Wednesday, 18 June 2014

MIT OpenCourseWare
Today, we have alternatives to develop ourselves for increasing experiences and improving skills. One of them which I recommend for you is MIT OpenCourseWare or MIT website for studying, free e-learning resources from professional professors who teach at MIT university. E-learning from MIT is well-known website as a good resource for everyone who is enthusiastic of learning. If you click this URL http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm, you will find the homepage. After that you can choose the lesson from menu existing on the top of homepage and study with some video clips, download free documents for your revising. The interesting thing of this e-learning resource is obliged step to study, student must do the exercise before studying the next topic, and recommendation good books for external reading. I have used this website to study about science, I found that it is easy to use and very useful to augment my knowledge. You can study anything which you want anytime. If I compare this website to the others, I find some beneficial things likes obligation to learner in order to do the test before passing to the next lesson besides, information from this website is worth trusting, gained by world-class professors. The disadvantages of MIT OpenCouseWare is about tapescript. If you are not the native English speaker, it will be quite hard for you to lecture the lesson from listening to teacher speaking all content in English. The additional things of this e-learning should have subtitle for learners who study English as a foreign language. For more improvment, MIT OpenCourseWare should have better quality of video clips as high-definition quality. In my opinion, MIT OpenCourseWare is a good choice to evolve yourself and get more exciting experience on your own.

Let 's see the sample!

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.  
Peter Drucker




Can't live without it!

      I've been using Twitter for about 4 years. It has been really important for me to keep in touch with my friends. There are a lot of funny things in Twitter and there are always something new to read. I can never feel lonely with Twitter. Most of the time when I'm on Twitter, I prefer reading on the timeline where everybody share their tweets. 
       For me I prefer the design of Twitter more than Facebook's because Twitter has the classic white and blue design and it's really easy to work on.     

     Sometime when I feel a little bit lonely, I like to slide into my timeline and check out about the new things and all the funny things my friends posted on. It make me feel like I'm actually staying and talking with my friends. It's the easier way to catch up with all of the news around the world. Many news are shared and spread so quickly without analysis so that mean some of them can be just the funny rumour.     

      The bad side of Twitter that I hate the most is the maximum of the alphabet per tweet. It's the worst thing in Twitter that we have to organize long sentence into 140 alphabet which is so difficult when I have a lot of things to share, a lot of things that running in my mind. So if someone from Twitter company accidentally read this message, I would like to ask you for improvement in the limit of the tweet please. Finger-crossed on that! x-)
Living without my laptop would be really hard, because it is a gadget that is quite important for me and for my daily life.  It is a HP Laptop and I need to admit that it is not very good , but what can I do? I really need it and it is  extremely useful, because I use it for lots of things.
In Brazil I used to have a better laptop, but it has broken. So I bought a new one in Auckland and I had a bad decision  choosing  for buying the cheapest laptop. Well, I don’t want to complain about it because as I said, my lap top is being very useful, but I could think a little bit more to buy it.
Anyway, it is helping me a lot because I am using it for studying and for communicating with my family. So I use to use it every day and I cannot live without it at the moment.  But if I could give you one advice I would say to never buy the cheapest thing as I did. Be careful, first search the product that you want and make sure if it is good enough or you are going to do what I did and have some problems with a slow computer. My point is, be patient buying your stuff  and you will make a good decision finding an useful gadget.

Karina: my wireless headphones by Dr Dree

Working out without using my headphone is technically impossible cause it helps me to find the energy from deep inside me. These headphones are different from others because it is so powerful and the sound is so clear that its impossible not to pay attention to the music, to the energy that transmits while you doing your exercise.

Exercising with one of those also makes your life easier, because its wireless so the cables are not going to disconnect, they are not coming out of your ears and instead of digging around for your music player when you want to change a song, change the volume or answer a call, you can just press the buttons on the right side of your earpiece. Simple, don’t you think?

Another good reason for buying them it’s the battery life. Takes up to 10 hours till you have to charge it again, so you can listen all day long.

Its possible to buy in 3 different colours: black, white and silver. Now, if you want another color or design, you can also buy the skins. I'm always amazed by the huge variety that I can find online.



