Mikey's Tech Journey

                 The tech topic I chose was the fascinating and growing world of mobile applications. The biggest reason behind this is because of the vast potential mobile applications, or apps, possess. The website emizentech.com reviewed a Statista report indicating “there are about 7.1 billion app users worldwide,” and that, “global revenue is expected to reach $808 billion in 2022,” (EmizenTech, 2022). This is a burgeoning industry that is only expected to grow in the coming years.     Apps translate, “communication efforts into interactive customer experiences heightening cognitive, emotional, emotional, and behavioral responses,” (Kim & Yu, 2016). The world is now more connected than ever before. Through certain apps, individuals have the capabilities of crossing geographical boundaries and allows us to communicate with anyone who also uses the app and has an internet connection.    I use my smartphone ever...

    With the advent of computers and the internet, so too came the invention of harmful scams. These malicious entities have become more and more prevalent since the turn of the century and exist in various forms. From existing in different types of computer viruses, spam emails, phishing, and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks there are a multitude of ways for user’s personal information to be accessed and disseminated without knowledge or consent.               During week 3 of our course we learned about ping commands and even practiced using these to access different websites. This week’s venture into security took the concept even further by revealing how one can use ping commands in a negative and harmful way in the form of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. These types of security breaches require no hacking of any kind, nor does it involve the installation of any type of malicious software which is also known ...

       The role of computers in the workplace has shifted immensely over the past decade. Especially in the Education field. Being computer literate is definitely a must for everyone considering computers have become an essential aspect of the job. Whether it be with students learning from a computer, educators teaching from it, or administrative staff using computers to perform their daily tasks.         Technology’s presence in the workplace has been growing since the turn of the century with the advent of faster computers that could perform greater tasks, but I feel that the pandemic expedited this change even more so. For the last couple of years the education field has shifted to rely more heavily on technology by having instructors teach remotely from virtually any location. This may have been present before 2020 but the pandemic really forced most, if not all, colleges and K-12 schools to go virtual at higher rates. This is also t...

  Hi World,        Ping Command Activity – This was a great exercise that highlighted how ping commands work in a hands-on way. I enjoy being able to play around with topics we are learning about. Here are the screenshots of my ping results. The two other websites beyond google was the official Australian government response website: Australian.gov.au and the official website of the government of Japan: Japan.go.jp         I was rather shocked to see that the ping to Japan was the quickest when compared to google and the Australian website! The average speed for Japan was 24.025 ms (milliseconds). Google’s average speed was 24.474 ms and the Australian site’s average was 188.582 ms. Given how far away those countries were I expected them to take longer because there is so much more distance that needs to be traversed. Given that the Australian ping took the longest was expected, but the fact google sits in the middle is a surpr...

   Working with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel was just the refresher that I was needing. I have worked with these platforms for years now but as we know, the less we ‘use’ it the more we ‘lose’ it. As in lose our memory for how to properly navigate each platform and take advantage of their respective features and capabilities. As such, this exercise was very much needed and I am thankful for it. Each program has their own strengths and specialties, and it ultimately boils down to what it is we are trying to do.    Word has always been my go-to for writing papers and this makes sense because it was built with this in mind. Word is literally billed as a ‘Word processor’ computer application. This means it was designed specifically for creating formatted text. “Formatted text refers to features of a document like margins, text size, bold text, italicized text, colors, number of columns, etc,” (Vahid & Lysecky, 2019). These features come in handy to express di...

  One of my favorite apps that I spend way too much time on is TikTok. It is almost scary how I can be on it, and then boom, suddenly it’s two hours later.     The beauty of TikTok is how vast it is in terms of content. For those who are not familiar, TikTok is an app that is full of short video clips that users create and post for all to see. There is also a “live streaming” feature available as well where users can “go live” and record what is actively happening in their life.    Usability for this app is very straight-forward. As soon as an account is created you are asked about your interests and are immediately inundated with random posts from users across the globe in what is called the ‘home’ or ‘For You’ section. This is basically a never-ending chain of videos where you just scroll down from one video to the next. The more time you spend watching and liking videos allows the app to create a personalized algorithm for you. For example: if I ‘like’ lots o...

  Here is the URL link to my Scratch program:   https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/678680203   My Scratch short program project was a total of 36 blocks. This process seemed like it would be extremely easy at first, but I soon realized it was not quite as simple as previously thought! The moment I created my account I went right into the video tutorial section and quickly began thinking about what I wanted to do. The video tutorials were presented in an easy-to-digest fashion. The website design overall was easy to navigate, and I found everything to be the epitome of the term: “user-friendly”.               The most difficult part of my experience with Scratch was getting the timing of my program project right. I wanted my project to feel like a scene of a tv show. For everything to play on continuously with the click of one button. Getting it started was the easy part, but the real trouble began when I star...