Mix Tape Experience

For my mix tape project, I decided to make a mix cd for my best friend, Kandi. We've been friends since we were four years old. Our first meeting was in preschool. Today we still remain best friends. I just thought I make a cd for her letting her know how much I love her. At the same time reminding her how much our times spent together meant to me. So here's the track list of my mix cd.





1. Anytime You Need a Friend...............................mariah carey


2. That's What Friends are For..............................dionne warwick


3. Girls Just Want to Have Fun.............................cyndi lauper


4. Thank You For Being a Friend..........................andrew gold


5. You've Got a Friend in Me.................................toy story soundtrack


6. Dancing Queen.....................................................abba


7. A Friend Like You...............................................geoff moore


8. Public Affair.........................................................jessica simpson


9. I'll Stand by You.................................................pretenders


10. Graduation........................................................vitamin c


11. Wind Beneath My Wings.................................bette middler



(song #10 Graduation [friends forever])

DJ SPOOKY

Paul Miller presents his book, Rhythm Science, in a totally new fashion. I was a tad bit confuse with language mainly because of his different style of writing though it's very "creative". This different style of approaching readers is very fascinating. I find the hole in the middle to be mysterious. It serves a purpose but yet I'm still trying to understand or find a interpretation of Miller's intention of the hole in the middle. Along with that, the green pages of illustration. The playboy bunny seems to be repetitive. What's the significance of this bunny?

The language that he wrote in made me have this image in my head. In this image he is on stage with his turn table and remixing his musics/free styles. To me the music/free styles are the words in his books. This reminded me of my friend who is does some dj-ing and free styling. The techniques of speaking are similar.

Over all, though it's rather confusing of a read, it's interesting in the sense that it's completely different from other literatures that I've encountered in the pass.

Sampling Experience

I found the Sampling Expeience quite interesting. It gave us a chance to bring about our own creativity by using other people's creativity into our own. At first, I was stubbling on what I was going to use or how I was going to make an arguement with images available on the web. It took me a while to come up with what I did. I just put together a collage/poster of various pictures of famous arts (writers/books, musicians, paintings) with a title "authorship".
To make the same arguement with my own images, I did the same. Again I put together images that I've taken over the years. These images are similar to the ones I found on the net, rather they are ordinary people or objects that I'm related to. I found second image to be a little difficult to attempt. Even though I already had the pictures for myself, it was hard to make a similar arguement as the first sampling.
But overall, I did take away a lesson learned. To me, I think creativity is unlimited. Anything could be creative just like our collages that we made for this sampling experience.

Creativity

After class last week in the writing center, I'm still a little confused about what I'm going to use for my visual displays for the sampling project. It's quite complicated to say what authorship means and what is creativity. For me, basically almost everything is creative ranging from fashion to music to the film industry to literature and everything else in between or beyond that. I sort of have a basic idea of what I want to use for my two visuals, so I'll be spending my weekend digging through my photo album and taking more images for this project.

Free Culture vs. Permission Culture

In reading Lessig's book, I found it to be interesting how the whole world of copyright/piracy started. I found the introduction to be quite amusing about the "indifinte space/air" was considered property and no one could trespass. It even went about to court in regards to this. Besides that, what I struck me was the case of Mickey Mouse and the Walt Disney coporation. I never even thought about how Disney had borrowed other ideas and remade it into theirs.

In class on Monday, we discussed the first couple chapters of Lessig's "Free Culture". There's this questioning of what is considered today to be a free culture or a permission culture. I agree with Lessig's argument of Permission Culture. Today, we are in a world where when we want to create something we have to recieve full permission from that of the powerful in order to do so. We live in a world where it is considered a "free culture" but due to the world of media it prevents of from this free culture with the back up of laws and policy, in which, therefore, we call it "permission culture". Not just in the media world but also lies within educational system. Whatever is taken from someone else's ideas or thoughts you must give credit to them. Even taking one simple sentence could lead to terrible consequences. So, I do agree that this world have shift from a culture that was once considered "free" to now "permission".

Plagiarism Experience

It is unsual that a college instructor would have his class plagiarize a paper as 10% of the final grade. Lucky for us, we were given the opportunity to do so. Well, not really lucky. It was not very pleasing to do such thing. On the other hand, it was quite an interesting experience with a lesson learned. Whoever thinks that plagiarizing was easy is definitely wrong. I found this experience to be quite complicated. The difficulty of this project was trying to blend in the voice of yourself and at the same time the voice you're plagiarizing to make them both sound the same.
The tricky part of the experience was trying to plagiarize and fool your classmates of what was and was not plagiarize. I was hard for me to weave in the words of another into mine to sound like me. Who ever read my paper, well, you definitely know that I'm not a good plagiarizer. I would be caught within the first couple sentences. That's why I don't plagiarize.