The only disadvantage is the price, especially if you buy them in New Zealand where everything is more expensive. I suggest looking on ebay or even amazon to save. You won’t regret it and you will definitely going to work out harder listening one of them. 

my google map

MY GOOGLE MAP










 I have been in Auckland for 2 weeks. It not easy to remember the way and the bus but now I use the google map that helps me a lot. Google maps is an application that on a smart phone can show your current location. It has a lot of information such as where the bus stop is, the bus schedule and what the bus or train to catch when I want go to somewhere. It also gives information on interesting places such as a restaurant, cafe, shopping mall etc. It changed my life so much.
Now I can go to new places, that I never seen before without getting lost and I know what number the bus I should catch.
 But sometime when I am underground, it is a rainy day or I am in a place where there is no signal this program I can’t use it.

In the future I hope it will have more functions such as weather and traffic information , faster, higher quality and improved the internet access.

My laptop - Jake

My laptop makes me comfortable to live now. The functionality of the laptop is very good and useful. I can write out documents easily by typing. Also, I can watch a film, listen to music and search for anything on the web. I like using it.
It looks very simple with black colour. And, its little bit bigger and heavier than other laptops. So, it was uncomfortable to carry this laptop in the past. But now, Im used to carrying this.
Before getting this laptop, I used to use my desktop only at home. It was very inconvenient. Whenever I did my work, such as writing an essay, I should be at home. But, It has changed. The laptop has helped me with my work efficiently since I got it. I can use my laptop anywhere and at any time.
Ive been doing many things with it. Ive been using webcam to do webcam chatting with my family and friends in my country. And, Ive been surfing on the internet and watching American dramas for improving my English.
This model Ive got gives high performance for its price. Its very cheap compared with other models possessing the same efficiency.
The only disadvantage of this laptop is its design. As I said, It looks very simple. Frankly speaking, the design is countrified and old-fashioned. I think manufacturers didnt care about designing at all.
Even though there is a touch-pad on the laptop, I always use my laptop with a mouse. Touch-pad is very uncomfortable to use. So I want to get a touch-screen laptop. A small number of touch-screen laptops are being sold expensively on the market, but I heard that some companies will produce cheap touch-screen laptops. Cool.

Tuesday, 17 June 2014

facebook


<facebook>

I’m going to explain about facebook. it has already been popular in the world.

I think it is a pocket edition of the world. It includes magnificent functions.  First of all, you can find your old friends, neighbours, and even celebrities in facebook. When you find them, just pressing ‘friend’ button. If they accept your request, you could be one of friends of them. It is the main trigger of getting popular for people. You can easily be a friend with someone who you want or you can burn the bridges immediately via that button. Furthermore, the function that posting pictures, videos, and music is attracted people’s eyes. Even you can share someone else posts which impressed on you on your timeline. It’s one of communication methods in facebook.  Although sharing posts, there are several means of communication with each other. If you like someone’s posts, clicking the posts or pocking  your friends and back. Sometimes it’s heard very weird because there is just only one button (like button) to express your feelings.  That’s a tricky system. For example if the post that

Gadgets

Gadgets


   I chose talking about my laptop, because in my opinion is the most useful gadget at the moment. With it I can do any kind of research, keep on touch to my family and what`s happening on my country and still use it for entertainment such as internet videos or game
s. Not to mention that I can bring it with me anywhere I want like in big distance travels like the one I am doing at this moment here in New Zealand. Paying anything over the internet is much easier too, you don`t have to leave the comfort of your house just to go pay something, you can do it online, of course there is the risk of being robed but I think that you just have to know which sites you can rely on or not. One of the good aspects of my laptop is its speed and the screen quality, since I really like to watch TV series through the computer and watching a lot of videos, picking up a high quality monitor seemed essential to me. However, the laptop I have is now obsolete, I own him for 4 years now and it is already considered “heavy” and some people find its configurations too old, I don’t think that the weight of the computer matters that much, but I’d appreciate a lighter one. I think that some good improvements could be done in relation to its design and about its weight too, it doesn`t really bothers me but I think that those kinds of improvements would be really good too.


