Create Your Own Infographic!

For this week's Tutorial assignment, I created an info graphic based on a blog post by Avinash Kaushik's on his blog Occam's Razor. I used Piktochart, a design website that helps you create your own custom info graphic!

Here's a look at the info graphic that I created:

You can also check out my custom infographic here on the Piktochart website!

Cloud Computing Blog!

For this weeks assignment, me along with my fellow classmate Nicole, have created a blog dedicated purely to Cloud Computing! If you want to check it out, click on this link: http://whatiscloudccomputing.blogspot.ca so that you can learn more about Cloud Computing and its effects on your daily life!

Geek Chic | Coding Your Own Website!

For this week's tutorial, we took a look at programming and how to code your very own webpage!

Codeacademy.com is a great website and tool that teaches you how to use the different languages of coding that are available today, and allows you to create and enhance your very own website!

First, I completed the "Introduction to HTML" course on their website. I'll take you through some of the steps that you are given for this course!

After completing the "Introduction to HTML" course, I then did the "Build Your Own Webpage" project. Here are some of the steps:

Below is a screenshot of all of the badges that I have earned from completing "Introduction to HTML" and "Build Your Own Webpage" courses on Codeacademy.com!

 Hope this is helpful for anyone that is interested in learning how to code and create their own websites!

Cyber Bullying PSA

For this week's tutorial, we were assigned to make a Public Service Announcement (PSA) about one of the topics we have covered in class so far.

Cyber Bullying is identified by Google as" the use of electronic communication to bully a person, typically by sending messages of an intimidating or threatening nature." In this digital age, it is becoming an increasing problem all over the world.

Watch our PSA at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4fLtRLQli4 to learn more about cyber bullying, and like and share it with your friends to bring more awareness to this serious issue!

All images, video, and audio clips are CC licensed.
Thanks for watching!

Creating My Own App Using TheAppBuilder.com! | DiscoverToronto

This week, I was given the task of creating my own app on any topic of my choice. I thought that designing an app that will give tourists and people who don't really know Toronto very well, some great information regarding things to do and places to see in the city! So DiscoverToronto was born. Here's the app that I created, hopefully its convenient, efficient, and helpful to anyone looking to discover Toronto again or for the very first time.

http://myapp.is/DiscoverToronto

Online Collaboration - The Modern Way of Communicating

Modern technology such as the Internet has given us the opportunity and ability to communicate and collaborate with people all over the world and use our different outlooks and lifestyles in order to spark creativity and ingenuity.

Example:

Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir is a great example of how online collaboration can positively influence our society and the lives of thousands of people. Whitacre is a conductor and decided to create a version of his songs, using the voices that people had recorded and sent in of themselves singing his song. He got over 2000 videos from 58 different countries of people performing his song, which were then edited and uploaded onto YouTube, becoming a viral video. This virtual choir shows that people can experience a connection with others that they have never even met, using the Internet. The choir in a sense became a family, where people from different backgrounds and walks of life could come together to create something truly awe inspiring and beautiful, through the use of the internet.

Check out Eric Whitacre's talk about his virtual choir on TED Talks 

Virtual Choir 1: Lux Aurumque

Virtual Choir 2.0: Sleep

Virtual Group Vs. Physical Group: Which is a better way to collaborate?

There are many pros and cons to online collaboration as well as pros and cons to collaborating face to face. Here are some of the main arguments for each side:

Online Collaboration:

• Gives you the opportunity to meet and interact with people all over the world
• Differences are set apart – there is less judgment online
• Shy people can step out of their comfort zones and do things they normally would not (ex. The virtual choir – singers who normally wouldn’t sing in front of millions of people can do so in their bedrooms and still be seen by the world)
•  Working online gives you more time to present the best version of yourself (You can have multiple takes of yourself singing in a video, but you only have one chance in a face to face audition)
• It is easier to manage and organize things online (you can write one email and send it to a large list of people)
• Online collaboration is also cost effective – you can work out of your house instead of having to go to an office or a recording studio for example
•  Less time consuming – you waste less time commuting when working online
• Strength of Weak Ties:

-       When you are talking and collaborating with people all over the world, you are making connections with different people, giving you access to more ideas and inputs

-       Online collaboration gives you the chance to build your community and build relationships with people that you would not normally get the chance to know

Face-to-Face Collaboration:

