Week of January 20

I’ll do the traditional “show and tell” introducing you to the philosophy and content of the course. I’ll start the process of familiarizing myself with your names, and familiarizing those of you who have not had a class with me before to my classroom style.

I’ll pass out the only bits of paper I intend to pass out this semester: The course overview and this syllabus for the first week. Hereafter, you’ll be able to keep up with what’s going on by checking the class website. If you wish a paper version of the syllabus, there’ll always be one available for downloading. Do familiarize yourself with the web version. It will always be more complete and provide links to interesting and useful information.

I’ll introduce you to Bridges–-for those of you who don’t know the system already. Through Bridges, you’ll be turning in most of your work for this class, and I may use it for additional exercises for you as well.

I wish our class was a little longer. There are some wonderful films, such as Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (the picture top left is from a scene in the film) which I'd love to show you. Perhaps we can arrange something for a Wednesday afternoon. In the meantime, click on the picture to hear a radio version of the show.

I’d like to have you bring your computers with you, and do this regularly. I’ll ask you to log on to both the class website and to bridges. Please stay off Facebook and Twitter, however.

We’re going to use this class session to take a look at some neighborhoods with which we’re familiar: Our own. To do this we’ll use three very interesting Internet resources: Google Earth (which you’ll have to download and install on your computer–it’s free), the Google Maps with Streetfinder, and Bing Maps. The Google Maps and Bing don’t require any additional software. All these programs require a little playing with to understand their full capabilities, but you‘ll have fun learning them, I almost guarantee it.. Below are three views of my "neighborhood". The top is my house. Prowl around a bit if you wish.

1.In each (or at least two) Enter the Street Address of your home. If you’ve lived in several houses in several cities/neighborhoods, then enter the address of the one you most consider “home”.

2.Look at this address at several different levels of magnification so you can orient to the local neighborhood and to larger areas as well.

3.On the right or left (left side you’ll see the Smartview column. Each of the principal categories (food & dining; recreation & entertainment, community services, etc.) expands. Clicking on the various topics will locate these resources in the vicinity of the address you enter. Locate such things as schools, libraries. Where are they in relationship to “home?” Online, you’ll be able to run your cursor over the icons and find the names and addresses of these.

4.Print off a few of the maps or views which you create. On them, write in the names of the community services, etc. which are in your vicinity. How many of them do you recognize? How many of them have you used?

5.How many of the resources would be accessible to you on foot? How many by public transportation? Where is there public transportation? Google Earth will show you commuter lines. How many require a car?

6.Add links to these and put them in your resource folders.

We’ll discuss what these maps tell us about the relative richness in resources in our several neighborhoods.