Triumph of the Nerds

This show chronicles the rise of the personal computers starting with the Altair 8800 and using Macinstosh and PC computing as standards. It also covered IBM and Microsoft. This series looked like it went from the 1970s to the 1990s and it had interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Cringley takes the viewer through the history of computing but also interjects personal stories into the show about how these ideas formed and what the outcomes were for the personal computing machine age.

Internet Lesson 9

The two internet searches that I used were dogpile and yahoo kids. I chose these because I knew that they would give different search profiles. Yahoo kids is a site that does not allow advertisements and as seen above it gave me sites that are all about Alaska for kids. The sites however are not listed in any particular order, you could search this again and again and get different answers each time. Most of these sites are sites that are made by kids or schools or foundations and are not necessarily factual. Yahoo kids does search its own site first for information and then the web for kid friendly sites. Dogpile on the other hand searched and found one million sites in 1.3 seconds. The first two pages of searches are advertisements for cruises or vacations in Alaska and the next three were for condos in Hawaii, even though I searched just 'Alaska'. This is due to keywords and linking certain words together in searches so that your website will come up no matter what is searhced. These tags are useful for people that use them the right way but advertisers use them for everthing so in the end they pop up an ad for a Hawaii vacation when a person searches for information on Alaska. One search engine is not better or worse then the other. If you can get a look at their protocols and search standards you will see that the majority of search engines search keywords and not actual content of the pages, this is what pops up the adverts and errors. By utilizing boolean symbols you can decrease the number of errors that you receive.

Internet Lesson 8

Internet Lesson 7

I reviewed Net Nanny and The Internet Filter. I did not like either of them becuase of their limitations when it comes to learning and evaluating sites based on actual content and not the names of the pictures or the description of the site. As a technology teacher I am more for a proxy server that allows sites to be visited that are approved as opposed to randomly blocking sites that may or may not have appropriate content based on a program that searches out keywords, you might as well be using google images to put together a photography portfolio if you are going to be limited by Net Nanny. Net Nanny is also a Windows program that is compatible with IE 7 but says nothing about backwards compatibility. The Internet Filter keeps track of sites but does not evaluate them based on the user that is logged on the computer. I think that in the future computer companies will move more towards having controls built into the system that allows blocking and monitoring for children. People above the age of 14 should be able to self-monitor or face losing priveleges as we have implemented in our district as a precaution. We also lock the history up so that the student can go anywhere but then the history is analyzed against a series of filters that I have set up. These are checked nightly and students who are breaking the rules are simply not allowed to go on the interent anymore- it is very affective. For home use the best system I have seen is the MAC Childsafe program where you set allowed sites and it doesn't let kids use the links within the site to get to other sites. If appropriate boundaries are set then it is up to the teacher or parent to teach kids what to go on and how to appropriately use the internet, not a net nanny.

Internet Lesson 6

I liked the open forums on the internet better then Moodle becuase it allows you to choose what topics you are interested in hearing about. The only thing that I did not like is joining groups that are not moderated because then you get a lot of junk mail. Groups that require you to join them are better for topics that are always moving and changing, that way you know that the stuff you are getting is topical. I belong to a book group that uses this approach and it works very well. I like that you can always see the main topic in the discussion and that is what you are in essence responding too- not someone elses comments. The Moodle site is good for classes but it can get confusing if someone posts to the wrong question or replies to someone else's reply- the tree can get very messy that way.

The Machine That Changed the World

I watched all five episodes of 'the machine that changed the world' originally produced in 1991. The first three episodes are like a history lesson taking you through the history of computing from Charles Babbage, through Difference Engines and COLOSSUS all in episode one which is then followed up by what was occuring in the 1940s and 50s with computers being used for the 1952 elections and the creation of the movie 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'. I was also unaware of the contributions of Atanasoff and how he was credited with the invention of the modern computer. I was interested in seeing more about computers and space that did not get alot of air time on episode two. In episode three, the paperback computer I got to see how the mouse was devised and was very interested in how they covered Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Later there was a segment on Sesame Street and how they covered computing, very interesting. I did not understand a lot about the chained computer theories or the illusions portion of the show. In episode 4 the show kind of went backward to the 50s-70s to discuss AI and how scientists and computer engineers have been working for decades to make a 'smart' computer that can think and learn for itself based off of mistakes and not preprogrammed responses. ELIZA was a project by Weizembaum and SHRDLU by Windograd that looked at AI. The self-driven vehicle seems like a possibility now with the pilotless airplanes that are being developed by the Navy. In the final episode the rapid development of computers was discussed as well as how print material was now being put on CDs - 450 books on one CD. The digital world is being substituted in for the analog one and global communications are more broad and well defined.
I felt that this series was interesting and informative but not that topical as in the past twenty years the advent of the internet has superceded many of these topics and it is not even forseen in this movie series. I also think that a series about computing and the digital age should be easier to find and download for educational purposes.

Internet Lesson 5

Internet Lesson 4

Internet Lesson 3