I can't live without....


My Laptop:

My Laptop is quite a good laptop with a good processor and good graphic interface.
It got all the normal functions of a laptop; it’s pretty well designed and also got the touch-screen and motion-sensor controller options.

I find this device important because it is connecting me via an easier way to my centres of interest. The main one is music and I have been recording, composing and sharing my own music with this device. A laptop is also a gate to the Internet, and then I can improve my musical culture by searching as more sources as I can as an inspiration.

I recently composed the beat for my future Hip Hop track by sampling a song of Led Zeppelin that I found on YouTube.

My laptop is quite expensive comparing to the others but I think it’s a worthy one because it has a perfect cooling system and so my HDD won’t have any kind of problems.
The brand (Asus) is going to improve all of the intern software by an update by the end of the month. It will include a cleaner interface for all the controls of temperature, power, brightness, etc…

I definitively can’t live without it…

Sunday, 15 June 2014

Benefit of different news source.



Benefit of different news source.

       The huge step of changing in news is how the journalist or the news writers reach to the source to get all the information for their report. Back in the early days, most of the journalists had to work hard on getting all the information. They had to be at the original source, have the appointment with the source so that you can get their opinions. Since they got the answer from the direct source, the occasion of the false of information can be reduced.

       But nowadays, most of the journalists chose the easier to get into the information. They mostly use the social network as the tool to get the information. They look mostly through the Facebook and Twitter which I think it is a really lazy way and the information can be wrong too because it’s just something on the internet. We never know that it’s the fake one or not.




THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EFFECT ON TELEVISION

THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EFFECT ON TELEVISION


When everyone talks about television, you will think about a large number of programs which you like in various kinds. Some people think that television is very useful media to spend time in a day. For me, television has both black side and white side to you. If you spend time on television likes features, news, educational programs, these will make beneficial things to you not only knowledge but also good attitude. Features can give you new perspective about many things around the world, help you as the pioneer to bring you to travel all over the world without transportation. Although, news might be boring for some people, everybody should watch news generally because your life must be known about each thing happening in each day. Furthermore, educational program will provide you a little knowledge that you have never known before or much knowledge as possible as you can watch. In contrast, if you waste your time on programs namely soap opera, too many of entertainment program, you will get nothing except entertaining yourself. Relaxation by watching television is a good method to make you feel better but watching television too much might occur your healthy problem about optic and obesity. You should not sit for long time to watch television like couch potatoes, you should pay attention to other activities activating your health and your mind. Television is a useful equipment for anyone who can control appropriately. It will open your new side of this world surely if you know how it works!

After reading my opinion…
Look and listen different opinion from this video clip
---How to Watch Television By Charlie Brooker---

And..."How about Steve Jobs?"
"I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saturday, 14 June 2014

Television is it Good? Bad?

                       

Every body knows that Television is one of the greatest inventions to ever be created. But is it true? As a child I always thought television was great. Television was amusing and brought entertainment to the comfort of households. Although, over the years I think that television has a big harm effects to childrens.

Television teaches young children bad habits and family values are weakened by peoples interest in television. Many people grew up watching television ages ranging from one through twelve. Many of the bad habits children pick up come from television. You can say there is a program to educate children. Yeah that is right! But Television programs for children are too explicit. Many programs promote violence and drugs, rather than programs that promote education. Children see it on television and think it's all right to do drugs and act out violence as long as you don't get caught.

Then there are late night shows where sexual content is used. Children at an early age shouldn't be learning about sex, they should be playing and having fun. Next there are family values. Before television, families used to sit at the dinner table and discuss daily agenda.
Now at dinner time many families sit in front of the television with their food in their hand and don't say anything to one another. There were times when families went to the movies or amusement parks for entertainment. Now, they just sit in front of the television watching a variety of programs and movies.

Especially a well organized household Television causes the world more harm than good. If you need a important stuff and it is Advertising at the TV then you can just call for it. You don’t have to go out and spend your time.

to summarize, television has a negative effects against children BUT you can control your children from watching TV and television also has a positive effects for us. 
So it's UP TO YOU!

Where did you hear ??

