My Final Thoughts

My final thoughts are wow, I got through it. When I decided to take online classes, I thought that I would have a lot of time to complete assignment s and that I could do them at any time I chose to do it. But there were many different assignments to do and different due takes so I had to do work every day in order to keep up with the class and not fall behind. We had up to seven assignments each week and it was nothing but writing for each assignment. I think that because it was a lot of work, it helped me to improve my writing and critical thinking skills. I was not the biggest fan of the topics that we had to focus on because each and every topic was about music.

Each assignment was different but the entire class revolved around music. I am a fan of music but some of the artists we had to discuss were artists that I did not hear of until this class. I wish there was more variety of things that we did. I’m glad I got through it will little trouble though because I also have three daughters at home to take care of and I was working full time when this semester started. It was intense work and mostly when we had essays to do because we had to do a first draft, then review the drafts of our peers, and then do up to two more drafts.

The biggest obstacle in this class was working with our groups online. Not every member could be online at the same time so it was hard to discuss our topic. Then we had no idea who was taking charge and posting the final product onto the discussion board. Then we had to reply to members of our groups and members of the other groups to keep interaction between the class so the assignment was done but there was always more work to be done. This semester challenged my skills but I did my best in getting as much work done as possible and on time.

I learned a lot about music, writing, grammar, and how to cite different sources. I also became a little bit more familiar with writing papers in MLA style. Overall I have no regrets in taking this online class. I was challenged and that is something that everyone needs once in a while. Last semester, I took three classes at the college and it was not as hard as taking two online classes. There is more work to be done and many steps to follow to complete each assignment. There are also many different due dates to keep in mind and conversations with the students and teacher to keep up with. We started a blog which is not something that I have ever done. If anything, I try to avoid doing too much online so that I don’t put too much out there about myself but it was not too bad because I had a topic to keep in mind for each writing.

Improved Writing

When the spring semester started, I was eight months pregnant so I figured that online courses would be the way to go. However, I had no idea how much work and how much writing it would be. We had up to seven assignments each week and every single assignment contained writing. In the beginning I thought, what am I learning from just writing. But as I went back and read older assignments, I found that my writing has improved just from doing all those writing assignments. I did not see the improvement until now that we are nearing the end. I feel that my spelling has improved and my grammar has also gotten better.

My writing is still not perfect but there has definitely been improvement in different areas in writing. In blogging, my writing improved because we have to write a min of 5oo words to complete the assignment. We also had to respond to the blogs of our peers so my reading skills also improved. In our blog responses, we used critical thinking and our understanding to read, understand, and then reply to these blogs. This exercise helped in writing, reading, and also kept the classmates social even though it was an online class.

Group work was the biggest challenge in the class. It is hard relying on people you have not met or know nothing about. The only way to interact was writing back and forth but it’s a challenge because there is so much to discuss and the group members are not online at the same time. This exercise required analyzing and writing. My writing has also improved from doing these group activities. Our discussion board was also helpful in writing because we wrote 10 or more sentences and continue conversation by asking questions for others to answer.

We also wrote a few essays that improved my knowledge on MLA format and it gave me more experience is organizing a thesis statement and essay. The requirements increased after each essay challenging my writing skills. Some essays also required citing where we got our information from and this was very helpful. PDR or peer draft review was helpful to me and to the writer of the work that I was reviewing. The positive thing about reading the work of others is that you can find mistakes in their work and it helps to look for those same mistakes in your own work as well. It also helped to teach me good writing skills and spelling. I was able to see how their thesis statement correlates with their paper and this helped me in making my own thesis statement.

Overall, my writing is better, my spelling has improved, and my understanding in reading is better. I now feel more confident to write papers in the future and not have the anxiety of not know what kind of grade I will get. I will jump into any writing assignment with little or no problem because in this class, I got nothing but experience.

Music Sampling

Sampling is a creative touch in music. It is an obstacle to take something that is already great and try to make it greater. The good thing about positive is that the original artist can feel good that a newer artist chose your music to re-do. It is interesting to see what another artist can do with a song that has already made it in the music industry. Sometimes the newer version sounds better at the time. As time goes on, Music changes directions are artists are forced to keep up with the new musical trends. Sometimes taking an older song and making it new is what can make great music. On the other hand, some will disagree with sampling.

Others may feel that it is stealing and not original. The argument would be that they did not do much work and just changed up the way a song sounded. A lot of people enjoy seeing what the musician will come up with on their own. However, I think that sampling is creative. It is not easy to take something that has already been great and try to make it yours and new. Some artists like a challenge and that is ok. It still shows their creative side and pushes what they can do to new boundaries. As long as the artist does make their own original music, sampling does not take away originality.

