Week 13 Reflection: New Aggregators

I enjoyed Dr. Wayne Iwaoka’s presentation.  New methods of food processing are needed to produce safe food products that have better sensory and nutritional quality than the traditional thermal canning/pasteurization processes.  Dr. Iwaoka addressed the research on the emerging technologies in this important area of food safety and security. This discussion provided a forum for discussion regarding these technologies to examine which are the most promising for certain food products.  He also discussed how to strengthen collaboration, awareness, and understanding of the wide spread worldwide food borne pathogen problem, emphasizing the technologies under development to bring the problem under control.  Furthermore, he described and discussed the some of the technologies available so that scientists and food industry leaders are aware of these technologies to improve food safety and technology.

Week 12 Reflection: : TCC Online Conference 2011

At the 2011 TCC Conference, I had the opportunity to participate as a student presenter.  The presentation was in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Masters Degree in Educational Technology.  Although it was nerve racking, it was an awesome experience.  The size of the conference might have been a little intimidating for a newbie like me, however, the conference accomplished what it set out to do, and that was to not only create a structure but also a culture of connecting technology enthusiasts.  The conference did not only enable participants to participate in groups and sessions; it also created the potential and structure for the ongoing discussions taking place on Twitter (every session had a hashtag).

I attended many great sessions this year. My favorites included ePortfolios – Leveraging the Blog Format to Demonstrate Student Experience, Blended learning in Undergraduate Education: The relationship between students’ perceived interaction with others and their satisfaction, and Create & Engage: Using Free Web 2.0 Media Tools to Engage and Promote the Online Learning Experience -- all of them capturing up-to-date topics essential for classroom settings that work with technology or utilizing it to drive change.

Week 8 Reflection: Intercultural Collaboration

People from different cultures and language collaborate to meet the needs of a more globalized society.  Emerging technologies may be useful in intercultural collaboration to transcend cultural barriers over distributed environments.  For instance, a technology to support intercultural collaboration that could be considered is to use a machine translation in intercultural, multilingual collaboration classroom setting.

The online language population is to said to comprise of 1/3 English, 1/3 European languages other than English, and 1/3 Asian languages. The language barrier can be viewed to exist in the online world same as the real world. One technology that can overcome the language barrier to support multilingual communication is machine translation. However, the quality of the machine translation currently has much room for improvement. Although the accuracy of machine translation is far from perfect, machine translation is helpful in such intercultural collaboration setting where no bilingual person is present.

Week 7 Refletion: Internet Privacy

Week 7 Reflection:  Internet Privacy

After reading the articles in regards to internet and media, it doesn’t hurt to be extra cautious and concerned for our privacy.  Yes, I do worry about my privacy on the internet.  One of my biggest fear is internet fraud.  I’ve taken action to protect myself online by using anti-virus solutions to protect my privacy.  For example, by using safe passwords, regularly deleting browsing history and upgrading of anti-virus software.  I’m also worried about who’s watching online.

Two Internet privacy practices or behaviors I would recommend a teacher or faculty member adopt are:

1)      Don’t Search for yourself online, or use real name online, or social security number or anything of that nature, and clear your usage tracks each time you start or finish using an account.

2)      Do not click ads.  By clicking an ad, you are generating one more data point about yourself.  Furthermore, you are inviting any executable code hidden in the ad to run. This is a common way to install malicious software on your computer.

Week 6 Reflection: Internet of Things

According to the readings, the Internet of Things is about the coming future when there are more "things" on the Internet (sensors especially) than there are people.  I learned that Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a technology that uses communication through the use of radio waves to exchange data between a reader and an electronic tag attached to an object, for the purpose of identification and tracking.  Meanwhile, the QR code (short for Quick Response) is a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera phones.   QR code has a lot to do with the Internet of Things.  For example, when you scan or read a QR code with an iPhone, Android or other camera-enabled Smartphone, you can link to digital content on the web; activate a number of phone functions including email, IM and SMS; and connect the mobile device to a web browser.  The ability of QR codes to connect people with each other and to multimedia digital content is very useful for both businesses and consumers.

Week 5 Reflection: Intellectual Property & Copyrght

The readings provided on intellectual property and copyright detailed factors of the fair use defense to copyright infringement.   The articles addressed how to use the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in order to protect audio and video recordings from misuse.  A few factors of a fair use defense to copyright infringements are: 1) The nature of the copyright work; 2) The amount and sustainability of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; 3) The purpose and character of the use, including whether it’s for commercial nature or for non-profit educational purposes; and 4) The effect of the use upon the potential market or value of the copyrighted work.  The important thing to understand about the purpose and use factor is that the current body of copyright law, both statue and case law, favors the dissemination of necessary information over any sort of commercial pillaging of someone else's intellectual property.