 



Newspaper (old but good)
Good : Have anyone never read newspaper? Although newspaper is a old and slow sources, but it has a lot of information and mostly story you can believe than other resources.
Bad: It  not easy to take a newspaper with you to everywhere and it harder to read it  than the other resources.


Internet (fast or false)
 Good : The internet is a good way for everyone who have a busy day because it is easy to read and it update all time.
Bad : You can’t believe all the story on the internet.


Word of mouth (easiest way)
Good : It is easiest way to receive a news.
Bad : It is the most unbelievable resources. you can’t believe it more than everything.


Overuse isn’t good

When I was 10 I used to spend more than 5 hours in front of the television per day, what I can say? I love cartoons, but my mom doesn’t share much my interest so I decide to take some classes of swimming and football after school to avoid problems with her. After this decision she was more relaxed about my health.

What I mean with this?
You know that most of the children in the world who spend more than 4 hours watching tv are obese (I didn’t know it until few days). Nowadays a lot of children and adults are obese or have problems in the time to sleep and when they are working or studying. This doesn’t mean that the fault is totally from the television but some cases are.

How do you know that?
Well I had to do a debate about this topic so I researched some information and I found a lot of negative effect and I coming back to my childhood I spend more than 5 hours but I was a national championship in swimming competitions and my notes always were acceptable to my parents. Tv could be so bad for you but if you use it in the wrong way mean, tv has a lot of negative effects but also has positive effect like entertainment, news and educations.


To conclude the television nowdays is part of our life to the majority of people and have negative and positive effects but the main responsibility for learning how to use it are our parents and ourselves.

Friday, 13 June 2014

What is mass media? (sarah)





Today i'm going to talk about mass media. Do you guys know eaxactly what is MASS MEDIA?
Its definiton is 'the means of communication that reach large numbers of people in a short time, such as television, newspapers, magazines, and radio.' Nowadays SNS(facebook, twitter.etc..) has become a significant media as well. As time has gone by, new media has been coming up and changing their funtions.
 As i mentioned previously, MASS MEDIA is based on 'communication'. it is called 'mass communication'. it is technologically and institutionally based mass production and distribution.
therefore,in other words, it is influenced who says what to whom through what channel with what effects. so human and media is as a symbiotic relationship.

 there are severals skills of mass media. it can be divided 5parts.
1. observation: it could observe our society.
2. analysis: making people's opinions.
3. connection: it connects person to person, other regions, even other countries.
4. delivering value: share our value
5. entertainment: after hard-working, we can be relaxed by tv, and we can express our feeling via media.

Otherwise, there are disadvatages of mass media as well. firstly, media can manipulate the public.
for example, in korea when politicians commited crimes, they spread celebrites rumors for lying low.
therefore the crowd is changing like an incompetent. secondly, mass media is a  sort of commercial industry. we can be instigated easily. for instance, if you watch an advertisement that come popular celebrity and advert cosmetics, you would like to buy the product. but actually, you don't have to purchase it. finally, mass media is NOT UNBIASED ALL THE TIME. Sometiomes it is also manipulated by government like china, north korea because media is a commercial industry. so we have to criticize it with a keen sight and watch it with various aspects.

Pros/cons effects of television

Pros/cons effects of television

"The American people don't believe anything until they see it on television"
Richard Nixon.

I would like to begin talking about the positive and negative aspects of television with the Nixon`s sentence above. I think that it is the absolute true, not only about the American people but good part of the world population, and there`s where the problem lives. Anybody can watch anything on television at any time of the day, from the poorest family who haven`t gone to school and don`t have the critical power to judge what`s right or wrong to the richest one who have a solid opinion about political and economic issues as well as an active life in relation to them.

Propagandas are the most common way to mass manipulate and television is the perfect kind of media they are looking for once the mass is always watching it and as Nixon said, Americans (not only them) believe anything they see on television. Of course it has its benefits, I mean, when television first appeared in the house of families It was revolutionary, a kind of media that could bring news from anywhere in the world happening at that exact moment through images was really impressive, even nowadays there`s a lot of good stuff we could say television has to offer like valuable information about an enormous variety of subjects, but In the other hand, for children television can be really harmful if they are watching it for a long period of time, people need to keep in mind that the kids brains are still under development.


