Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Not shopping

For some reason all my profs have this idea that we go on the internet during class to do one thing, and one thing only: search eBay. I don't know where they got this idea, because most of us are quick enough on the upshot to close the window when they start wandering up the aisles. And as I sit in class, by far the most popular entertainment I see on laptops remain Solitaire and IM. Usually they come as a pair. Then email, a smattering of CNN. Lately I've seen a lot of people doing Lexis trivia. Every time I see somebody doing it, I try and keep an eye on them to cheat on the day's answer, but I always miss it. They probably randomize those anyway.

So I don't know why they think we're on eBay. Most of my profs seem to be level 3 on the internet savviness scale - meaning they can check email but can't figure out how to make the electronic projector screen retract. But I mean, where would we get the money to shop that often?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

They probably think that because that's the only way they (or their spouses) experience the internet. While I'm not in academia, I teach adults in a fairly technical field (nuclear power plant operations), but most of my co-workers' "internet saviness" is pretty low. Our ages range from late 20s to about 55, with most of us on the upper end of the scale, so we didn't "grow up" with computers, the internet, cell phones, etc. Many of us have figured ebay out, though, and, I guess, assume that everyone else has a similar interest. What other reason is there to spend that much time on the internet?

My guess is that it would be the same for a lot of college professors, especially the older ones.

Me? I'm one of the older ones in my work group — 11 month short of early retirement. In my department, I was the first one to have a PC on my desk back in the early 80s — an IBM clone with two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives.

I don't do ebay.

Sansserif said...

Mike,
That's exactly what I was thinking! I think because eBay got so much publicity - it was a highly publicized internet phenomenon, and many non-internet users got tipped off to it. I think you're exactly right.

I consider myself lucky to be born when I was - I remember doing school assignments pre-internet, with encyclopedias (the paper kind). But I was born late enough to have essentially grown up with the web, to have attained fluency.

Kudos to your ability to recognize the internet as 'more than eBay.' I have one parent who evolved to it, and one that didn't. Happy retirement!

Supra

Anonymous said...

New comment for an old post...

An update responding to your "Happy retirement!"

I actually retired as planned, just after turning 55. It's been great! We're doing a bit of traveling and I'm doing a lot of photography - and, yes, I'm making my pictures available for people to use for any thing they want, except for sale either singly or in a bundle. (All other rights reserved - and I actually know what that means.)

I came across your blog again as I am moving material from the old website to a new location.

I found it to be interesting reading - and I'm not a lawyer! Actually, I did done a lot of reading and study on copyright when I was doing genealogy research. I own several books on copyright and the public domain.

I searched your blog for "copyright" and understood most of what you had there. I even understood what you were talking about in your reference to Feist - I have the entire ruling on one of my web pages.

Sansserif said...

Mike -
Great to hear you're doing well! Traveling and photography sounds amazing, both things I too love. Where are your photos posted online?

Flickr lets you easily copyright photos with a Creative Commons license - do you know about CC? That's sounds like exactly what you have, so forgive me if you're already using it! If not, it's incredibly simple and easy to do:
http://creativecommons.org/license/

Anyway, glad to hear you're well, and send me your new site link, or post it as a comment when you have it up.

Anonymous said...

Actually, you can't copyright photos with a Creative Commons license - the photos are copyrighted as soon as they are ... ah, you know what I mean. Just being picky with the lawyer over something I know a tiny bit about. [big grin]

Thanks for the Creative Commons link. I've already included a CC license on my new photo blog.

Right now, until I come up with something better, it's called Mike's Photo Blog and I only have a few pictures on it.

So far as my new web site... that's kind of funny. You see, besides traveling and photography, I build web content and post content on blogs - a lot of it. Check out the civil war blog in the link with my name, above, for one. A couple of the others include:

>> I've got your blog in the blog roll for my general purpose blog, Exit78.
>> Another thing I'm going to be moving at some point is my Copy Right, Copy Sense set of web pages. I've not done any work on it for a while and I don't like the way it's indexed. The site came about out of a sense of frustration over misconceptions and flat out wrong copyright information that was being bandied about in genealogy mailing lists a few years back when I was really into genealogy. People were claiming copyright over factual information and other stuff from the public domain. It's just a layman's approach trying to explain copyright in terms most others can grasp.

How much more do you have before you will be able to take the bar exam and what kind of practice are you interested in?