Scratching the Surface of Animations

This past week we have worked some with finalizing our websites, getting the animations we created to actually work on the pages, and started working on with Scratch. This is a program for creating more detailed and complicated animations, using characters (or "sprites") that can move, spin, talk, grow, and even make sounds.  We dabbled around with it for a few days in class to get the hang of it, then went to work making several of our own projects. One of them limited the possible actions to 8 simple commands, which greatly restricted the options and forced creativity.

HTMLing

This past week in class we learned about HTML coding and how to make our own (rather simple) websites. It was kinda cool to see how messing around with the encoding text brought about real changes right there on the web page, even though it is very complex the more stuff you want to add. On Thursday we each designed several images in Paint and tried to program the webpages to play them in sequence to create an animation effect similar to that of Stop-Motion videos. Different words programmed into the right spaces determine the background color, text style, the alignment of photos or text, and every other little detail you can think of.

Internet Issues

Last week we discussed several different topics about the internet and its role in the categories. Several topics flowed together, such as how governments use and control the internet. Some countries like our own allows its citizens full rights to say what they want and view what they want (all problems of legality taken into consideration of course). Other places are not so lucky, like Egypt and Tunisia. Since the governmental bodies owned most of the wiring companies and hardware that provided Internet services, they were able to quickly shut it all off. They also got some help from outside governments who were heavy suppliers of cell-phones, bullying other governments into going along with their total shut-down efforts. It was all an attempt at stopping the political activism that had begun to erupt in the country, as groups were talking on Facebook and making gathering times for their rallies and protests.  I cannot even think what it would be like to live somewhere and not be certain whether or not the entire world wide web would be suddenly shut off or inaccessible to everyone I knew!  We should consider ourselves to be lucky to live in a country that provides us the freedoms we have.

"To the Cloud!"

To The Cloud--Start-up--Windows 7 by windows-videos

I remember those kinda corny commercials advertising cloud computing, and it was the first time I heard the concept. It's really very simple and yet very helpful: store your data (pictures, documents, movies, etc.) in The Cloud instead of on your hard-drive, so you can access it anywhere. The only set-back to this kind of computing would be if for whatever reason you can't connect to the precious internet, or else you wouldn't be able to access your data.  But, as we also discussed, the number of devices the average person carries around daily that can connect wirelessly and quickly to the internet is increasing too with SmartPhones and handheld devices, as well as WiFi being almost everywhere. And LAN computer ranges are increasing as well for networking offline.

Genius

I'm not saying that the guy we watched on those videos was a genius, but his ideas were basically perfect. After being smart enough to invent the CAPTCHA concept, he then realized how its increased security functionality was also wasting a lot of time due to its prevalence across the internet. His devising this way to have people subconsciously help digitize books through doing what they're already doing- and I emphasize for free- is nothing short of amazing.
He also came up with several other games for helping people translate books as they learn effectively how to speak another language is mutually beneficial to both the company and the willing users who save money on expensive alternative computer language programs.

Crowdsourcing

So today was possibly the most fun class I've had in college so far.
We played a few games trying to get people to think about crowdsourcing and how it can be a useful way to solve problems.  One group made  us play a game designed to teach the importance of sharing, or else the other members of the group would be killed off- it was funny to see how different groups treated the game differently, some being dominated by greedy fishermen and others cooperating so that everyone survived and got skittles in the end.

We also played the game where everyone in a group holds hands and tries to unfold back into a circle. We made multiple attempts, and although much fun and loud laughter was had in the hallways, I don't think either group ever fully got finished. But the key to that game also was teamwork; each person had to help each other out and talk through how to get untangled.

Modern Marketing

We had a guest speaker come in last week and talk about how he helps companies market themselves on the internet in order for them to get more business.  It was interesting to see how big a difference it makes on how much internet traffic a business' website gets based on whether it appears on Google's top few results or not.  People pour ridiculous amounts of money into online advertising because they know that's how most people shop nowadays, and getting your name out there is how you draw people in.
He also mentioned some other interesting ways of tagging products with things like "p8tches" that use QRCodes, which are essentially small squares that are similar to hyperlinks to a URL. You can simply scan it with a smartphone and go strait to a website for whatever object is being marketed.
The future of marketing is very interesting, and there are almost endless possibilities with the emergence of QRCodes and similar ways of interconnecting the web with the tangible world around us.