Left unlocked. Seriously?

Be security minded and never leave your computer accounts unattended.  

Bynum’s Definition

In 1989 Terrell Ward Bynum developed a broad definition of computer ethics following a suggestion in Moor’s 1985 paper. According to this view, computer ethics identifies and analyzes the impacts of information technology on such social and human values as health, wealth, work, opportunity, freedom, democracy, knowledge, privacy, security, self-fulfillment, etc. This very broad view of computer ethics employs applied ethics, sociology of computing, technology assessment, computer law, and related fields. It employs concepts, theories, and methodologies from these and other relevant disciplines. This conception of computer ethics is motivated by the belief that – eventually – information technology will profoundly affect everything that human beings hold dear.

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Pixlr Collages

Once a week I visit all my students blogs to provide them with feedback. The feedback chat takes between 10 and 15 minutes each and is mainly organized into three categories: relevance / coherence of the blog contents, writing quality and layout / format of each post. One question arose quite frequently, How can you place two or more images together in the same paragraph? We tried out many things: we used text flow tools (unfortunately the text did not flow the way we wanted), we placed some HTML tags (for some inexperienced users this seemed to be too complicated and a waste of time) and in some cases we finally used the "<table>" tag. 

Some students liked the idea of using the "<table>" HTML tag and they are using that "old fashioned" tag to arrange elements in a web page. As Blogger allows us to insert our own CSS, I'm planning to "migrate" those old fashioned tables to CSS markup descriptors in the near future, but that is a topic for a different post. Other students preferred to use another kind of tool. 

What about using an image editor to arrange images as a collage? then we would use the collage as a solid image, composed with the smaller images as components of the bigger one. The authors of the post would have to insert a single image file, still looking like a complex arrangement of different pictures. An example, the following image is a unique file, containing several others as components: 

Now, here you have a nice tutorial to learn how to create a collage.

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Bits being equal

Browsing the Internet I found a lecture that´s similar to one of my recent sessions with you. As we began learning how a computer represents an image, the "bit" was presented as the most basic building block of modern computing. Collections of bits are interpreted as being different kinds of information, for example: this aggregate of 8 bits (01100001) represents the letter "a", if you consider the ASCII code.  

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Photo Editing - Sharpen and pixel replacement

Photo or image editing is one of the most interesting creation techniques I ever experienced. No matter whether it is a photograph or a digital drawing, I am passionate about creating images. I usually begin with a sketch or a fast edit, just to see if the workflow I have in mind, will do or not. Most of the time, a rapid preview is enough for me to confirm whether I´m on the right track and if I actually am, hours of dedicated work are to come.

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Converting files is an easy task

A few weeks ago we were working in our audio personal presentations. Some of the students decided to use their personal device, such as cell phones or Ipods, to record their voices. Some others used the Windows Sound Recorder or even Vocaroo.com. Although the variety of devices and tools used, it was something of value for the learning process, we found a limitation. The selected streaming platform (GoEar)  allowed us to upload only MP3 files. 

The problem was, that we had created many different audio files in a variety of formats, such as: AIFF, WAV or even MP4 (come students used youtube to record presentations). What would happen if we had no other choice than uploading to GoEar? We needed a file converter, one that would be available to all students, from home or from school. I suggested zamzar.com  

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The Flubaroo experience

Google forms is a great tool for conducting online surveys. Teachers around the world are using this tool in a number of different ways, including for online quizzes for students. The advantages of gathering student information in digital form and being able to analyze that information using formulas and charts are simply undisputed.

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You sound...

This week we were engaged recording our audio personal presentations and publishing them in our blogs as the first post. 

Students ranging from 2nd. to 6th. HS years had the task to present themselves and record the audio. All students got the same short task description with few constraints as possible (personal information protection guidelines were discussed previously). A short tutorial was available only for beginners.

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