Twilight Theatre was destroyed in an act of vandalism on January 18 between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.

This vandalism will cost the school 3,000 dollars to get a replacement TV that they will be ordering next week.

"The willful destruction of community property for no good is pretty sad," said Jonathan Davis, associate of student affairs.

George Hacking, director of public safety said that they are trying to put more security measures in place. They are thinking about putting security cameras in the theatre lobby and hiring another public safety officer.

"Currently we have no leads coming in," said Hacking. Public Safety asks that anyone who has information about the vandalism contacts them.

Also see the story from The Critic.

Lady Killed Trying to Save Cat

Blurb: Woman hit by car

Text: Around 4 p.m on Sunday, a local woman was killed on I-91 southbound as she was walking across the passing lane of the interstate to rescue a stray cat.

75-year-old Cynthia Long, from Putney, was struck and killed by 28-year-old Jonathan Ribas, causing the interstate to be closed for about three hours.

Anyone having information about this accident is asked to call Trooper Wagenbach at the Vermont State Police Brattleboro at (802) 254-282.

Pretty Pimp

So...my blog.
I just added a bunch of random gadgets - tetris, adsense (so I can make a fortune), and top iTunes songs. I also adopted a bat (bandit) who lives on the bottom of my blog. I added an image to the top to add a little extra color, and I adjusted all my font sizes and colors for my text. I also added new a template to make it more interesting. I added a rating system so people could tell me if they think me posts are horrible by picking a low star rating. I gave myself a five for this post. :D

Nsnsports

This site had a lot of interesting elements. I liked the radio feed that you can listen to as well as the live chat. I thought it was a good idea to have the blog listing by date with just the title and date, so you can easily click on one that interests you without having to scroll through the whole posts. Also, the stories, the videos, and the game schedule is very easy to see and understand.
One thing I think might make the sight a little more appealing is if the videos and pictures were also shown when the story is opened instead of having just text. Links to the videos could be attached to the stories and story links could be attached to the videos so they weren't completely separate.