Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Learning Journal Post #5

Peer-to-Peer File Sharing has become a constant system we have by sending and retrieving information. FTP, or File Transfer Protocol is a program used to transfer information from one computer to another. What's also useful about FTP is having a server where you can upload all the content you wish to transfer. FTP has client programs anyone can use such as Fire FTP. It a much easier and faster way to send files unlike e-mailing where you need to send your files as attachments. A disadvantage to that is you can't make your files public through e-mail, only one person will be able to see your work.
Different from fire sharing, Peer-to-Peer Networking is a famous way for people to have music files downloaded, or even movie content. When your computer is connected to the network of the file sharing, you gain what is called a 'tracker.' All shared files have their own tracker, and connecting to one tracker will make you unable to share files. Every tracker has a piece of that file needed. Unfortunately we must be careful what we download, because it could be copyrighted, and anyone P2P sharing in this process could end up with the consequences of 'illegally downloading.'

In all honesty, I never knew about Web 2.0 tools until now. I've been using them to share content through the Social Websites, and never really heard about the term. Web 2.0 is in comparison to a new generation of using the Internet, where as there's a difference to just being online rather than going online. It's very reliant on the Social aspect of it. In Social Bookmarking we use a method called Folksonomy or a way we create tags to organize out content collected. In other words tags have the same use as bookmarks. Tag clouds is a term I've never heard of up until this point. It's when the tags people online use the most, become "Popular tags" and list of tags show the popular tags through visually making the text bigger and bolder in the tag list.

Here is a visual representation of how a Tag Cloud looks when it has popular tags:


The Semantic Web is a new form of web that will possibly be used in our future. It's a Web that's able to describe, to make your computer have the ability to understand. It relies on relationship instead of links, meaning the computer will be able to relate words or phrases to what they initially means. For now the computer is just blindly retrieving information we look up. If we have the Semantic web, the computer will have an understanding what you are looking for and can gain better results.

Here's a video explaining how the Semantic web would work:



Five Words I have learned:


Shareware- Software that you can download and try out, but you are expected to pay for the software if you decided to use it on a permanent basis.


Anonymous FTP Sites- because anyone can log on to these sites using "Anonymous" as their username.


Command Prompt Window- A Windows operating system using FTP by typing instructions in the client program to your web browser.


FTP Client- a program that offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface containing menu commands and toolbar shortcuts.


Peer to Peer(P2P) file-sharing network- allows files to be transferred between individual personal computers located on the same local are network (LAN) or between individual personal computers to the internet.

WL12- My Voki

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Photobucket Slideshow

Using the Web 2.0 Web application Photobucket, I created a Slideshow of my clay figures I've made over the years:



Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Learning Journal Post # 4


            Online communication is becoming more prominent in our everyday lives. Most of the time we don't even acknowledge how much time we spent online and communication to someone. Quite honestly Social Media is evolving not only as a trend, but also as a source of communication people rely on. I'm not too big on using sites as Twitter and Facebook, but I've come to realize Twitter is quite useful. Twitter is what is considered as a Micro blog, meaning it’s a website that allows people to broadcast and follow the messages or posts people make. Twitter is different from Facebook because it makes Micro Posts where a set limit of characters restricts users for making lengthy posts. It’s not a bad thing though. Facbook on the other hand is a Blog that doesn’t have restrictions on the amount of content put onto it. Twitter is a great tool for celebrities and famous people, because they’re constantly on the go, and they barely have time to update anything. They use twitter to write a quick post at any time and anywhere.

            They think E-Mail is a way of communication that’s slowly dying, but they’re wrong. It’s one of the more popular ways people used to communicate virtually to this day. Thanks to e-mail, rarely anyone uses the post office, considering it’s a much slower process sending mail through the post office. This way of sending mail is also known as snail mail, and unlike snail mail, e-mails can transfer and people receive them within milliseconds.

