In the Parlance of Our Times

I've had my iPhone for a week now, but haven't had a lot of time to practice typing. What better way to practice, I thought, than to write up my impressions of the phone using the phone?

So what do I think after a week? I love this thing! It's the best toy I've had in years! And that really gets to the heart of it - this is a toy for consumers, not a business tool. A lot of complaints I see online and in print about the iPhone come down to the fact that it's not a Blackberry with an iPod built in. But it is a great iPod, with amazing video, and it's a cool mobile Internet device, and it also makes phone calls. In that order.

Next time I make a short trip I'll be leaving the laptop home. With the iPhone I can do most of what I use the laptop for when traveling - like checking email, watching videos, browsing the web. Two things it can't do - yet - will keep me lugging the laptop on longer trips for now: video chats and the NYTimes crossword (which requires java).

But it's not all about what the iPhone does and doesn't do, rather it's about how it does what it does. As with other Apple products, a great deal of thought has gone into the user interface. The predictive typing is amazing. I'd estimate that I've typed about ten percent of this entry without error, yet the built in intelligence has correctly guessed what I actually meant to type at least ninety percent of the time. So either it's pretty smart or I'm pretty predictable!

You know that dream you have where you're sitting at a red light with 3 cars ahead of you and you look in the rearview mirror only to see a one ton wrecking ball rolling down the hill coming straight towards you?

Well that dream was a reality for one poor soul today. This had the potential to be a tragic situation, but fortunately no one was injured. Quite a few cars were scraped and dented as the ball - which broke loose from a demolition site up the road - bounced its way down the hill and somehow ended up in the trunk of this car.

(And, yes, I took the photo with my iPhone!)

This news article about Parents charged with child neglect due to video game addiction bothers me on many levels. I'm appalled that parents can neglect their children like this and that's what bothers me the most about this story.

But I'm also very concerned at where the blame is being placed. That video game addiction can be cited as the reason these parents neglected their children is very disturbing. I just don't buy it. As I see it, the parents didn't seem to have any trouble finding time to take care of themselves, to shop for a plasma TV and computer equipment, even to have sex (as evidenced by the second child). They just didn't find time to care for their children. To me that's neglect, plain and simple, and we shouldn't be making up excuses for them by saying it's due to video game addiction.

This week's Learning 2.0 topic is about using online resources for research. We are assigned the task of using Google or Wikipedia to search on a topic and to then search for the same topic using the online subscription databases available here at Allegheny. I decided to search for more information on video game addiction.

I began by using Google and the first result was this Wikipedia article on game addiction. Other results pointed to news article, blogs by gamers and anti-gamers, and research papers on the topic. The quality of these sources was very mixed. Some, like the Wikipedia article, were well written and thought out, included references for all quoted statistics, and included links to other sources. Others, like one anti-game blog, included sweeping statements and generalization without any evidence to back them up. Still others were heart wrenching stories of a life gone awry. Overall, I think the Google search gave me a better picture of the topic than I had before I started.

For the database search I decided to try PsycINFO. Perhaps this wasn't the best choice, but with so many databases available, it's hard to know what is best. My search turned up 25 print sources, only some of which were relevant to game addiction. I was shown abstracts of books, journal articles and book chapters, most of which were at least two years old. If there was a way to get the full text of a journal article, I did not see it. I gather one would either contact the library to gain access to the actual material, or check one of our other databases to see if the journal article was available there. One nice feature of PsycINFO was the ability to export the reference into RefWorks.

For the topic I chose to search on and for my purpose, the Google search was much more satisfactory. It gave me immediate access to very current material on the topic and at the end left me feeling like I knew more about the area than I did when I started. If I were doing scholarly research on the topic I would definitely need to supplement the Google search with a database search, and would probably not limit my database search to PsycINFO. But I do not think that I could get the full picture on this topic using just the online databases. The Google search led me to some valuable information that I would not want to ignore.