Tunnel of Oppression Controversy

For those of you who haven't yet seen it, go see the Tunnel of Oppression at the Student Union main ballroom sometime this week.

The exhibit, while pointed, stops viewers and makes them examine some civil rights issues in the world today.

That said, I agree with what Andrew Schwartz said in today's Daily about the Palestinian room being one sided. Here's my little rant on that.

The Palestine section does a disservice to the reality of the conflict, and in fact to Palestinians and Jews alike, by not presenting a more realistically complex account, with both sides represented.

While the facts and figures shown may be accurate, they fail to examine the reasoning behind such actions as suicide attacks and the building of the wall. Ergo, they fail to explain why the conflict has lasted so long or how anything can be resolved.


I do not believe it was the intention of the group, Students for Change, to demonize Israel, as some have said, though I do believe that such one-sided depictions can easy lead to inaccurate interpretations of the conflict.

That said, I also believe Students for Change has every right to present their point of view, no matter what it may be.

Why such a long post on this story? First off, it's Genocide Awareness week. Secondly, the Tunnel of Oppression has been stirring up some controversy online.

Check out these links for a behind-the-scenes look. There's some interesting emails in there as well. (1)(2)(3)

San Jose ,SJSU ,Soapbox Prophet ,Tech ,blog ,,Web 2.0,,Andrew Venegas,New Media, journalism,Andrew,Venegas,vlog,Tunnel of Oppression,Spartan Daily,Aaron Schwartz,Tunnel of Oppression

Dust Gathering On Some SJSU Blogs

It's getting warm (global warming theories aside), and students are beginning to do their annual mental vacation. This is no less true for bloggers, apparently. A technorati search of SJSU tags will atest to this.

Students are blogging less, and the blogosphere is again being overcome by other voices.

A CHALLENGE TO ALL SJSU BLOGGERS: Try to post at least one post EVERY OTHER DAY during the work week, and link it to a local blogger you dig. I'll start it off here with this link to a post from Kyle Hansen's blog about student fee increases at SJSU. I hope this gets a conversation started. The CSU system is in desperate need of student voices.

Or, if you're REALLY tired of the real world and just need a getaway, try going to the SJSU campus in Second Life.

San Jose ,SJSU ,Soapbox Prophet ,Tech ,blog ,,Web 2.0,,Andrew Venegas,NewNew Media, journalism,Andrew,Venegas,vlog,Second Life,Kyle Hansen

Cleaning House

I've decided that a little house cleaning is a must on this site. There are several blogs that I linked to at the end of last semester that have simply been abandoned, and others from students that whom have since graduated. Those will be gone or moved to a different section of the site shortly.

Also, I'll be busy scouring Technorati over the next few days in search of new bloggers/vloggers in the SJSU community. If you know anyone out there that hasn't been linked to on this site, shoot me an email here.

San Jose ,SJSU ,Soapbox Prophet ,Tech ,blog ,JMC163,,Web 2.0,,Andrew Venegas,New Media,vlog,

Making History!

Blogger Beta is back in business, baby!

For those of you that didn't read my post on JMC163, I've taken the first step towards forming a New Media & Tech club on campus. Kyle Hansen has already told me that he's in, and now I'm looking for more students/teachers/technologists that are interested in making some history.

I know that this first week of school is going to be busy for everyone, so I am hoping to have a meeting sometime next week to discuss: 1.) a constitution, 2.) electing officers 3.) meeting times and locations, and 4.) have the club will do throughout the year.

The has been talk of getting speakers, of teaching CSS, video and audio podcasting, and a whole host of other things, but I really would like input from other people that are interested in the club.

One last thing; does anyone know how one goes about getting permission to set up a booth on campus? I figure that would be a great way to get the word out there about the new club, for non-tech geeks. Again, any help anyone could give would be helpful.

Contact me anytime on Skype (username: andrew.venegas), call me on my cellular phone, or email me here.

San Jose ,SJSU ,Soapbox Prophet ,Tech ,blog ,JMC163,,Web 2.0,,Andrew Venegas,
,Skype,New Media,

Improving Spartan Daily

There has been a lot of talk about how to improve the online presence of The Spartan Daily such as here on Invisible Inkling. From my perspective, the easiest way to do that is to concentrate less on the web page and more on making the RSS feed useful. It’s great that the Spartan Daily has an RSS feed, but the full article is not included in the feed. In order to view the article, you have to click a link to the Spartan Daily website and read it from there. That defeats the purpose of using an application like Google Reader, and it makes me not want to read the feed at all.

I also don’t like the layout of the Spartan Daily webpage. Don’t get me wrong, it is impressive considering it was probably designed by some very hard working people at SJSU, but it just doesn’t fit the way I’m used to having content delivered to me. It looks like an old school static page. I think it would be better and simpler if the stories were just published on a Wordpress page. That would also allow articles to be tagged with information like the author, or the type of article. Ultimately, small changes like these could make the Spartan Daily more accessible and give more power to the readers.