Ghostwriting Experince

For the ghostwriting project, I decided to write a college application essay prompt for a friend of mine whom I've known since 8th grade. My friend, after graduating highschool, decided not to further his education. Instead, he bounce from job to job not being able to keep a stable career. So you can say, he and I are two completely different person. This is the main reason why I chose him to be the victim of my project.

What I found most difficult in this project was trying to imitate the voice of my friend. Because he had not been in schools for years, his recollection of how to write an essay was blurry. I asked him why he wanted to go back to school. He gave me his reasons. I put them onto the paper. When I was finished, I asked him to give some feedbacks. This was process wasn't very successful. Since he hasn't been in school, he didn't have much opinion but rather mostly agree. It was difficult at this point because I didn't know if the paper sounded like me or like him. I had to push him more to help me out. In the end there was improvements.

I found this project to be interesting at the same time a helpful learning experience for both my friend and of course myself. My friend learned how to write a college essay prompt. I learned how to be a ghostwriter.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism was the talk of this week's lectures. We had some pretty interesting guest speakers sharing their most memorable plagiarize cases they've delt with in the past. The story of the frat pledge was funny. Poor guy but he should have still done his paper instead of taking the risk of plagiarizing. On the other hand, the brain surgeon girl, no sympathy for her at all. It's pretty sad how she had to get her parents to defend her. I really like Adam's technique of approaching the person who plagiarized. He gave the person the chance to explain or asked if there's anything the person wanted to say. There are other instructors who doesn't give the students the chance to explain.

Why do people plagiarize? Answers to this question varies. One reason, as mentioned in class, is scarcity. Some people think they lack the skill and don't have enough time. Another reason is just plain lazy. But whatever reason the person may have, plagiarism is plagiarism. It is wrong and should not be done. If there's a fear of not having the paper done on time or not knowing what to do, they should simply address the situation with the instructor. I'm pretty sure the instructors have some sort of sympathy and will give you an extention.

Ghostwriting

I find Gregory Baruch's article, Artful Deception, to be quite funny. It's ridiculous how celebrities are so called the authors of whatever literature they published but they have no knowledge of what the book is about or even seen it. They have no contribution in it other than just promoting it.

It's quite hilarious when Gregory Baruch mentioned that ghostwriter, Mickey Herskowitz, of Lamar Alexander's presidential campaign tact "We know What to Do" was acknowledge as the 83rd person after his Aunt Sula. That's just ridiculous. Shouldn't Mickey get more credit for working late and sleepless nights on Alexander's campaign? Aunt Sula must have been a great inspiration.

Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, had no idea or has even touch the book that was written about him "BY" him. I'm curious if he ever had the chance to really read this book of him "BY" him now that he's no longer with us?

When it came to the money making and autographing the books, they are definitely up for it.
I wonder how these ghostwriters feel about not having any acknowledgements in the works that they've done. Or do they get a hugh chunk of money from it already that they could careless?

Wikipedia

I find the video clip of the Cobert Report to be humorous. It definitely got some laughs out of me. Cobert defines wikiality as "together we can create a reality that we can all agree on-the reality we just agreed on". It's interesting that possibly any kind of reality can be created with enough people agreeing to it and also to be published.

Though wikipedia is so covient and easy to access, it's not such a reliable source to use. Sometimes depending on what topic of your research there are some accurate facts, often times it isn't so. After reading the article "A Stand Against Wikipedia", I decided to do a little research of my own on what wikipedia is or what it means. My findings are quite interesting. "Wiki" is a website that can easily be edited by anyone who has access to it and it could be easily tampered with. And "wikipedia" is one of the well known website used by students. Wikipedia, itself, has agree that students should not use wikipedia as thier primary source.

Plagiarism

Coming from a culture that has no written language and only relied on oral traditions until the 1950s; everything before that was spoken through the mouth and kept in memorization and then passed on to future generations.

I've seen many foreign films that has been based on folktales that I grew up hearing from my father and grandfather. But then these stories were also told to my father/grandfather by their parents and/or grandparents. They would disagree to such scenes that they think has sabotage the "true" and "original" story. Their remarks would be "that's not how the story goes". But then what is the "original" story? Who was the first to tell the "original" story?

This notion of storytelling brings up the question that was asked in class the other day (about the famous children's fairy tales we grew up hearing), who is the first person to tell such story? Would it be considered plagiarism when there are so many books published or made into movies about the same story but failing to give credits to the author or the owner of the story?

My First Blog

Isn't this exciting?! My very first blog. With myspace, facebook. mywepspace, and many many other profiling pages, one more won't hurt. Who would have thought of taking a UW course that consist of BLOGGING as a part of your final grade?! Cosidering that this is my last semester, this just makes it a little less stressful on myself. Hopefully I won't fail my BLOGGING assignments. If I did, there would be no point of spending the past couple years of my college experiences at College Library with good intentions of making good use of time but actually only waisting countless hours serfing the net each day. Therefore, I conclude my first blog post saying thanks ENGLISH 201!