• It is easier to resolve conflicts in person and ensure a response to your questions or ideas (some people do not respond to emails or messages online as quickly)
• People have an easier time saying rude and hurtful things behind the safety of a keyboard than in person
• It is harder to read body language online – sometimes you cannot tell if a person is being sarcastic or not through messages online, while in person you can tell by their gestures, etc.
• Some people don’t have access to the technologies (people can have limited to no internet connection in some areas, which can be an impediment to participating online or networking in a group)

RSS Feeds - Giving You Relevant Content | Interior Design

Did you know that there is an alternative to your regular search engine that can provide you with content curated directly to your search topics? While most people think that Google is the only way to find information on the Internet, it turns out there is another way that can provide you with specific results to your searches. In only a few simple steps you can be curating content online to get results that are relevant and helpful to you!

Start by downloading the Add-On 'Sage' to your Mozilla Firefox browser. You can then head over to a blog directory such as Technorati, Alltop, or Delicious and start searching! When you find a blog or site that you find informative, simply click the Sage icon in your browser, then click the 'Search' icon, select the RSS site feed, and 'Add Feed'.

When you have added as many feeds as you want, go to Options in Sage, select 'OPML export' and save it to your desktop. Sign up with an RSS Reader such as 'The Old Reader' and import the file into it.

Now you will see a stream of the most current content from the blogs you have chosen! This gives you a constant flow of information that you have tailored to your interests and searches. You can update and add more blogs to this feed as often as you want, making it a great way to stay connected with the information that you care about.

I tried this out myself on Alltop.com, searching for topics related to Interior Design, using a number of different search words including: Design, Architecture, Interior Design, Art, etc. Here's an image showing the stream of information from the ten blogs I chose!

As you can see, after searching on Alltop for probably ten minutes, and by saving ten blogs into The Old Reader using Sage, there are over one hundred posts for me to look at from this. This gives me such a diverse range of information from different sites to look at, all based on the topic of Interior Design.

The most significant difference between using this method of content curation, as opposed to a search engine such as Google, is that when using a blog directory like Alltop, you are guaranteed to find results that are not only relevant, but apply directly to your topic of choice. Contrastingly, when searching 'Interior Design' on Google, these were the top results:

Most of the results I received on Google were for Ads for Interior Designers in the GTA and job listings related to Interior Design. These results can be useful if you are looking for a job in that field or a company in the area, but if you are trying to get information about Interior Design as a topic, RSS feeds are the way to go! Don't get me wrong, Google is a very useful search engine, but when searching for the most current sources available online relating to a certain topic, blogs can be very informative and helpful, because content found on blogs is being updated every minute by people all over the world. This gives you the opportunity to find such a wide variety of information and data produced by a wide variety of people, all in one convenient place!

So now that this blog has informed you about content curation and searching on the blogosphere, go create your own RSS feed and see what useful information other blogs can give you!

Collusion | Tracking Your Trackers

Have you ever wondered how the ad's on the side of your Facebook page sometimes seem to be way too tailored to your exact interests and hobbies. Well, this is isn’t as much of a coincidence as you might think. Whenever you visit a website, there are ‘cookies’ – and no these are not the delicious cookies your mom might make – these cookies are small pieces of data that a website sends to be stored in your web browser every time you browse that site. Whenever you load the same site, the browser sends the cookie back to the server to inform that website about your previous search history.

Essentially this means that every time you log on to the Internet, the websites you visit are creating records about you based on what you have searched in the past on those sites. For example, if you post a Facebook status saying:

           

Facebook will take that information, and give you advertisements that are relevant to that topic, for example this add for getoutsideshoes.com:

Don’t get me wrong, this part of tracking cookies is actually pretty cool. It gives websites like Facebook the ability to track your interests, posts, and likes so they can produce adds that are catered to you!

However, there’s also a component to tracking cookies that is quite scary to think about. This part is when third-party cookies are tracking your movements online. Now what is a third-party cookie you might ask? Well, these aren’t the regular cookies like the ones Facebook or Twitter use to gather data about your online browsing, these are the cookies from sources other than the ones that you are visiting.

This means that other websites are compiling information about you without your permission. So many of these sits track users from other sites without asking, which I think is a huge invasion of your online privacy. We, as users of the internet, should be able to choose which sites we give permission to track us, not the other way around. Sites should not be able to track and store data about us without our consent. Well, this is where Collusion comes in.

