ELA friday 4/26

I’m sorry for this blog being a little bit late. I love the classes in the mac room because I never leave without having learned something new about convenient tools on computers. The one we learned today was Google Reader, and it is a fascinating tool that allows me to read my section mates’ blogs in an organized way. When I went on it this morning, it displayed some of the writings of the recently updated blogs, so I can easily get a rough idea of what some of my section mates’ wrote about. Google has multitudinous numbers of features, and memorizing the functions of all of them is probably beyond my capacity. Nevertheless, they are effective academic tools. To be honest though, I have yet to become used to using various Google tools. For example, I had no clue how to get to the Google Group on Friday … (I have resolved the problem now). In High School, I only used computers for typing essays, so I still need time to become familiar with them.

I like Rab’s method of teaching where he does not reveal his main point until after he shows us the videos or pictures. I think it is not only intriguing but also thoughtful because it encourages us to contemplate the answers ourselves. For example, he introduced two Youtube videos to us, “The Mother of All Funk Chords” and “Angles on the Moon”. The first one was an integration of the sounds of professional musicians, who are individually playing different tunes, to form a completely new music. The second one was a line-up of various people playing the same tune. In the first one, musical genres such as jazz, classic, rock, and funk are all blended in and amazingly, it is relatively smooth. However, in the second video, each musician play uniquely with their own tempos and pitch, so listening to the bumpy sounds made me seasick. Rab said the ultimate message is that collecting high quality things and integrating them produces an exquisite masterpiece. Therefore, in our papers, we are supposed to integrate various reliable sources. I think the reason why “The Mother of All Funk Chords” is alluring is because Kutiman is dexterous at editing the music and in amalgamating them, which indicates that we have to be the same with the information we collect, and which is going to be challenging!