In this report, I will analyze reports and home pages of students from Generation 1 to Generation 4. When I analyzed the documents of the students, I noticed each student has their own unique style of presenting their work. No work is exactly the same. This is what I found to be very impressive. Every student has their own unique way of presenting their assignments. When there is room to create new ways of presenting their work, it encourages the students to be creative with their assignments.

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Are the Generational pages improving?

It is hard to say if the generations are improving. In my opinion, each generation has a unique quality because there are different assignments that they do in each class. All the students have improved through their own will power to learn about the Internet.

In the first part of this report, I will discuss eight measures of how the generations are doing. I will discuss the first four which are quality, depth, richness, and scholarship. In generation one, I noticed there were many short assignments and reports. They were bunched up in one document. Maybe the reports should have been in separate files. It was a little confusing to read. In generation two, the reports seemed to be a little longer in length and content. The lengths of papers have progressed over the generations. In later generations, the reports were kept in different files. This made it easier to understand.

In each generation, the majority of students had sub headings in their reports. This is important to have because it guides the reader and tells the reader what topic will be discussed.

Each generation has their own ways of linking to different sites and within the generational curriculum. Students decide what they would like to link. It depends on if they want to refer the viewer to the site they are discussing about. Sometimes the students find links that might be of interest to the viewer.

The detail of topics differed in the generations. For example, generation 3a was a summer course. They did two reports and had less time to learn how to do reports and pages on the internet. The semester courses had more time, and wrote reports with a little more depth.

In this next section, I will discuss the measures: technique, connectivity, integration , and navigation capabilites. The links in the generations go within the generational curriculum to different students' reports. The links in reports go to others sites outside of the curriculum, also. This is important because it shows the viewer what site they are refering to. The viewer can go to that site and understand what the report is talking about. In the generations, students included navigation buttons. These serve almost the same purpose as the links. The main purpose is to take the viewer to different locations important to the author writing the reports.

The overall appearance of the generational site is unique in its own way. There are tons of information each generation has contributed to to the site. A viewer can't possibly view everything in the site in one day. It would take more than a day to actually read each report of all the students. Personally, I like the freedom each student has to be creative. No one home page is the same, and all of the pages are unique. All the students have their own way of presenting their thoughts, feelings, opinions, etc. in their reports.

In the first generation, they did not have animated gifs. The most they had were pictures and different backgrounds. When I first took this class, I searched for animated gifs. There are tons of different gifs you can put on your page. I had fun finding cute little moving gifs. (As you can see on my home page and reports.)

Some students in the the generations had indexes and table of contents. These are options that help the reader to go to certain topics or parts of the students reports. This is helpful when the document is very long and the reader only would like to read certain parts of the document. Generation 3a had examples of the table of contents.

In conclusion, the site has many different ideas to offer. Each generation as contributed a lot to the site. I can't say the generations are improving because I feel they all have accomplished difficult tasks. I give credit to each student because they all have come a long way!!!!

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Benefits and purpose of the Generational Curriculum

Here is an articleabout the Generational Curriculum. It discusses the purpose of having the curriculum in the first place! The project of Dr. James started in 1975. He wanted to create the generational curriculum because he felt students needed improvement in their writing skills. These are located in the Archives. This is the original Archives which has student papers from the years 1971-1991. These are classes Dr. James has taught, and the reports are put together by the topic and year.

In the year 1992, he required students to start putting their reports on the internet. From then on, all his students put their assignments on the internet. Here is a Daily Round Archives done by Psychology 499 research students. Our generation is the most recent one to get published on the internet. The next generation will be number 5!

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How do students feel being part of the Generational Curriculum?

First, I will start off with how I feel about being a part of the Generational Curriculum. In the beginning, I felt very frustrated in learning how to work the programs. I had some help from past students who were familiar with the process of putting up the reports. It took a few weeks to fully understand what I was doing. It is not the most delightful feeling to have.

