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Week 15: Thoughts on Digital Security

(Readings at bottom) This week’s readings concerned themselves with cybersecurity with two main themes: the importance of cybersecurity in this day and age, and what we can do personally to protect ourselves from cyber-attacks. The first three readings were about this first main theme. The main point I took from “Privacy and Security in the Internet Age” was that the government and the people as a whole need to promote access and privacy when it comes to the Internet, especially concerning developing countries. I do agree with this point, but it also seemed like a big idea that I can’t do much about. I don’t have any idea about how security works online other than that there are some encryption codes. The best we could do as individual citizens I suppose is elect representatives that support increased security with easier access and privacy with regards to developing countries. I’m currently majoring in Computer Science, so there is a possibility that I end up working for a securi...
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Week 14: Thoughts on Digital Citizenship

(Readings at Bottom) The readings this week were in more or less two parts. The first part was a discussion of perhaps what exactly the goal is of digital citizenship, and the other part involves examples of how to properly prepare young people for that digital citizenship. When reading over the Nine Themes of Digital Citizenship, what really struck me is the fact that the themes can’t be just taught and learned, but rather there is a need to “practice” and “work out” the skills, as is mentioned at the end of the article with the REPs. It made me think of the technology classes I had in elementary and middle school. 2 days a week, the class would go into a computer lab and do activities with the computer. Thinking back on it, that is likely where I gained a lot of the basics of my knowledge of the digital world. I remember doing activities that helped us learn about Microsoft PowerPoint and how to type effectively on a computer (digital literacy) as well as activities that sho...
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Week 11: Thoughts on the "Attention economy" and the choices we can make

(Readings at bottom) The readings this week all touched on the theme of the “attention economy,” how all these social media sites and technology companies are competing for our attention. The TED talk, “How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day,” as well as the article “Our minds can be hijacked: the tech insiders who fear smartphone dystopias” had this theme as their main focus. I remember reading about the “attention economy” before, so I was not completely new to the idea, but the talk and the article really made me realize how present it is in my life. I believe I reflected on this somewhat in previous blog posts, but looking at the “attention economy” idea specifically, many of the things talked about happens in my life, perhaps the most obvious one being that I often intend to just spend a couple minutes checking over social media sites or new Reddit posts, but that quickly turns into a half hour which turns into an hour, since my brain is always th...
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Week 10: Learning in Video Games and Thoughts on a Domain of One's Own

( Readings at Bottom )       Recently, I bought a new game for the computer called Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 that essentially allows you to design your own theme park, complete with custom paths, roller coasters, and water slides. You manage it with hiring workers, placing food stands, opening and closing rides, and everything else that goes into managing your own theme park. A lot of learning in this game came from tutorials that you had the option to do. In the tutorials, there would be dialogue boxes that popped up that said what the goal of the tutorial was and give instructions on how to take steps to achieve that goal. There were multiple kinds of tutorials, including how to use the camera (what buttons to press for various camera movements), how to start building your own coaster, how to place paths, and how to change the terrain just to name a few. The tutorials were really a general overview of everything that was possible and ultimately was just opening the do...
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Week 9: Thoughts on Learning and the Connection with Digital Technologies

(Readings at Bottom) The two videos “A Vision of Students Today” and the TED talk on “Learning” both had more or less the same theme in terms of the fact that today, students are not as engaged in learning and there needs to be a reevaluation of how learning is done in schools today in order to tap into everyone’s potential so that everyone participates in ‘real learning,’ as Michael Wesch says. I was surprised at some of the statistics. Some, of course, don’t really apply here at Le Moyne, like the average class size being in the hundreds. The largest class I have is 30 or so people, so I don’t really feel like the teachers don’t know my name either. I can’t say that I’ve ever really had a problem with learning in the way that Michael talks about, but I can definitely understand the perspective he is coming from. I know that the best experiences that I’ve had in the classroom were times where we could go and apply what was just ‘learned,’ especially when we were just encouraged t...
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Week 8: Thoughts on the Impact of Social Media on Socialization

  (Readings at Bottom)             The main theme of the readings this week was the impact that social media and other newer technologies have on our socializations skills, with there being points saying that people socialize more and others saying they socialize less. The video and the article “The Flight from Conversation” both focused on how technologies are taking away something from our regular ‘socializing’ and connection with others, and for the first time, they mention a concrete reasoning behind why these new social media sites are so beloved. It is all about control. You can control what you pay attention to, you can control what you say in the conversation or how you display yourself, and you get a feeling of understanding and connection from the ‘automatic listeners’ on social media. That really hit home for me, because I could see myself doing those things, especially the last one, that sense of automatic list...
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Week 7: Thoughts on the Digital Divide in Society

(Readings at bottom) The first reading, about the internet affecting how we think about thing, was a good opening for this week, and it really showed me how much the digital world is changing how we think and see things. I definitely feel that I, personally, have become more receptive to just the surface level information, not paying attention to things unless I can get the answer I want right away. I also find myself reading less books, as they mention in the article. I have conflicting feelings about this shift from a deeper reading to a more surface level approach. On one hand, I don’t like that it’s happening with people, myself included, because I feel like I can’t get as deeply involved in what I read. I have a shorter attention span, so reading something for school, for example, becomes more about finishing it rather than paying attention to it and really picking out the crucial details. I want to get back to that, to rediscover that joy and involvement of deep reading. How...
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