Collusion is an Add-On to Mozilla Firefox that gives you a graph showing you the websites that are using third-party cookies to track your activities online. That data creates multiple webs of contact between companies and trackers, to give you the information that you should know in order to understand how websites are using your information, and which third-party cookies are taking that information for themselves. Collusion also gives you the option to stop third-party sources from tracking you using cookies, which I think is pretty cool!

After surfing the web for about half an hour, I got my own Collusion graph to see who's tracking me, and this was the result: 

The circles that are outlined in blue are the ones that I actually visited, while the ones outlined in white are the ones that I never actually visited, but gained access to my information through advertisements on the pages I did visit. 

Looking more closely, I only actually visited six sites in total, but loads of other sites were still able to access my information and data because of third-party cookies and tracking. This really opened my eyes to how nothing you put on the internet is actually private and how if someone really wants to access something, they can. Hopefully this has educated you a bit to be more wary of the things you're posting online. 

If you want to download Collusion and see how it works for yourself, you must first download Mozilla Firefox and once you’ve done that you can download Collusion.

Now you're ready to start tracking your trackers!

Cloudy with a Chance of Computing

For this week's tutorial, the both of us, Nicole Grella (@nicolegrellaRU) and Danielle VanHelden (@danielleannaRU), chose to further our understanding of 'cloud computing' because it is used by millions of people every single day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMH-AmzVknQ&feature=youtu.be

Thanks for watching!

Google Syntax - Making Google Searches Even Easier!

If you, like me, didn’t think it was possible for Google to make searching for things on the Internet even easier, then you sure are wrong!

It turns out there are several Google ‘shortcuts’ that can make finding anything from a definition to a specific brand or item, even simpler.

Here are some of the most useful ways to use Google more effectively:

How would you search for an exact word or phrase?

If you put the word or phrase you are searching for in parenthesis [“ and ”], Google will specify the search so that the results will contain exactly what is within the quotation.

Did you know that ‘Carpe Diem’ is a Latin phrase meaning to ‘seize the day’? Well, now you do.

How would you search for something on a specific site?

In order to search for something on a specific site, lets say you are looking for the Women’s Department at Macy’s, all you have to do is search [site: macy’s womens] and the first link should lead you straight to the Women’s Department at Macy’s!

How would you correctly search for a definition?

Now this one is really easy. All you have to do is type [define:] and then the word that you want to define, into the Google search bar. Google will give you the exact definition of that word at the top of the search page.

For example, if you didn’t know before reading this what the word “syntax” means, now you’ll know! (I had to search the definition before I even started writing this)

How would you search for a specific product available within a specific price range?

Let’s say you’re looking to buy a Polaroid Camera between $100 and $200. Just type [Polaroid Camera 100..200] into the search bar and this is what you’ll get:

How would you search for a specific filetype?

Depending on the type of file you are searching for, you just have to type in the name followed by [ext.pdf] or [ext.doc] for example. The first result in your search should give you the [PDF], [DOC], [PPT], etc. file for the topic you searched.

How would you include or ignore words in your search?

Including or ignoring words in your search is as simple as adding a + or – to those words which you would or wouldn’t like included. For example, searching [computers – windows], gives you results for everything computer related, excluding Windows computers. The first result this search turned up was actually an ad for the new MacBook Pro from Apple. 

How would you find related pages?

All you have to do to find similar pages is type [related:] followed by whatever you want really. Here’s an example for all those Harry Potter fans out there (including myself):  

How would you find a topic, searching all available synonyms of a word?

Just by adding [~] before the topic you are searching for will give you thesaurus results for that word, as well as search results based on synonyms of the word. An example would be to type [~happy] into your Google search bar, and the result would be:

How would you find the time in another country?

I think by now you will be able to guess how to shortcut finding the time in another country. It’s as easy as typing in [time:] followed by your country of choice. For example,

How would you find out how many Egyptian pounds you get for $20 Canadian dollars?

If you know the abbreviations for Canada and Egypt then this should be quite easy for you. Using this example all you’d have to type in would be [20 CAD to EGP] and then you’d find out that $20 is 133 Egyptian Pounds, give or take a pound. It’s as simple as that. 

If you're looking for more Google-related shortcuts, simply type [related: google shortcuts] into Google and you're sure to find some! You can also check out this video for more helpful tips:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Je2RGx-zM