Blog posting 5

I found this article today on Yahoo and thought it fit into class.

The president of France Nicolas Sarkozy is declaring the Muslim burqa is not welcome in France because it is a sign of debasement against women.

Sarkozy said "The burqa is not a religious sign, its a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement --I want to say it solemnly, it will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic."

I understand that the burqa is probably degrading to women, but is it the woman's choice? I really don't know how to answer this. I know what Sarkozy is saying and yeah the women are probably repressed but is it a form a religion?

I don't think it is right for him to completely ban the burqa, the article says France has the largest population of Muslims in Europe so he may alienate alot of Muslims-a culture who already has ill will to many groups of people. The director of the largest Paris mosque thinks so also.

I think the bigger problem is what the article says later:

The unemployment rate for immigrants and their French-born children is higher than the national average. Many children of immigrants complain of discrimination, saying they get passed over for jobs because they have "foreign-sounding" names. Frustration of many children of north African and black immigrants boiled over in France's three-week wave of riots in 2005.

I think Sarkozy should be more outraged by those statistics. Since that is discrimnation against people who sound different than other French people. I remember watching the riots on tv.

I don't know if anyone has a right to ban the burqa, you may not agree with it but you can't really tell them not to wear it since it is going against their intellectual freedoms. I know some people would say (and I can see ALOT of people saying this in the US) that well they immigrated to that country so they need to adapt to that culture. I hate that people say that-they should be able to express their culture no matter what.

What do you think? Do you think Sarkozy is correct or should they be able to wear their burqas?

Blog post 4

Reading the book Little Brother really has me thinking about censorship and our right in the US. Sometimes I think how crazy some people are who get angry if their child reads books they find not acceptable or how movies get rated because there is cuss words or nudity. However I think I still need to be thankful for the freedom that we do have.

To find my article I typed in censorship in google-just to see what I got, amongst the articles there were tons on Iran and Twitter and a bunch just on China in general-talking about about computer programs and the Internet and this article that I finally chose to use.

The article talks about how China's First Gay Pride event is going to be censored. The censorships includes not screening movies with gay/lesbian themes. The event was not going to be a huge thing (have you ever seen Chicago's Gay Pride parade) but just a few smaller cultural events with movies and art shows. The article said this was so it would escape the eyes of Chinese officials.

The article said it's not illegal to be gay or lesbian in China it is however kept underground. That would be a hard life for anyone. Gay and lesbian people don't always get treated fairly in the US (ok they don't since they can get married in just a few states) but at least they can let people know they are gay. I think in China you really can't tell anyone, I wonder if someone would get fired if they came out.

Even if you look at the side of the webpage there are articles from all over the world with people who may run into problems with gay pride events.

I would never want to live in a place where I couldn't do something because the government thought it was bad and wanted to censor everything. It would be a very scary place to be-but as I read through Little Brother I can almost picture the US going to a place like the book, probably not as extreme but it could happen.

Blog post 3

This week I found an article about how Tennessee schools had been blocking gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) information from the school computers. However last week the superintendent stated that the censorship organization (Education Networks of America, ENA) will no longer be blocking those websites.

ENA provided the filtering software to 107 school districts in TN and prevented the access to websites like GLAAD and PFLAG (which is a website for families of gays and lesbians).

Last month the ACLU filed a case against Nashville Public Schools and Knox County Public Schools to unblock the websites. The case was presented for a few students and the librarian who wanted the blocks revoked.

What makes the filtering even more shocking is the filters did not block websites that talked about how you can change your sexual preferences back to being straight, which boggles my mind that there are even these-which also seems discrimatory by not providing both sides of the viewpoint.

I think websites like GLADD and PFLAG are important for teens to look at. If they think or know they are gay then they need support that they may not be able to get from anyone close to them. I think it may be scary to know that support may not be there but the websites will be able to help them. PFLAG is especially useful for teens whose parents may be gay.

The school library may be the only way the students can look up this information if they are too scared or don't have the means to do it at their house. It is a very touchy situation that I don't think will ever be make both sides happy.

Intellectual Freedom-Post 2

For my reconsideration project I am doing the book And Tango Makes Three. As I was searching the internet for information on schools and just on the book I found a recent article concerning a school in California.  I was shocked that controversy still follows this book but then I thought:

1-Books like Huck Finn are still controversial

2-My own case is just back from last year

So it looks like the arguments against the book will never go away.

