I forgot what assignment this was…

Part 1

Part 2

Vodcast Away…or not

Vodcast Away…or not

There wasn’t necessarily a process that I went through to get my desired footage. It was more like I went with whatever came out at the time. I do wonders USING a camera, just not that well when the camera focuses on ME. Naturally, I didn’t put much into the content. When a camera is capturing me I get nervous in a way. But there is a good side to getting footage of me, I do things in an orderly way. My thinking process isn’t all over the place and I

Location Portrait

 

Computer Lab

 

 

What I use Technology for…

When I wake up in the morning, what is my first thought? My computer, of course! In my path of education, I have chosen to be a computer engineer. As such, I have taken on the challenge of learning anything and everything about computers. From keystrokes to processors, I interact with a computer daily and it’s always satisfying and fun. Now why did I enter this field? It actually goes back to when I was a child and still trying to discover all the wonders of the world. But I will get more into that later! I always try and look for more ways of technology to apply to my life and the daily lives of others. It’s in my life’s goal to change the world with this passion of mine.

We have all heard the debate about whether or not video games are helpful to our generation, and anyone after. Over the past 40 years, video games have been getting more and more complex due to demand in the experience of the game. Let’s say you played a game for 12 hours. Wouldn’t you be tired of looking at the same graphic environment, especially when you have mastered it? That’s why more and more games are being constructed – people get bored. Chances are though; it’s not the top journalist of the New York Times or the manager of a fine dining restaurant that you will see playing video games. I have had my own personal experience of talking to people that have never played a video game in their life (not even Pac-Man). It’s the people that might criticize the industry, and say that it’s killing the generations ahead that need be corrected. It’s those generations I want to reach out to, and say that there is more to it than just playing.

From my own personal experience, I can say that video games are ideally the most effective tool for learning available for children. When I talk about games, it makes me reflect back into my past with them. I picked up my first game at age 4. At first most of the effects were bad. I had OCD because I had started at such a young age that it created an addiction, since it was all I knew, and I wouldn’t talk or hang out with anyone. I had only a few friends. I didn’t do homework for school, and didn’t feel school was all that important. I didn’t even think that I was important. The only thing that mattered was the story inside the game, the characters, and the important message behind the plot. But then I played a certain video game that changed my whole perspective on life and how I should apply myself to make a difference. It made me decide that I would one day step my foot on the world and leave a giant footprint in history. This game was called Final Fantasy VII. This video game was monumental to my outlook on life and I knew that there was more for me just as there was for the main character. I couldn’t just hide inside myself all my life and just avoid all of the battles. It implanted in me a desire to press on and move forward, gain confidence in myself – that I am more than a conqueror, more than a champion. I can read 1500 words per minute, and I write adequately because of how much formal reading is done in video games.

This game showed me a world that was so much bigger than the one that I knew. As I kid I did not see much of the world

Critical reasoning skills are required to finish some of these games. One game in particular, MYST, is a virtual world that seems to be one giant puzzle. You don’t move through the game normally. A normal game would have a story previous to the game but this game has the story unfold after you play. You have to solve puzzle after puzzle to get to the next step in the game. The point of that game is for you to solve all of the puzzles to find out what really happened in that world. It is one of those games that make you think for hours on end, testing your ability – sometimes beyond all reason. The puzzles get more complex as you go and unravel the story. It’s a development process in itself. Some games are far more complex than anyone can imagine like Professor Gee suggests in his book, “Research suggests that people really know what words mean only when they can hook them to the sorts of actions, images or dialogues to which they apply. That is why a game manual or strategy guide makes much more sense after someone has played a game for awhile than before. So, too, science textbooks, cut off from the images and actions science is about, are like a technical game manual without any game.” – James Paul Gee, Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading, University of Wisconsin; Author, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy.

Everybody learns differently. Some people learn with books better than pictures and vise versa. If there were some way to incorporate the video game principle in our learning process, we would have more people succeeding than we do now. Of course, children should not endure this until they are thirteen years old due to my experience with the negative side-effects. We would not want any child to go through that kind of stress and isolation, and ultimately a possible failure at living their dreams. Children are our future. If video games are a big part of their life, then why not take advantage of the situation and bulk up our children’s minds? We need to start taking initiative around our future as a whole.

Communication with New Technologies

The way we communicate has drastically changed since the time of horse-back letter sending and morse code with candle lights. Today, we don’t have to wait for two weeks to get a letter. We use an advanced mailing system now that allows us to receive mail in only a few days! But there is one issue to this system. This way of communication is dying because technology is taking over. The telephone was invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. The telephone really was the take-off point when it comes to a pivotal change in communication. Up until the latter 1900′s, the majority of communication was from mail and eventually telephone and radio.

When the latter 1900′s hit, the age of the computer came into vision (internet). Many people today use a computer and most people who use a computer use a form of communication such as E-mail or a social networking site. There is also a growing community that uses webcams and communicates visually as well as verbally. Billions of messages are sent through all of these…DAILY! We also have a more convenient telephones called cellular phones that we can carry around with us all day long and talk whenever we want. And again, billions of calls are being made…DAILY! We communicate more now than ever before in history, and certainly more than anyone has ever imagined.

I believe that we create the future of our world based on how we communicate. Since we have been able to call people and receive information faster, there has been an uproar in the amount of people and the amount of cities with massive buildings. Because of this one little advancement, we have been able to create so many more technologies and cultures! Now we have cars with GPS and computers that talk to you. Without the communication we have today, I think we as a people would fail and chaos would envelop the world.

Aside from the doom and gloom, my own experience has changes as I have aged when it comes to communicating with people.

Literacy These Days

I don’t think that you need to know much to be literate. If you can read, I consider you to be literate. As far as I am concerned, the page that Will Rich wrote called “An Introduction to…Blogs, Wikis, RSS, Online Bookmarking”  just talks about the new advances in the internet age. These blogs, Wikis, and online bookmarking is all luxury standards. People in third world countries don’t have this.

In any case, that still isn’t the subject here in this blog. To be literate in the modern internet, is almost essential to today’s success in the world. Literacy, to me, means that  you have been subjected to new age material such as computers and new uses of the internet. Books have always been essential but I like to look at the convenience of all the technology today. Computers are getting smaller and smaller and ever more powerful. Cell phones are able to access the internet from virtually anywhere!

Toulmin Model: The Original Internet

Claim: The Internet should be just the way it was design to be.
a. Warrant: The Internet was originally was design to share and exchange raw data across a troublesome distance.
b. Backing: According to the Internet Society (ISOC), the Internet was created for the military to have a faster mean of sending messages.
c. Qualifer: The Internet should be limited due to sexual predators, sexual deviants, and scam artists.
d. Reservation: The Internet should be just the way it was design to be.