Tag Archive for: course-nocourse

Hello for the last time.

I started this semester with an air of certainty that was unwarranted.  As a person who spends an extreme amount of time within arm reach of an electronic that connects to the internet i would say i would double that undeserving confidence.  I mostly taught myself how to access and traverse the internet and when I started this class i didn’t expect much of the courses new information.  Through most of the course I believed that it was map for people who never bothered to learn the internet or weren’t born around the time that it was so ubiquitous. That the course was a crash course in how to use basic function that pertain to school or social media.  The course felt more as a doctrine or a way to propagate the message that this is the way it will become, that everything you do leaves a paper trail. It felt a bit too pushed and that when everyone slightly sees some truth in message they are more accepting in the whole thing.

Honestly now that this semester is coming to a close and I have made it far from unscathed, I can say that i was wrong on what this class meant and what I could have learned from it.  Any new way of using the internet wasn’t very interesting, I don’t believe I learned any new tricks or shortcuts with the mechanical part of using anything online, but my way of approaching social media has definitely changed.  The class has made me see that there is a lot more connection with anything that i do online to myself in the real world.  I have been very careful to change my identity online and understand that there is a schism between myself as a student and the pseudonym that I have on many different board.  This class has shown me through the affects of the project and the videos that my digital footprint is more set in stone than set in dirt or a muddy track. This course has been interesting to say the least, having to use social media as a main source for most of my project goes against everything i learned in elementary school up until now.  From the way the class was set up, hybrid and with a classroom that seemed a little chaotic constantly, i was very interested in what else was there to come.  The times we were in class I tried my best to engage and interact for many  reason, some because I was feeling guilty over forgetting to do the work but also because the class did interest me on how much importance was put into seeing the student interact online and their ideas that went along with it.

I guess the previous part was a mix with the impact and changes but continue with more focus on the impact i would say that i will continue to be stuck in my typical methods for school. While the class was interesting and engaging i didn’t see a major shift in my scholarly life with the teaching.  The bottomline I think that the course would be more useful and expand more beyond this one semester but i don’t believe that the school has changed enough for that to happen.  The major points that i pulled out the effects and community based learning from the book I had seen and studied in communication courses, the videos made me see the true modernizing of established ideas like democracy and aggregated information and work, but again I don’t believe that the environment is willing to take these changes even if the student is capable.  Just how the United states scientific community already uses the metric system pretty well and the common public is not exposed or given any reason to change, I see the same for the school system.  Students are willing to change to fit this new age with digital identity and it is effects but as it sits now those new skills will stay dormant.  The skills offered in this class were amazing for veteran users and novel ones, we just a place to use them effectively.

This post is my last post for this class. That is an ominous way to start this post, but it is the truth! So the final assignment is a reflection on what I had originally thought “digital citizenship” meant before the course.

Before the course, I thought that “digital citizenship” was about the way the Internet is a deeply integrated part of the world. I thought it was about how the Internet makes people more social but also more closed off. My final thoughts were about content that is on the Internet and how we consume said content.

I would say that this course has definitely opened my eyes to what the Internet can be. I feel that as someone who grew up as the Internet progressed, I thought that I knew the Internet pretty well. But this class showed me that digital citizenship is much more about the participation involved with the Internet. The Internet has a lot of power to pull people from all over the world together and grow a community. Each social media site shows its own type of community and each community can affect the world in different ways. My opinion of the Internet has changed. I don’t think that having access to the Internet in our pockets through our phones makes us more closed off. I truly think the Internet connects the world in such a way that we don’t even realize how connected we are. For example, my boyfriend started a personal blog that he writes from little, old, humble Camarillo, and he gets international readers! I started a YouTube page more for myself like a video diary, but the reality is that anyone in the world can watch my videos if they want to. The idea that the whole world is connected is insane to me. I didn’t think that digital citizenship meant a type of worldly citizenship.

I still believe in the importance of the content that users put out and also the content we absorb. Because it’s so easy to put out one’s own content for everyone to see, we must be aware of what we put out. Any content that we put out is a form of engaging and a form of participating in the world wide web. I think that this aspect of the Internet calls us to be more aware of what we put out and what others are doing on the Internet.

The different skills that I learned from this course that I will definitely carry with me is crap-detection, lurking, and the comfort of engaging. The Internet gives us access to the world and its information, it’s important to utilize it (and utilize it correctly and knowledgeably!). Lurking and engaging are techniques of research that I had not used before this class, and I think it’s extremely useful. With these techniques, I’m able to gather knowledge from people all over the world, and I think that exposing myself to different walks of life and knowledge will in turn make me more knowledgeable.

To my readers, whether you’re from my class or otherwise, thank you so much for reading along this semester. I’m not sure yet if I will continue blogging, although, this experience has been extremely enjoyable for me. I think that it has also broadened my writing style. There’s not the pressure of a grade so much with these blog posts, so I feel that my writing and my ideas flow more freely onto the screen/page. If anything, I may continue to blog about my experiences at school.

Again, thank you so much! I hope you’ve had fun, because I definitely have.

Guy Trimby (Plymouth Marine Laboratory) in collaboration with Paul Spaur, and the rest of the AARR team, set to prove that OpenROVs can be used as tools to detect fluorescence in the marine environment, and used the Cook Islands as a test bed for this experiment.Guy developed an UV LED light package, which excites proteins in organisms, causing them to emit a different wavelength of light (fluoresce), often times giving off brilliant colors.

A specially filtered Go Pro camera filters and records the light for analysis. Paul and the AARR team outfitted their ROVs with a special payload setup to carry the system, and modified their main LED lights with filters to make them emit only blue/UV light, and filtered the main ROV camera.

The fluorescence is used in many species as warning signs, in communication, and in protection from the sun. The system has a lot of important implications such as: detecting new organisms and proteins that fluoresce, using said proteins as biochemical markers for use in medical research, and for use in gauging the health of corals and other organisms.

We set up several sites in a coral reef, and recorded day and night surveys of each. At night, it was difficult to see, so we marked each area with glow sticks prior to sunset, and navigated the ROVs out to each one. We were able to see each coral that fluoresced both in day and night for identification, and we even discovered a species of clam, the Small Giant Clam (Tridacna maxima) that was not previously known to fluoresce!

I have gotten through the tough wind problem I was faced with and have created a formula which can be used in the algorithm to shift directionality of movement based on wind. I am using a color scheme that picks out targets that are within the right speed, this is radial velocity. 

and I have used a grid to show targets that echo back the right dBZ level (5-15 dBZ)

And ran the first test at 0 knots and 0 degrees (these are all of the matching targets aka birds)

This can be adjusted for wind speed and direction, shown here at 45 knots and 45 degrees. 

I am still looking for the best wind data available. This will be an evolving process with new layers of detail added as more information is gathered.

Today I had a presentation at R.J. Frank Academy of Marine Science and Engineering to show them my capstone project and tell them a little about college in general. Overall they were pretty receptive, especially when it came to an activity, which I created for them. The activity was to somewhat give them a taste of what my project is like. I had this cartoon version of Santa Rosa Island printed out on 11″ x 17″ sheets of paper and introduced their “target” on my powerpoint slide which was the Italian Thistle plant. I had several “copycat” plants that looked similar but stressed that they should keep in mind the three characteristics of the plant. They all did very well with only one or two groups making minor mistakes.