Week 5 - Power of Internet for Learning

It is not hard to find a computer in the classrooms these days. Every classrooms will be equipped with at least one computer and lessons are usually conducted with the help of these technologies. Teachers will be showing videos or pictures from the internet and explaining the topics using the graphics on the projector. Lessons are made more interactive these days, students are encouraged to have a laptop or tablet for lessons. Some of the materials that were being covered will be shared through the internet. Students will be expected to download materials from the school sites and use it for class.

E-learning has became an essential tool for students today to access school materials from school or home. E-learning is a platform where the teachers will post up materials and students are suppose to access these materials online at home and go through a virtual lesson and complete some questions given. Students are also able to interact with their teachers via this platform. They can post questions and teachers can access these questions and answer all the doubts online.

Some classrooms had been replaced by e-learning. Learning and teaching are being conducted online and students may not be required to attend class physically in school. They will have to log on to the platform from home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrrzTSp60RI

Week 4 - Doing Business On The Internet

There are four components to make E-marketing successful. The data, software, skills and networks.

Data:
You need to know who are your competitors, how's the market like, how many competitors you have in the market, how popular is your market? You need to find out more about the market you are targeting before you actually start on anything. You need to know how to improve your site's traffic should you start the site. Start getting leads from various medias. It will be helpful when you start to promote your site.

Software:
What kind of software do you need when you start up your own site? What makes your site different from the others that are already in the market. How efficient are the softwares that you are going to use? If you are expecting large site traffic, you will have to invest in better softwares. If you are expecting little site traffic, you may just have the basic softwares. Selecting the software based on your traffic is very important. You do not want to invest on things you don't need or not investing on things you need and lose some revenues in the process.

Skills:
With the datas and softwares in place, you will need the skills or someone with the skills to analyse and report to you. With everything in place, it's hard to miss out all the important information or details that you need for your e-market.

Networks:
Lastly, you need to build networks with your current and potential clients on and offline. Combining all your clients onto one site is effective too (Facebook, twitter, linkd etc). Building your reputation online is very important too. With your reputation being built online, it will be so much easier to continue building on what you already have.

With these four components together, you will be able to make sure that your e-market starts on a right track. After these four components, it will be entirely up to you how you handle the good responses from the public.

Week 3 - Social Networking

FACEBOOK

Mark Zuckerberg, one of the five founders of the online sensation https://www.facebook.com were only college students when they had the idea of launching Facebook into their campus (Harvard). Zuckerberg was exposed to programming and computers at a very young age by his father. His father first exposed him to Atari Basic Programming and from there, a private tutor was being hired to teach Zuckerberg. By high school, Zuckerberg was already developing communications tools and games. He had came up with the ideas for instant messenger even before AOL's IM was introduced. He even built Synapse Media Player which had received a 3 out of 5 ratings on PC Magazine.

He has already built his name as a programming prodigy by the time he was in high school. He was already building programmes for fun and he has been building many different types of programmes.

Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004 in Zuckerberg's dormitory room.. However, Zuckerberg was sued by his seniors for intentionally misleading them to believe that he was helping them build a social network and used their ideas for Facebook. Started out from Harvard, it was quickly spread to other schools like Columbia, NYU, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, Penn, Brown and Yale University. From there, Facebook was slowly building up and has now became the most sought after social networking website. In 2010, there were 500 million users on Facebook.

Financial strategies were implemented on Facebook shortly after. Facebook are earning income from advertising on the site. Zuckerberg was ranked first on its 2010 list of the Top 100 most influential people of the information age.

At the age of 30, he is worth about US$ 31.6 billion.

TWITTER

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and co-creator of https://twitter.com, is also the CEO of Square (a mobile payments company). Dorsey, Stone and Noah Glass are the co-founders of Twitter which was spun off from Obvious. As Twitter slowly grow into popularity, the founders are seeing it as a perfect opportunity to earn through the site. Dorsey has later developed a new site called Square, a platform that accepts credit and debit card payments on mobile device. 

In 2013, Dorsey even made it to the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company.

With these two successful people behind the two famous social networking sites, there is no questions how these two sites became so successful and popular among the people all around the world today.

Week 2 - Social Media

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube have become the hot sensation among not only the youths but the adults and young children too. With the increase popularity of these platforms, more and more people are addicted to the usage of these platforms. These platforms are where people will meet and discuss about things, life and anything and everything. People are posting pictures on these platforms more than before. 

Social medias have become not only a platform for people to know more people, people to connect with each other, they had also became a platform for marketing campaigns. Companies are turning to social medias for exposures on top of the usual flyers distributions, newspapers advertising etc. The video below clearly show why social medias are an excellent platform on how companies can get maximum exposures. 

The 5 Impacts of Social Media

News- Social media has become an important source of news. News are spread around through social media really quickly. Even though the credibility of the sources are questionable but the news through social media are an efficient way of updating the happenings around the world quickly.

Interaction- Social media helps people to keep in touch in a more regularly, and sometimes, more intimately, than was ever before because of time and space constraints. People who are cities or continents apart can keep in touch so effortlessly, creating an opportunity to experience different cultures. It's free and interactions are almost immediate.

