Scratch

    Scratch is pretty cool.  It is a program created by MIT that allows anyone with a computer to create animated  videos that can then be posted online.  It comes with some pre-made avatars to use when creating your video.  You can them make the avatars move and talk to each other, interacting, and you can change the background.  I plan on using this program for my final project in Sustainable Development where I have to come up with and explain ten principles of Sustainable Development in some manner.  I think that using Scratch will be a really fun way to present the principles of SD as I see them.  I plan to post my scratch video online and link it to this and my SD blog so that others can see it.  I might actually make a blog specifically for this project that has the ten principles written out and explained with some sources so that anyone who wants to learn more easily can.  It is really cool to use a program like scratch that takes preset commands and translates them into a video so easily.  Knowing just a little bit of how computers work now makes me appreciate such seemingly simple programs.

Web Page!

    I now have a web page running through the schools domain.  We all created our own pages in class on Tuesday, then made an animation for them on Thursday.  I have done a little bit of page design in a workshop in middle school.  I enjoyed doing some of the more basic programming and seeing how pages are made.  It is very difficult to use and understand all of the commands available to create web pages.  Looking at other peoples pages was also super fun.  I especially enjoyed Josh Elyeas' workout page.  Creating an animation was frustrating, but enjoyable.  Drawing the same thing over and over again on paint got very tedious, but I am proud of the end result.  The hardest part was actually linking the animation to the web page that I created on Tuesday. I had to get Dr. Parks help with that.  I didn't have the files in the right place or something like that.

Honesty

     I missed our class right before Thanksgiving break.  I know that I missed a guest speaker named Michael Barry who talked about cyber security in our country.  I very much regret missing this discussion because I am researching the same subject for our annotated bibliography. On the other hand, I had a great Thanksgiving break.  I very much enjoyed being back out on my farm and unplugging from the rest of the world for a while.  I hardly used any Facebook or any type of internet.  I did continue to use my cell phone for communication with my friends and was able to plan some fun activities with them.  One thing I would like to know is how the X-box live network is protected.  They pretty much have their own private network, but it works through the existing internet.  I wonder what sort of firewalls they use and what sort of media they don't allow?

Group Discussion

     I got much more into the class discussion about our various topics this week.  I started to be able to connect the dots between peoples topics more and more.  I found in interesting to compare the ways that different countries and groups have used the internet to their advantage.  I personally studied the Taliban and how they use social media as a propaganda tool to promote themselves while some countries, specifically China, block most social media sites.  I think it would be interesting to see China use social media to promote themselves to citizens outside their own country while preventing their own citizens from accessing such sites.  Another interesting thing we talked about was the revolution in Egypt.  It surprised me that a country can have that much control over internet and cell phone use.  I always thought of those as two mostly private industries that the government wouldn't be able to just shut down.  These services may be less private in countries like Egypt, or perhaps I simply do not understand how much influence our government has over such services.

The Cloud

    I like the term "cloud computing" and the visualization it implies.  The Internet seems like some bright, misty place that magically stores information and runs computations for us.  In reality the connectivity created by the Internet is what really makes these things possible.  The abilities that the Internet has granted us do seem magical in many ways and can be used to create great archives of information that would be impossible to create otherwise.  Dr. Wilkes showed us how he has used the cloud for his, and all bee keepers, benefit.  By creating a place where bee keepers can store information about their hives for their own personal use, he has compiled a large, ever growing,  database full of statistics ready to be analyzed in ways that will benefit bee keepers everywhere.  The cloud has other uses than collecting and analyzing statistics.  It has served as a key tool in social and political change in multiple countries.  Actually, without the Internet and its "cloud" many modern day social movements would not be possible.  The power of the Internet never ceases to amaze.

Oops

     I may be a little late on posting this one, but at least I'm getting to it.  I love the idea of using games to help out society by digitizing books and improving search engines.  The coolest thing about it is that the games are actually fun and the player often isn't aware that they aren't just playing a game.  I hope that more of these games are created in the future, especially if they can be made educational.  I have always found that the best way for me to learn is to turn studying into some sort of a game.  The internet needs more games like the translation game described in the video we watched in class.  I feel that these applications of technology improve many aspects of our society including; ourselves, the internet, and our efficiency.  By creating more accurate online searches and translating pages correctly, we will waste less time online trying to decipher Russian translations and find specific images.  All in all, I am a huge fan of these types of crowd sourcing.

Presentations

I loved the way all of the books that the different groups read were all connected. Many of them brought up some of the same points such as ADD to argue slightly different points.  I did enjoy reading Rapt because the content was interesting, but the writing wasn't very good.  Most of the presenters said that about their books.  I wonder if that subject lends itself to poor writing?  More possible is the fact that most people who are writing on subjects like the internet, psychology, and attention did not study English very extensively in college.  I for one will be taking only the minimum amount of English possible to graduate.  After reading Rapt, I am more aware of  how I focus and my focus problems.  I have found that I do have trouble focusing for long periods of time unless I am in what the author described as a flow state.  Where time seems to loose meaning because I become so engrossed in what I am doing.  Unfortunately for me I almost never find that state of mind while I am doing schoolwork, only when I am reading for fun.