Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is the modern method of abusing someone usually occurring in grade and high school. In the article, "Warily, Schools Watch Students on the Internet," there is a case where a 12 year old girl from Florida committed suicide after much abuse and bullying by two other classmates. After the suicide, one of the girls had the audacity to Facebook post about the death. Obviously, the two classmates were arrested after the comment. Schools want to use the internet themselves to stop cyberbullying, but I honestly don't believe that bullying in general will end. Sure, kids will learn the lesson to stop abusing others online. What are they going to do? I'll tell you. They will take whoever they want to bully and do it in person. There are no federal laws about bullying until it reaches a certain extent (usually physical abuse). Kids will just be more cautious while bullying. Hopefully an answer to the question of how to stop bullying will be found soon because kids continue to take their lives because of inconsiderate others.

Legal and Ethical Issues

Open Access Research is a growing trend that many college students find helpful. Open Access is basically content free from licenses and subscriptions when used for research. This allows for more research to be done. How many times have I tried to read an article, but couldn't because the website required a subscription since their content is for premium users. I don't believe that all online articles and websites should follow this however. I think that you should have a choice to make your work private. However, if used for non-profit research, then I believe that the researcher should be able to view anything needed to aid his/her work. The question comes down to whether it is ethical to allow one person to view it for free while most everyone else has to pay for that service. In Joseph Havey's article, "Open Access Research Grows in Popularity," he talks about how beneficial this would be towards University Professors because it would increase readership.

World Wide Web

The web is moving with increasing speeds to saving things onto the cloud. The Cloud, in my opinion, is a great step towards improving everyone's computing experience. The previous step was Windows 8. We all know that it didn't exceed anyone's expectations. Even the City of Chicago is taking a step towards the Cloud. Mayor Rahm Emanuel moved 30,000 employees to Microsoft 365 to be more productive using the Microsoft Products. They are specifically going to use cloud based e-mail. Using the cloud is beneficial if you have to use different computers daily (some college students). However, laptops have not much use for it. I have a laptop that I carry with me. I can have everything saved locally because of it. The only reason that I use the cloud is if I want to back up my data.

Networks and Communication

We have all used either synchronous or asynchronous methods of communication before. I myself use synchronous communication whenever I'm playing video games. Synchronous communication is that which has real time interactions at both ends. In Skype, you are communicating as if the other person was standing in front of you. However, asynchronous communication might be more common. Everyone age 12 and over has used this before. Email is widespread because it provided a faster means of communication when it first became popular. However, there is a delay between the communication because you may not receive a response right away. We are relying so much on the ease that technology has caused communication to have. We no longer have to send letters (luckily), but technology can also be dangerous. In the one study performed by the University of Queensland, it was concluded that texting while walking makes you oblivious to your surroundings. Thus, you don't notice when you are running into things. There was one woman according to the article that was trying to click something on her phone, but fell into the mall fountain because of her not paying attention. Synchronous communication is used more for an alternate means of communicating besides the loyal phone call. Many people have stopped making calls because of this. Phone service providers have also started to make only text messaging plans as a result.

First Blog - About Me

Hi! My name is Daniel Miranda. I am a second semester student at NEIU. This is the first blog I have ever written. I don't know what to expect from it. However, technology does improve many things. This keeps my hopes up. I have used twitter in my high school programming class to be able to look at code. Mr. Shapiro used these technologies to be able to improve his class' attention. I hope that technology will keep improving and making all of our lives easier.