To sum everything up, I think that the television have a lot of good aspects as well as negative ones and that the most important one is when it comes to mass manipulation which is a negative one and there`s a lot of reasons why I think that, however I don`t think I have the space to debate that here but I think I made kind of a point here :)

Thursday, 12 June 2014

Hey everyone ! I’m the Wise owl, the Wise owl is trying to give you relevant
information about different topics !

Today, my teacher Regan asks my class to discuss about the pros and cons of Television nowadays.


PROS/CONS OF TELEVISION :


 Firstly, television business sector has dramatically increased last years.
More and more people is watching the television so it seems respectable to have a quick discuss about the behaviours that are going with this phenomenon.

BAD SIDES/DRAWBACKS of Television:

- T.V is more and more used by young people and teenagers and sometimes transforms them in kind of couch potatoes without any envy to discover or to make something great.
-T.V is reflecting the violence of our modern societies such as War, abusive
sexual behaviours, normalization of guns, mainstreaming… those things are of course part of our societies but shouldn’t be shown on public and non-protected channels.
-T.V is also the places of reality shows clichés and idealistic “
how to be” , that is pretty dangerous for teenagers or young children which are trying to create their own image… I mean.. They are not really good examples.

AVANTAGES of Television:

· Convenient
· Relaxing
· Varied

I didn’t really mentioned the advantages of television because, in my opinion, the different hazards shown could be avoided by balancing the way you watch at it and overall, T.V as to be considered as it is…. :  Fiction.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF TELEVISION

A good way of spend your time is watching TV, and as everything, it has positive effects and negative effects.
You can find a lot of different genres when you are channel surfing, it’s up to you what do you want to watch, to learn. There are some channels that for me are interesting, like sport channels and news channels, if I want to watch a movie I have internet and I can watch whatever I want. Also there are a lot of educational and scientist channels like Discovery, History Channel, etc. Watching this kind of channels it’s difficult to find a negative effect, one of them could be an addiction, but you are addict to something that “is not bad”.
Let’s talk about television news. I used to watch news in Colombia and there you can find 2 principal public channels, one of these channels supports one political side, and of course the other channel supports another politic side. 

Without generalizing, you can’t trust everything that you watch-hear on TV news, you should find out from different sources such as radio, newspaper. To conclude, it’s our problem what we want to learn, is not television is HOW we use it, so think about it and reflex, are you taking advantage of TV? Or, is TV taking advantage of you?



Monday, 9 June 2014

Telecom’s Corporate Social Responsibility




Telecom’s Corporate Social Responsibility


The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility day per day is developed for a lot companies; generally this idea is used by organised companies that have enough monetary resources to invest in different kind of programs that are connected with the products that they sell.


Before to write about one of the biggest companies, I would like to give the definition of Corporate Social Responsibility, CRS is the group of activities that one company do in order to generate a positive impact in the society, such as: creation of foundations, activities related with environment, education, disaster relief.



One of the companies that applies this concept is Telecom; this company has been in New Zealand since 1987 and today it has a significant level of operational scale within the New Zealand telecommunications market, with assets including; the PSTN network equipment for fixed line calling; the XT 3G mobile network; national backhaul networks; a 50% ownership interest in the Southern Cross international cable; and one of Australia's most extensive fixed IP networks.

Telecom has included the following activities in order to contribute with the society:




·         The Telecom Foundation



The Telecom Foundation is an organisation committed to supporting the charitable causes related with children. 

·         Environmental responsibility


The company recognise the importance of environmental responsibility. Their employees are part of local communities in order to protect the environment.

Employees develop environmental activities include recycling, waste minimisation, power saving and fuel reduction initiatives. And they also examine their carbon footprint to identify further opportunities to incorporate sustainability practices into our supply chain and procurement systems.

·         Internet safety and discouraging bullying


Telecom works with relevant authorities to ensure a "no tolerance approach" to the use of the Internet or communications technology in a way which is harmful or hurtful anyone, but especially children.