Political Landscapes- Social media has enabled greater political awareness and organization, which has in some cases rewritten entire political landscapes. It has particularly played a large part in the Iran elections, and Obama’s reelection for a second term as US President, and inspired the political unrests in Egypt.

Learning- Social media has also played a large part in teaching literacy. Children who start using social media develop early communication skills.

Marketing- The whole dynamics of marketing have been changed, and rather than investing in mass channels ads, companies are becoming more consumer-centered through interactions made over social media. They are able to understand the needs of the market from the market itself, greatly altering the way marketing has been done in the past.
(Sources)

Week 1 - The Past and Present of Internet

THE PAST

The father of computers is called the ARPANET. It is the first network of computers that is created in 1969. The first message message that was being sent over ARPANET was later evolved into the internet we have today. Packed switched networks were developed in the late 1960s and the early 1970s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET is the reason why the Professors developed protocols for networking, where many separate networks can be joined together into the same network. Telnet was the first commercial version of ARPANET which was launched in 1974. In 1981, BITNET was introduced. It was connected to IBM mainframes around the educational community and around the world to provide mail services. A link was provided so that the BITNET and ARPANET can be connected. Internet was only started in 1982 when ARPANET started using TCP/IP standard. The DNS (domain naming system) was implemented in 1984.

TCP/IP standard is where the different networks methods got unified. The differences between network protocols were hidden by using a common internetwork protocol instead of the network being responsible for reliability. With the roles of the network being reduced to the bare minimum, it is now possible to join almost any networks together, no matter what's their characteristics. The development of TCP/IP implementations for many operating systems has scheduled a migration of all hosts on all of its packet networks to TCP/IP.

The map of TCP/IP test network in 1982

THE PRESENT

With TCP/IP in place, us connecting to internet today has become so much more convenient. You can access to the internet on your laptop, smartphones, tablets. You can access to the internet wherever you are, whether you are on the subways, in class, waiting in a queue for starbucks or even in the washroom. Internet has become a necessity irregardless of your age. I see a 3 years old girl tapping on youtube on her iPad away, her mother standing beside her surfing Facebook on her smartphone, the man standing near them in executive suit busy typing emails while waiting for the train to arrive at the stop, everyone is using the internet these days. The impact of the internet is so great that almost everyone cannot live without the internet. 

An advantage of the internet is that you can join a community. You can create new social contacts all over the world, which you could not do so easy without the internet.Such communities can also help people who can not go out to find friends in the real life because they are disabled. Therefore they can chat with other people via the internet. Sometimes it is also easier for people, who are afraid to look into the other’s face while talking, to chat with a person that they do not know. There is something between them which makes it easier for them to communicate. It also does not matter if you have a terrible appearance because you can pretend to be whatever you want. You can also change your gender and your age to talk about topics which you do not normally do. However, there are no time and place limitations and there are no boundaries, both geographical and political. You can chat with people in Australia and you have freedom of your mind in a way. Moreover the internet is much cheaper than the real life, e.g. phoning a friend in Australia costs more than to chat with him.From my point of view the e-mail has replaced the traditional letter. You do not have to buy stamps anymore and it is much faster and also for free. You can also add files to your E-mail and that’s why a big data transfer is possible. Therefore you do not have to send disks with information around the world anymore and you have your information in a digital way. Another free service of the internet is sending SMS. You can save a lot of money if you do not send it with your mobile phone especially from Austria to America. You also have the opportunity to register as a user. Then you can use more things, e.g. sending E-postcards, I-messages (messages between registered users), and lead an address book. You can also place your digital photos in the internet. With a password and a login name your friends in America can look at your photos without sending them to them. Another important part is online gaming. You can play with people from all over the world and share your knowledge. In my opinion it’s more exiting to play with friends than playing alone.Additionally, another big advantage of the internet is the easy access to information. Online reference books and dictionaries replace the way to the bookshop or to the library. It is again cheaper to search for information in the internet than to buy a book, that is old after one year. In the internet a lot of information is renewed and up to date. You can also find information which is very new and a book does not exist yet. Moreover you can read the daily newspapers from all over the world, sometimes for free. You do not have to buy them anymore. In addition, most newspaper sites have an archive in which you can search for old articles. However, the internet is also a big “advertising company”. A lot of enterprises have a homepage with ads and support opportunities. On some of them you can order products online. Then you do not have to go to the city anymore. You avoid waiting in front of the cash because of a long queue. Moreover, you can get the newest stock exchange courses because the stock exchange in the Internet is always the most current one. You also have the ability to tell the computer to buy shares when the course is down. Besides you can learn with the internet. CBTs (Computer Based Training) already exist but you can also join an internet course with other members. Furthermore you can hold videoconferences which means that e.g. your teacher is sitting in his office in America and teaching you in Austria. This is very important in the medical sector because doctors from all over the world can join an operation. So specialists can give tips and help other doctors to complete the operation successfully. The patient has not to wait until a specialist will come from America. But this is only available because of the internet 2 which is much faster. The internet is a database full of information and offers us a lot of services, sometimes for free. This makes our life easier and sometimes also cheaper. All in all I think that the internet is very useful especially for students.