Past Senior Seminar Projects

I originally started this post on Tuesday but I got distracted toward the end of writing it up then totally forgot about it and closed out Firefox in a hurry to leave for lunch totally ignoring the warning window telling me about my unposted post in blogger... I swear, I don't have ADD.

I read or attempted to read three different Senior Seminar papers. The first one I read was on the academic approach to understanding Christianity and the resistance that some Christians have to this approach. The writer was a Christian himself and discussed issues of Biblical interpretation in the academic field and the interpretation of the Bible by Christians outside of an academic approach. He discussed how people in his Church had told him to not take seriously what he would learn at college before he went. He was of the opinion that academic interpretations of the bible that take into account context of time, place, etc. we're actually good things and helped Christians understand their religion even though most Christians were skeptical of these methods, instead preferring to understand it on their own terms to suit their needs. He thought this was a misguided attempt to bend the message of the bible to suit their outlook on life. I found this paper to be very interesting but after reading a large portion of it I got bored and moved on to the next paper I had chosen to read.

Th next paper I chose to read was probably written by someone in the same IDS concentration as me, Internet Studies. This paper's thesis was that Freshman students should be required to take a course on Internet Safety and Security. The paper started out by making the probably correct assertion that many students coming to college would be exposed to broadband internet for the first time, and thus inexperienced in safety and security issues of the internet. Throughout the paper he outlined numerous security issues like viruses, identity theft, phishing attacks and more. His solution to help new students avoid becoming victims to these problems was to have a class that taught good practices in internet security and safety. I agree with the problem however I think most of the good practices could be taught in one or two class meetings of a class like Freshman Seminar. Overall I think he made a great case for the fundamental problem, which is ignorance of good practice to avoid problems of security and safety on the Internet. However, I don't think the problem would require an entire semester long class to address it. Aside from that the only problem I had with the paper were spelling and grammar errors as being of low quality in general. I was kind of surprised it had been turned in as it was, especially being a Senior Seminar project. It seemed like it was rushed, and in draft form.

The Last paper I read was what inspired my idea for my own Senior Seminar Project. It was a very thorough and well written paper on this history of Hip-Hop from the late 70s until today. It discussed how blacks and latinos originally used it as a way to speak out about their situation under the tough economic times of the Reagan and Bush administrations. It talked about components of hip-hop, stuff like break dancing, rapping, turntablism, etc. The paper discussed controversial issues like whether hip-hop was "black" or latino only. There we're even interviews with hip-hop artists where they discussed the definition of hip-hop and what it meant to them. This paper about an underground culture centered around a new style of music made me think of doing a project on my favorite style of music, dance music. The American rave scene and dance music were also more than a style of music, they were an entire culture. This leads into my next post about my own project idea.