One of the major disadvantages of being the last to post on certain assignments-everyone already posts the most important and easily accessible sites, leaving you with the more difficult topics and harder to find material.  Lesson learned-be the first to post!  It took me forever to find supportive material about fanlib-there is so much negative resopnse out there, so I had to really look within the members themselves and see what they had to say.  A lot of sifting through repetitive comments, but I'm done and can now focus back on my final paper.  

So, today someone almost died in our school.  It was crazy-this girl had a seizure, her heart stopped and we had to shock her twice.  I didn't witness it, but it was a crazy experience for our school, we underwent a "Code Stop" and we had a faculty meeting after school to discuss what happened and the principals were crying as they told of what happened.  It's a miracle the girl is alive and we won't be on the 6:00 news tonight.  It could have been bad!  I am very thankful our school got defibulators this year for the hallways.  What a relief!

 I feel like I've been fighting a battle for so long with ASL and I finally feel as though I am making some progress in several areas.  I've passed my ASL test, so I can feel more confident while continuing to fight the ASL battle.  My school and district supports this program with huge limitations, but recently I received approval for a grant to actually get textbooks.  Imagine that, ASL has been an official class  for 7 years and we have been teaching without textbooks.  Also, I've been given the go ahead for some training over the new textbooks.  I've been trying to get my university to accept ASL as my research requirement for my doctorate and I've received some encouraging feedback from my professor, as well as the possibility of including sign poetry in their new Mayo Review.  It's all very exciting!  My dad is very proud-being deaf for so long was seen as such a limitation and such a tragedy back then.  IF my dad had been born 30 years later, his life would be so different.  The world is opening up to the Deaf community and acceptance of their language as a true unique language worthy of study.  I am glad to be a part of that!

 So these past 2 weeks we've been focusing on eBay, which I feel I have a good handle on, so I used this as an opportunity to get ahead in my reading, so I can focus on my major project.  I loved th Mathijs book, but I like LOTR, too.  I enjoyed the arguments of classification between cult,mainstream, blockbuster.  I also love the argument of what makes something worthwhile and who decides that it is worthwhile and how do we determine longevity and how can we determine global context, what would be the measuring stick in determining such information, and so on... I love conflicts of thought-it gets me thinking.  The Bogost book was extremely complex.  I don't really know how to interpret what I read.  The parts I could relate to are when specific games like The Sims were mentioned.  Other than that, I might have to reread.  Also, I went ahead and wrote my summaries so I would remember what I read, but looking at the ecollege, I don't even think we have to submit summaries any more.  I am confused about the fanlib assignment.  I keep going online to see what others are submitting, but I don't see much submission, so I feel pretty ignorant about the fanlib study.  I've done some looking around at fanlib.com and tried to familiarize myself with the site.  But I'm waiting to see what others submit first so I can know what to do.....

I'm not with it in my Media Class.  So, I confused the syllabus and read the wrong book.  I was really confused when I read the required response for Chun, then I realized I didn't read Chun, I read "Split Dykes".  So, I was hoping to post for "Split Dykes before I forgot what I wanted to say, but it's not for several weeks out, so now I'm reading Chun.  Luckily, the reading is short, but I was all ready to discuss "Split Dykes".  Okay, I've printed out the syllabus, there is something to be said of having a hard copy-scrolling up and down sometimes loses me.  But I got it now!  I'm also upset because I can't work on this class at work, after school because it has all kinds of firewalls that prevent me from seeing the links, so most of my work is done late at night.  But isn't that the best time for techno-learners?  I think it is!