SWE - Fall 2007 - (Page 40) predators and, in some cases, stalkers. The action followed demands by eight U.S. attorneys general that the News Corp.owned company hand over offenders’ names and addresses, and delete their profiles from MySpace’s 175-million user base. Separately, MoveOn.org, a progressive activist group, launched a campaign against social networking sites because they blocked users from linking to certain Web pages, and allowed users to take down sites they found objectionable, including those with political content. The campaign called on the networking sites to abide by a “bill of rights” that would tell users why their sites were deleted, and give them a chance to appeal and apply for reinstatement. “The looming question is, ‘To what degree will corporations who build these online ‘public squares’ be able to censor the speech that takes place within them?’” said Adam Green, spokesman for MoveOn.org. The owners of social networking sites argue that they have the right to limit links, and that profiles that disappear usually break the sites’ terms of use. School and parent groups continue to argue whether universities should educate students about the positives and negatives of social networking sites, or try to restrict access to them. According to Cai, camera phones are becoming more sophisticated and are already used in Asia as people’s primary cameras. Many consumers in Asia readily spend hundreds of dollars for advanced camera phones that can serve as their primary cameras. In contrast, consumers in the United States are accustomed to getting their cell phones free or at a major discount in return for signing up for cellular service. That means only technology hobbyists are willing to pay the price of a high-performance camera phone here, Cai said. Eventually, copyright and privacy issues will catch up with the camera phone phenomenon. Originators of the photos will insist on copyright protections and royalties once they start selling the photos for commercial purposes, Cai stated. And places such as locker rooms, courtrooms, military sites, and even corporate shareholders’ meetings are already banning camera phones to protect people’s privacy. Videogaming: Will Women Break Through? Another controversial source of learning and networking involves videogames. Krause, of Elmhurst College, teaches a 3D Game Programming class. “I never thought I would see gaming platforms in the classroom,” she said, noting that Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express technology will be used in her class this fall to develop games for the PC and the XBOX 360. A liberal-arts school with about 3,000 students, Elmhurst started offering a bachelor’s degree in computer gaming and entertainment technology in Fall 2006. William Muellner, chair of Elmhurst’s computer science department who developed the degree program, said the coursework recognizes that computer multimedia — graphics, sound, music — are widespread not only in computer games, but in areas such as animated movies, medical imaging and interactive simulation systems used in education and training. A few hundred colleges and universities offer computer-game development courses or degrees, ranging from community colleges to prominent universities such as Georgia Tech, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California, said Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers’ Association, based in Mt. Royal, N.J. Though the coursework is still rare, it is growing in popularity and scale, Della Rocca said. Elizabeth Zwicky, a 19-year-old sophomore, is the sole woman studying for the degree at Elmhurst. She said her “dream job” would be to play and work with “The Sims” Camera Phones as Civic Tool Students are also tethered to their cell phones, many with digital cameras attached. A graduate student at Virginia Tech captured some of the first-watched video and the sound of gunshots outside one of the buildings where the campus massacre happened on April 16. “The camera phone is an enabling tool for citizen journalism,” said Michael Cai, director of broadband and gaming at Parks Associates, a Dallas-based consulting firm that focuses on digital technologies. “The advantage is that consumers, regardless of where they are, can capture images and share them,” he said. “Having the cellular network connectivity [to send the photos] is an important piece of the equation.” 40 SWE FALL 2007 http://MoveOn.org http://MoveOn.org
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