            Social Media usage has become an increased way of communication. It’s a new way to share, collab, and receive info on the individuals or group you watch. They also treat social media as a way to get their news through newsgroups. The best way to gain feedback by multiple people is by using Social websites such as Facebook, Tumblr, Youtube, etc.

            Wikis are a collaborative form of a website, where anyone can go in to add or edit material on a topic. I have learned that not only can I fix and add to Wiki pages, but relatively anyone can take what you wrote and alter it, even if it’s wrong information too. Another way to be collaborative is by using Google Docs. Instead of sending a Document through an e-mail, you can submit it to Google Docs in which you can share the document with who you want. This is a great tool to use when working for a business.

Here is a good walk through video on how Google Docs works. I've never used Google Docs up until now, and it helped tremendously with understanding how this tool works:

Five Words I have learned:

Bcc Line- contains the e-mail addresses of recipients who will receive a courtesy copy of the message.

Nigerian Sting operations- Fraudulent requests for money.

Digest Format- Messages are complied as a single file called a digest, which is sent to members of when it reaches a certain size.

Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)- To send newsgroup messages over an IP network.

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)- Allows users to send short messages continuing text only or text audio, and video to and from cell phones.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Learning Journal Post #3


The Main topic of Web Technology I had learned in this Web module is searching on the Internet, and how Efficient and Effective it can be. Again I felt I knew enough information on how to use a search engine to look up information, but there's more tools people can use that majority of Internet users don't know. I found out about the difference between a search engine and a Meta Search Engine. What a Metasearch search engine can do is not only look about the internet for the topic you want to know about, but it also collects date from tons of other search engines and combining that into a list one can browse through. My original search engine I've stuck to for years has been Google. I tried out Bing, Dogpile.com, and ixquick.com. Interestingly enough all of these search engines have a similar layout to that of Googles. I'm still sticking to Google, since I've been navigating on it longer than those three. Another thing I have learned is using AND, OR, and NOT key terms in my searches to help bring search results down or up when I need them.

The Deep Web is databases that are kept hidden from the public. Mostly restricted information is kept there, such as College Databases. (For Example NCCC's Library Database isn't available to the public unless you are a student at the College.) This information is said to be more reliable than basing it off of the public's website, mostly because it's scholarly articles gathered by professionals. Knowing this now will help tremendously with my Research papers in the future. PDF are also said to be part of the deep web, or invisible thread. There is an exception to this though, seeing as 'some' browsers support PDF formats like Google. Most websites in the invisible web are password-protected databases. Again in this case the public can't get in and misuse the information.

Truste is something I honestly did not know about until working on this module. Truste is a Privacy Policy that helps you trust the business you are taking part in online, and making sure it's done legally. If the site you are trying to do a business transaction on has the Truste logo on it, automatically the public should know it's a website you can trust to pay or sell things online. It also helps protect your privacy as a user. It's a trusted logo to thousands of businesses worldwide.

Here's a video on the principle called IF. It stands for Information Fluency and basically means it's the skills employers are going to look for in the new people they try to hire. This is a video I found to be very interesting and important during this lesson:


An Information Fluency Model:


21st Century Skills:

-Life and Career Skills
-Learning and Innovation Skills
-Informatuin, media, and Technology Skills
-Core Subjects and 21st Century Themes
-Standard and Assessments
-Curriculum and Instruction
-Professional Development
-Learning Environments

Five Words I have Learned:

Breadcrumb trail- Shows the hierarchical arrangement of categories and sub categories through which you have clicked.

Web Crawler- Software, or a robot that browses the web, automatically adding the URLs and other information about web pages to a searchable index.

Metasearch Engine- Used to compile the search results from multiple search engines into a single search result list.

Boolean Operator- A conjunction used in a logical expression, when given multiple keywords in a query, a search engine uses the AND, OR, AND NOT.

Shopping Aggregators- Shopping Search Engines aggregate information about consumer product or services, and help online shoppers compare models, prices, shopping costs, and other variables from various sellers before they buy.