Post #3

I found chapters 8, 9 and 10 to be the most interesting yet in this book. I found myself associating a lot with these chapters and things that have gone on in my personal life. In chapter 8 it talks about CSCW and when I worked at UPS we used windows messenger all the time to communicate with other UPS employees throughout the world. I found it very interesting when one of the females I used to deal with at our phone center, which at UPS is the people that take care of setting up our outbound/inbound trucks and tracking the trucks locations throughout their travel to our location, came to work in my office. It was nice to finally be able to put a face to the person I had dealt with on literally a day to day basis. It was unusual for the employees at UPS to use some sort of telecommuting in our office everyday. The people we called “the big guys” at UPS would send emails to literally everyone that worked at our location, which is as many as 1000’s of people, from their very own living rooms. They never even have to leave the comfort of their homes to take care of something that was work related. I myself am currently looking for a “work at home” job since leaving UPS. Though it seems like this would be a very simple thing to do because you can find millions of work at home job offers online, majority of those are actually scams just trying to get money out of you. As talked about in chapter 8 in order to actually work from home or really do any type of important work from your own personal computer you need to have a good firewall on your computer to protect you from viruses. In chapter 9 it talks about playing games online. I know several people that actually are addicted to games on the internet. When I was younger I used to play a game called Wolfenstein on my computer at home. It was suppose to be a virtual reality game that you would track “bad people” and kill them for rewards and weapons and whatnot. One my of ex’s is very much into the virtual reality games online, as in the games that deal with wizards and dragons, etc. Chapter 9 also talks about online gambling. Now I thought online gambling was actually illegal but I know a guy that makes his living off of playing in card tournaments online. I.E. blackjack and games of that nature. I myself have never found online gambling to do anything for me or interesting. In chapter 10 it talks about education on your computer or distance education. When I lived in Orlando I myself took online classes or distance educations while pregnant with my daughter. A lot of people believe that because your are able to take a college course from the comfort of your own home that it is going to be an easy A when in fact I found online classes to be much harder. Many people believe that because you are able to use your book on the test that you actually have to take for the class that it is going to make it a lot easier to get a good grade on the test but they don’t take into consideration that the test are not only timed but that most of the teachers do not take the test questions directly from the text in the book itself. Most of the test questions on the tests I had when I took my online course came from the online discussions, the group projects and the reading itself. So if you didn’t actually participate in the online group discussions or really pay much attention you didn’t actually do good on the tests themselves. I would never take another online class. Like I said I found it a lot harder then actually going to class and meeting on campus.