Week Six

This week we submitted our draft mid-terms, commented on one another's work and spoke more about out home institutions. It was interesting to read other people's papers and hear more about where they are working. I was interested to learn that Javierana University in Colombia, Rafael's home institution, is more than 400 years old and that the AAA has a "university." Javon's Oakland School for the Arts is doing very interesting and innovative work "across the curriculum," Lin, anticipating work in China will face an environment that is in some way similar to that of Saudi Arabia, and Matthew's Newforth Organization is focused on problems common in many third world countries struggling to establish a "knowledge based society".

On Wednesday our group held it's third virtual meeting via the CSUEB chat room. This was the first meeting I've managed to attend and almost missed it again because of Internet connectivity issues - now finally resolved. The meeting was a lot of fun and we got a lot done. Everyone is the group is well focused and well grounded and willing to listen and work together. Judging from the email discussions before the meeting, we'd already settled on one type of project, but in the meeting stumbled upon a more interesting option and everyone was immediately on board with it. It promises to be both interesting and useful.

A couple of weeks ago my son tried to fix our Internet connection and called the local service provider. There was a misunderstanding somewhere and they configured a special Net Nanny filter that blocked just about everything, including lots of academic sites - and gmail. Since all Internet traffic in Saudi Arabia is already filtered, I'm not sure what value this extra filtering adds. Since it blocks just about everything, it looks like an Internet service for people who don't want the Internet. That's would be fine, except that no one seemed to know how to turn it off - so I spent about a week going to work to use my computer there while Net Nanny sat at home wagging a virtual finger from the screen.