An artist who has done this is Kanye West who sang heartless, a song that was originally written by The Fray. He made the song a hip hop song by increasing the tempo and changing the music in the background. The song became famous again however I liked the original more because you can really get into the song because it is slower and more touching. Another time I heard this song was when Kris Allen sang it on American Idol. He sang the song slower and with his guitar. He sang this song better than the Fray I thought and better than Kanye West.

I understand how some will feel that singers are not being original with singing someone else’s song. However one must look past that because there is not one artist who only does sampling. Every artist has their own music that was written by them. Sampling is just like an obstacle for other artists to take what someone else has done and make it theirs while keeping it popular and not completely ruining the song. There is nothing wrong with an artist doing this as long as the other artist is aware and ok with this.

Sampling expands the experience of an artist in music. It is not steeling. It is just taking something old and trying something new with it. It’s like buying a wedding dress and altering it to make it yours. There is nothing wrong with that. As I mentioned earlier, as long as the artist has some music of their own, it’s not bad to experiment with something that someone else has originally created.

Dreaded Research Paper

I am writing a research paper on PMRC and information on cases they have been involved in. So far I have found some resources and am starting to put information together that I want to put into my paper. It is coming along pretty good so far. I hope that I will have enough to make it six pages long. I think that I will need more sources than required in order to get a lot of information. I am not the biggest fan of research paper because the biggest thing is putting different pieces of information together to make sense and not sound like a bunch of different ideas just put onto paper.

In order to complete it, I need to structure how I will put all the information together. This is so important because this will make or break the paper. Structure is very important in making sure that the paper makes sense and has a good flow to it. I feel that constructing an outline first will be the way to make this easier. An outline can lay out the structure of the essay and if it doesn’t make sense on the outline, the paper will not make sense. This way, I can make any necessary corrections to the outline before I put it into a research paper. The next thing is making transitions between each paragraph to make it flow well.

I plan on starting the outline once I have gathered enough information from my sources to piece this all together. It will be easier once I start the outline before I put it into my research paper. Once I have done this, I will go over the flow of the information and make sure it all makes sense and sounds interesting enough to read. The area of difficulty that I am experiencing with this paper is definitely how to put all the information together. It is a process to make sure that nothing is missed and that it all flows together in a way that makes sense.

In order to get over this obstacle is to put all the information into an outline as I mentioned earlier. Then put it all together on paper with transitions so that hopefully it flows well. Another important thing is to make sure I do not miss any vital information that will be vital to the research paper. Another difficult obstacle will be making it interesting and appealing to the reader. This is always the last thing on my mind when writing a paper and for that reason it will be difficult to try to keep that in mind along with getting the assignment done. I’m sure that many people go through this in writing papers for school. I’m usually better on paper than anything else but when you have a specific assignment and a deadline, it because a little more difficult to get the work done and also make it sound enjoyable. A very important aspect of my paper will hopefully be to inform people on PMRC, what it stands for and what their goal is.

Music and Internet Piracy

                What is internet piracy? Internet piracy is also known as theft of media online. In other words, it is unauthorized use of Internet media. This has known to be illegal, however many continue to do this. There are many programs and websites out there that allow this. You can do this with music, movies, and other kinds of media. In most websites, the music and other media comes from many users of the programs. For instance, in music, a person on these websites gives permission for other users to copy their music from their library. One can burn music from CDs that were legally purchased and save them to their library, or they can illegally burn music from other users who have also authorized their music to be copied by other users.

                The biggest issue with doing this is the money lost from people not going out to purchase CDs. It is getting easier for many to download music and burning it on to blank CDs rather than buying a CD from the artist. People love the fact that they save money in doing this and can also burn many songs from different artists rather than buying one CD for each artist when the buyers only like a couple of the songs on the CD. Some sites are legally used to obtain music however you do have to pay for each song or CD. Unfortunately for the music industry, they cannot control what people put out on the internet.

                I do not believe that the music industry will ever completely stop internet piracy from happening. Anyone can put just about anything on the internet even media that does not belong to them. It is difficult and time consuming to fish for these companies that allow internet piracy and the music industry is already a very busy industry to do this. They can’t exactly call the cops every time they find these sites either because cops have bigger issues to deal with.  Even if the music industry is able to shut down a website that allows piracy, they can put up another website and call it something else.

                Who loses money from internet piracy? Well, musicians, believe it or not, are not the losers in this. The artists receive money from many sources other than copyright. They actually do not get much from copyright so they do not end up losing much money if they lose anything at all. The ones that lose from this is the music industry. That is because they control property rights so they lose more from internet piracy. The musicians still receive money from their music being played on the radio or on TV and other sources. The music industry, on the other hand, only gets money from the music being sold when the musician has more sources of income and more ways of making money. An artist can always allow for their music to be used on commercials and they get money from that, they can also appear in commercials to sell other products while getting paid for that and getting their face out there to get more fans. This is the unfortunate truth with internet piracy.