The key is to get on the computer and force yourself to understand what you are basically supposed to do. I spent endless hours doing things on the computer. I have never spent so much time in the computer labs in my life! After a while, I got the basic idea of what I am doing. The feeling of frustration slowly went away.

Now, as the semester is coming to a close, I am very happy I stuck out the course because I learned a lot about the internet. This is a new beginning into the future. I am glad I caught up with the latest technology. A semester ago, I had no idea what it takes to create a home page and post reports. Now I am glad I learned the basics. I am happy to be a part of the generational curriculum.

As for other students, they also have their own feelings of being part of the generational curriculum. Here is an example from Ragna Borries. This person is from generation 2 in Cyber Psychology. This individual had a week 1 report and there was a rating scale of how the the person felt about doing the assignments on the web. In the person's ratings, it was difficult at first and there was a lot of anxiety and fear. The person felt there needed to be patience to over come the fear. This is in order to be successful with the internet.

Here is another example from Ronel Agarpao. This person was in generation 3a in Cyber Psychology. In report 2, the person had a table of contents. In the table of contents, there is a section called "Qualitative evaluation of the overall experience." There is a link to go to that particular paragraph. This individual also had a rating of how the person felt about using the internet. The person felt stressed out in the beginning. After the struggle, the person would still use the internet to search for information on more topics.

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What are some problems students have in learning the internet?

I stated above that in the beginning of the class, I was very FRUSTRATED!!!!!!! A major problem was understanding what in the world I was doing. Learning how to do the programs such as FTP, and pico took a while to understand. Practicing and trying to over come the frustration, makes a big difference in understanding what the whole concept of the internet is about. I learned, if you do not tackle your problems, you will not get anywhere. To reach your goals, you must work at it and go through the pain, not run away from it.

Students in the past have gone through the same problems as me. One example is from Shawna Honeycutt. This student is from generation 4a Cyber Psychology class. This student expresses some of her problems in report 2. She explains about being lost in the first week of class. She realized others had the same problems as her. This helped her to cope and go on with the class. Her second problem had to do with being stressed. Getting around to doing the work was a big struggle. Once she completed the task, she felt better. The third problem was the fear of learning about the internet. Overcoming her fear of conquering the computer is what got her through the class.

The next example is from Jean Leong and her experience on the internet. She is from generation 4a Cyber Psychology class. Her problems were discussed in her report 2, in the section "Developmental phase in learning the internet." Her problems were almost the same as all the other students. Frustration is the key word to all new learners of the internet! She overcame her problems by asking other people who knew what they were doing. She also told herself to keep trying and do not give up!!!! After she got the hang of the basic skills, she felt very confident with herself.

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A program for the survival and success of the Generational Curriculum

When entering the course for the first time, students are over whelmed by the amount of computer knowledge they must have. I did not know a lot about the computer. I had to start from scratch and figure out what I was doing. I was fortunate enough to have help from someone who already took the course.

Maybe Dr. James should warn the people in the psychology packet, that these courses are intense. Students should be warned they will learn many of the computer skills on their own time. Maybe doing this might prepare them to know there is a lot of work involved.

The exercises which were passed out in the beginning of class helped out. At least there were some instructions to practice skills we needed to know. This is important because we need this knowledge to post up our reports. The instructions suited its purpose, but there should be a little more information in each step. Some of the steps were vague and difficult to understand.

The HTML book helped me to learn the language needed to put up the reports. A book like this will help out the new student trying to learn the language. Having the basic commands in a book will help students learn the language. Giving out some of the basic commands in class lecture will help the students, too. Many of the students entering the course do not know how every thing works. Giving them a push will help them succeed in the course. As soon as they have a grasp of what they are supposed to do, then they will be fine.

The monitor in the beginning of the class helped out students as well. He helped us if we were stuck and needed help. Having past students who know what they are doing, should help out the other students who do not know how to do things in the class. This will help students who are stuck and feel frustrated.

Once the students get on track, everything will flow from there. The only draw back with the computer, is when things are not working, and you can't put up your reports. This will probably be the only problem, once students get the hang of things. Encouragement is an important key to success!!