Happy New Year
January 5th, 2003 | by Jason |If anyone is reading this, that is. I flew back to Boston for the celebration, and got a chance to enjoy First Night with some friends from school. Thanks to my snazzy new Casio Exilim camera (size of a credit card, also an MP3 player) there are some photos of the ice sculptures in Copley and Boston Commons.
A few minor changes to these pages – you might have noticed that I’ve moved the blog to the main jasonjay.com web site. Sorry if that caused any inconvenience. I’ve also started to add more to the “My Friends” section of my home site. Please don’t be offended if you’re not up there. I’ve been insanely busy and the site will be going up gradually…
Since New Years I’ve managed to turn in two doctoral applications (Harvard and Stanford), write a final essay exam, take the GRE (unexpectedly, no preparation), and start on a marathon of projects due in the coming weeks. Gotta love the Harvard schedule.
One of the projects is a mockup of a space in a 3D virtual environment (the ActiveWorlds Educational Universe). It’s supposed to be a blueprint or example of how teachers could use Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) for collaboration. So far all I’ve done is a space showing how a teacher (read, Jason) might use a MUVE space to vent political frustrations (screenshot). School is fun.
For the other project I’m designing a media literacy curriculum based around fast food advertising. I’ve been reading Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (buy it or read an interview with the author). FFN is by far the best-researched, most fascinating, and most politically relevant piece of non-fiction I’ve read since The Lexus and the Olive Tree. I’m very glad to be a vegetarian, and I think the book makes a pretty good case for more people to join the ranks or shop only in the most pristine of organic butcheries. It also illustrates how insidiously fast food restaurants and culture have infiltrated the United States, other nations around the world, and particularly children’s lives. It’s this last factor – getting kids addicted to dangerous, unhealthy foods developed in inhumane working conditions – that I’m hoping to counter with my media literacy curriculum. Fast food is the next tobacco.
One Response to “Happy New Year”
By max on Apr 24, 2003 | Reply
Why went political frustation?
You can interfere with politic and
as a matter of fact you do it.
May be yours is a new way that has to
be pushed on.
Please do not stop.
I greatly appreciate your new adjustment and may be I will understand more of it going on.
Love
Max&Diego