This article talks about how the Alameda CA. School districts will be teaching And Tango Makes Three to their second grade students as part of an anti-bullying (including homosexuality) curriculum.  What is making many people angry about this is the school is not giving the choice for parents to have their child opt out of the lesson.  The school board voted 3-2 to allow this curriculum in the schools.

People who are against the curriculum think that the opposite will happen: 

"But School Board Member Trish Spencer, who also voted against the plan, said she worries that its implementation could lead to the harassment of students who have religious objections to homosexuality.
 
“If there were students that answered that they that they did not think that (the two male penguins) were a couple, or that they did not think that they were good parents, based upon their religious beliefs., that could in fact increase bullying against those students from a protected class,” Spencer said."

It seems like this is a case of you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.  No matter what someone will get bullied according to both people for and against the curriculum.  I think it's great that the school is doing this so children may learn at an early age that everyone is different.  We all may come from different backgrounds but we all the same inside.

However no matter what the curriculum does, it depends on what the parents say-if the parents go on and on about how the book is wrong and the lesson is dumb and not needed than the children will most likely think that also.  Children just don't grow up with the idea that two daddies is wrong-they had to have heard it somewhere.  At an age where the parents are always right the lesson may go over few children's heads anyway.

Banned book

I found an article discussing a North Dakota high school's decision to remove the book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" from its collection.  The article also said that this book have never been removed from any collection.

It's not so much that they removed the book from the shelves that gets me it's the actions the parents and the board took to do it-NO ONE READ THE ENTIRE BOOK!!!!  How can you judge something that has not been entirely read?

This whole banning started when parents of an accelerated reader student chose the book to read.  The parents wrote on the reconsideration form that the book "implants thought patterns that are absolutely against what we try to instill in our students here at Beulah High. I realize that I have not read the book in its entirety, and maybe somewhere it doesn’t condone the sinful nature we are pointing out. But what we see is a very aggressive approval of … things we as a school (and a) community don’t approve.”

Right there they say they haven't read the entire book.

The article goes on to say that the board approved removing the book 4-3, and says that NONE of the board members read the book.  How can you decide to remove a book that you have not read?

Of course people were outraged (like me) and a few days later the board rescinded the banning and reinstated the book to the library.

This situation is one of the things that makes me so mad about banning books.  If someone brings up a point about a book and if you have the authority to say whether or not the book will be taken out of the collection I sure hope that research is done and the book is at least read.  "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" is a true story about a murder in Georgia.  These reconsiderations need to be taken seriously.  And while I think that book banning is ridiculous-it is very important to hear both sides of the argument-look at the book in question at all angles.  

Since I have worked at the library I have only had two people complain about materials in the library-they were both movies-ones was about religion and the other was a anime movie that had nudity in it.  I don't think either one ever went farther than the person filling out the reconsideration form.  However we always offer it a person who voices an opinion about something-which is also important.

 http://www.ilovelibraries.org/news/topstories/beulah.cfm

SLIS 640

I'll be using this blog for SLIS 640 now :)

Final Blog!!

I didn't think I would be able to come up with 12 blog postings but I had. And of course through most of the semester I really could not think of anything to write about and now I could think of a bunch of things to type. Oh well.

The wiki is pretty much done, other than going page by page and correcting mistakes, adding a few more pictures and fixing the people page some more. I didn't think the wiki was going to look very good at all. I don't want to sound negative, but I was so worried, but after it started coming together it started looking much better. I don't know why I love my weather widget I added but I do, it really serves no purpose on the site but I guess if people are looking at the wiki from a different state they can see what the weather is like in Gary :)

I'm still don't know what to think of wikispaces. On one hand it is fairly easy to work and it lets you add a lot of fancy things, however the easy editing tools seem to the ones that are the hardest to work with. Like the stupid tables.

I emailed them and asked about the editing of the tables and they told me the table is very basic and currently there are no spacing features. Doing what I did (add the invisible A's) is a good way to fix my problem. To top it off for some reason I haven't been able to edit my tables. When I right click the table nothing comes up. So I don't know what is going on.

The whole podcast/video thing is not my thing. When I heard we had to do I tried to think of ways where I wouldn't have to do it. But this past weekend I thought I guess I should give it a try so I downloaded Camtasia. After recording my simple simple video many times I realized it was pretty easy to create and edit a video. It was really neat. Unfortunately Camtasia will disappear in about 25 more days and I really have no other use for it, but I made two videos that I think look somewhat decent. I did have a hard time trying to figure out how to add the video the site but I finally did.

So that's it I guess. Thanks for reading my blog in which 90% of the time I complained about technology :)