Welcome To My Blog

Hello fellow ICM501 bloggers! Thankfully, my inherent tendencies toward procrastination have not gotten the best of me and I’m ready to start posting. 

I’ll start with explaining how I came up with the name for my blog – Goldfish. While at the grocery store this morning buying snacks for my daughter’s lunch (she starts kindergarten on Tuesday), I picked up few bags of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. My daughter really likes the cheddar kind and they were on sale this week. So I began to ponder how Goldfish could relate to ICM501 and my venture back into academia after a dozen years.

A quick Google search gave me some ideas:

• Fish live in schools. 
• My daughter and I keep a few goldfish as pets (named Leopold, Slinky and Smiley) and I have to clean the tank often. Goldfish produce a large amount of waste – kind of like blogs and the Internet.  
• A common misconception is that goldfish only have a three-second memory. Sometimes I think the attention span of Internet users is about the same length.
• Supposedly, scientific studies  have shown that goldfish have associative learning abilities, as well as social learning skills. So I like to think we’re all a little like goldfish, in the fish tank of the Internet, learning how to use techology as a positive tool for social interaction. We are all also expected to use our associative learning abilities to write coherant, critical response papers for Prof. Halavais.
• Lastly, in some cultures, the goldfish symbolizes life. So ”Goldfish” will suffice to symbolize my “virtual life” this semester.

BONUS FACT: “Dorado” (The Goldfish) is also constellation, named by Johann Bayer in 1603.