Artifact #7

It is great that teachers are starting to use technology to stop cheating.  Cheating has always been a huge problem when it has come to large colleges because teachers are just not able to go around and make sure that every student is taking the test honestly.  This is why it is outstanding that colleges such as Central Florida have implemented a way for students to take tests with having almost no chance of cheating.  These rooms that have cheat proof computers are perfect because it stops almost any chance that students had of trying to cheat.  Not only is it really hard for them to cheat, but even if it is possible they are so scared to try because of the environment that they are in that most of the time they probably will not try to do it.  It would be really great if many of the other colleges in the nation would use this system so that students do not cheat on tests, but with funds often times hard to come by it will probably be a long time before many of the schools move to this system.  The use of stopping plagairism through technology is becoming more widespread though.  In high school I had to always submit my papers to turnitin.com which was a place that looked to see if the paper you wrote had i phrases or anything in common with any other papers that were posted on the internet.  This is a very good tool to stop plagairism and there are many other websites like it that teachers use on the college level.  Plagairism is probably the most common problem today because many students like to take the easy way out and just copy and paste a paper from the internet.  So websites like this are essential so that this humungous problem is prevented as much as possible.  What is important about technology now becoming a big factor in stopping cheating is that the percent of people that admitted to cheating in college has gone down and probably will continue to go down.  With the great advancements in technology for stopping cheating only continuing to get better, I bet as the years go by and these different ways to prevent it become more affordable for schools the percent of people in college that cheat will probably fall below 10 percent.  This would be a huge step for colleges because it has probably been a really long time since the number of people that cheat was this low.  This would help many of the students learn more in the long run because they would actually do what they are supposed to do when they are in college, which is study.  The more the technology gets better and cheating gets stopped, the more that students will learn during their time in college.  This will only teach them how much hard work that they need to do once they get to the real world and this will make them better business people because they will often times be very advanced compared to the other workers that they are working with because they know the value of hard work.

ePortfolio 2

Artifact 3 blog
http://andymac22.blogspot.com/2011/02/artifact-3.html

Artifact 4 blog
http://andymac22.blogspot.com/2011/02/artifact-4.html

Artifact 5 blog
http://andymac22.blogspot.com/2011/03/artifact-5.html

Artifact 6 blog
http://andymac22.blogspot.com/2011/03/artifact-6.html

Artifact #6

This video is very interesting because it talks a lot about how things that are done on the internet can start a revolution with certain things.  At the beginning I could not quite figure out what he was talking about because it was very vague on what the video was going to be about.  But then I realized that his website is a big hit with many people because you can post anything that you want on it and it can be completely anonymous and it will be deleted within a certain amount of days.  This is good because on most websites once a person posts something it is on there forever and if they write something that they regret, they may not have a chance to get rid of it.  This is also helpful because if many people talk about one thing and complain about how it is hurting a certain group of people on this TED website then they can help get whatever they want changed.  A very interesting example of this is when they protested against the church of scientology.  It is a very odd church and just a few posts on the internet easily made a large protest against the church.  The church is completely bogus because only rich movie stars can afford to join it and from what I saw they believe in some really out there stuff like aliens.  Scientology is so odd that they even made a full episode of South Park dedicated to ripping it.  Another thing that was very interesting is about how the cat abuser got his due and was caught.  Many people saw a video on youtube about a cat being abused and within days there was thousands of post going against the man that made the video.  This sparked the police to go after who made the video and abused the cat.  They found the man within days and he was arrested.  This was very interesting because it is hard to believe that just a bunch of blog posts could get a man caught for animal cruelty.  The internet is a very powerful tool, that when used correctly can spark many people into a movement against whatever is a bad thing going at that particular time.  People should continue to use the internet more often to get major protests across against important issues.  Back in the 60s and 70s the only way to protest something that people were against was to march in washington d.c. and just hope that you had enough people in the protest to make people on capitol hill notice that the event you were protesting is very important and it needs to be stopped.  Now the internet is so revolutionary that millions of people can sit in the comfort of their own home in front of their keyboard and all type whatever needs to be protested against and usually they will be noticed by somebody and the issue can be brought to the national media's attention.  It is very important that we continue to use the internet as a tool of change and use it less as a tool for just playing around.

Artifact 5

This podcast talks about how porn is a big part of the internet and has been for a long time.  It is crazy to think that porn was the largest hit websites until social networks like facebook and myspace came along.  It is very obvious of the popularity of those two social networks because everybody always talks about them in everyday conversations.  What is surprising about porn being so popular is that you never hear anything about it so when you hear that it was the most hit thing on the internet and that it still is one of the most popular things out there, it makes you wonder just which ones of your friends frequently visit it without you knowing about it or when you strike up a conversation with some random person you might take a second to think, is this guy a big porn watcher?  From what it said on the podcast, porn is becoming such a large industry that they are becoming more advanced than most other websites out there.  Their innovative way to display live streaming images in HD is just leaving everybody else in the dust trying to catch up with them.  They said how companies like CNN have not even gotten to the point yet where their live streaming video is even of a very high picture quality and they will look towards porn websites as a way to get the most advanced method to display their images.  I doubt that porn will ever be outlawed on the internet or they try to make it very restricted to where it is almost impossible to access because from everything that I have seen about it it is a big industry that would take a lot for it not to fail, so it is going to continue to be one of the largest industries out there.  The big wigs on the internet are not just going to be able to shut down something that is so large and popular that they even said in a song that that is all that the internet is for.  I do think that even though porn will always continue to be a pretty big business on the internet, the social media networks are going to continue to leave it in the dust more and more.  Social media networks are not only popular to normal people but they are also popular to those weirdos out there that try to find anybody they can to start stalking or try to do something to.  So while many people like that watch porn on the internet, they will also use the social media networks to fulfill their very odd desires.  That is why the social media networks will coninue to grow even larger than the porn industry, because the social networks atract everybody while the porn sites mainly attract men, and ones that visit them on a regular basis ar often people with problems that are very odd.  These 2 different types of websites will coninue to race head to head for the most popularity for a long time to come.