Monday, April 27, 2015

Final Project: Historic Boston Reference Materials

The American Revolution or the Revolutionary War took place from 1775-1783. More information pertaining to the Revolutionary War can be found at by clicking this link.

Main image on the Old South Meeting House website

The Boston Tea Party took place on December 6, 1773. The Boston Tea Party is a major event that took place in old Boston. For more information you can read this overview of the Boston Tea Party that was created by Old South Meeting House.

Map of Boston 1775
I found this map of Boston in 1775 on the Massachusetts Historical Societies' website. You can also read about the Old State House here. The Old State House has been the location of many significant events in Boston's History.

I will update this blog post as I continue to do more research.



The Old State House in 1876

A more modern image of the Old State House.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Immersive Education Minecraft Competition

These images show that I shared the iED's post about the upcoming Minecraft competition with the Facebook groups and Google+ I joined.







Class 10: Facebook Events as an "opt-in" Form of Collaboration


This image shows that I have joined the Call for IMMERSION 2015 speakers Facebook event.

This image shows that I shared the event with the Virtual Reality Facebook group.


This image shows that I shared the event with the Robotics Community Facebook group.

Immersion 2015 outreach (Facebook and Google+)

The images below show that I shared the iED HoloLens post with my Facebook and Google+ groups.






Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Class 10: Instagram as a Collaboration Tool

In another class I took here at Boston College, (A marketing class with Prof. Nick Nugent) we learned that we are currently in “the decade of Instagram”. What that means is that Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform and one of the most popular in terms of marketing. If a company or team wanted to collaborate using Instagram as a platform, it would be easy for a few reasons. The first and biggest is the use of hashtags, which can easily group things into categories, and another is the ability for more than one person to run a single account. With the combination of these two, a team could consistently be posting and hash tagging on instagram which would help get their name out and possibly begin a much bigger marketing process.
Instagram is also widely used for a similar reason by individual people such as celebrities. Individuals can market their own products, or create posts to build their fan bases by using Instagram and hashtags.

Instagram is a photo sharing  social media venue.  It has a number of features: There is instant sharing to social media sites with unlimited upload capabilities.  It also allow “tag” capabilities like facebook where you can provide information on the pictures.  I tend to use instagram a lot more than snapchat as instagram allows comments to be posted back and forth which adds to the collaborative nature and benefit of the application.  

Instagram is known as an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that allows users to take photos and videos. Also, it allows users to share those photos on a variety of social networking platforms, including Facebook, Tumblr, and etc. One unique feature of Instagram is that photos are confined in a square shape, which looks similar with Polaroid images. The maximum duration for videos is 15 seconds. In December 2013, Instagram introduced a new feature called “Instagram Direct” which has a feature of sharing photos with a specific user or group of users. Similar with a privacy setting of Facebook, Instagram users can change the setting so that photos are not viewable by general public.

Users can share photos only with people who follow them. If users want to share photos or video clips with users who do not follow them, that recipient will get an alert that photos/clip has been shared.

Class 10: Snapchat as a Collaboration Tool

In one of the recent snapchat updates, they added a feature that allows friends to transfer cash to one another. Snapchat partnered with a company called Square Cash. Square cash is a money transferring app that allows you to transfer money to your friends quick and easy if you don’t have cash in hand. To do this you must first make an account with Square Cash. Once you have an account all you have to do is go to the text chat page of Snapchat and type a dollar sign ($) followed by a numerical value. It will then ask for confirmation before transferring the money to it’s desired destination. For example, if I wanted to send a dollar to a friend of mine, I would go to a blank text chat page on Snapchat, find their username, and send them a message that reads “$1.00.” Once I confirm that I want to send a dollar to that particular friend, it would transfer into their account.


One of the features that was launched last fall is called “my story” which is an interface that lets users share multiple snaps with all of their friends in a feed that will not disappear for 48 hours. Now it is expanded to the “our story” feature.

Snapchat is a great way to communicate with friends, posting pictures and videos creating a great collaborative environment that does not get old as it expires quickly.  As many have said, one picture is worth a thousand words,the messages come across to give it context.  The flexibility of having this social media tool on the iphone makes the use very easy. It is a good venue but I have to say I like instagram better as it is a better ”collaborative” too.  Snapchat has a great financial tool as well called snapcash.


Also in a recent snapchat update, the ability to video chat live with another person was added to the software. Previously snapchat only supported sending photographs and videos up to 10 seconds long, but now with the video chat feature snapchat can become a quick conference collaboration tool. A video chat on snapchat can be opened in only a few seconds, and closed immediately, removing any signing into skype or other video chat software, and can even be quicker than facetime on iPhones because connection can happen much faster, and the other person does not have to have an iPhone.

One piece of information about snapchat that I did not know came from team Dartmouth’s report and told how the app itself was made by three Stanford University students. This is an example of what a simple collaboration project can become.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Class 9: Collaborative Web Pages with TogetherJS

In the first image below you can read about what Together JS is. The home page, where the screenshot was taken provides an overview of what Together JS is, who uses it, and how to use it. For more information you can go to https://togetherjs.com

The next image is just one of the many apps that are available on Together JS. This was a mad lib app.


The next app I used was a drawing app. It allows you to draw anything in a variety of colors.


The final app I used was a grocery list app. This app allows you to make a list of groceries you need to get.
 

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Class 9: Immersion 2015 Outreach Assignment - Chase Cote

Here are a few screenshots of my posts to my Facebook groups and my google+ groups. I shared the Google-funded Virtual Reality video as well as the link to the Immersion 2015 web page.




Class 9: Google Docs HTML files


This link will take you to a web page that contains a report I did on virtual reality. I uploaded this to BC MyFiles so anyone with a BC account should be able to click the link below and read my report.







Class 9: My own Prezi Presentation

I did my Prezi Presentation on Virtual Reality technologies. Below are two screenshots of the presentation. You can click the link at the bottom of the post to see the complete presentation.





Class 9: My 3 Favorite Prezi Presentations


These are my three favorite Prezi presentations that I found. One is about the Boston Red Sox, one is about my home state of Maine, and one is about the Boston Bruins.












Class 9: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

        Hypertext Markup Language or HTML is the language of computers. HTML makes it possible for computers to communicate with each other. Hypertext means that the code has the ability to create links to other pages as well as images and videos. Markup means that it is used to create pages of formatted text. These pages can also contain images and videos. HTML is truly what makes the internet as useful as it is. Without HTML, the internet would not be something that is used on a daily basis by the majority of the population. 

        There have been many forms of HTML created. Today the most standard form used is HTML 5.1. From the year 2000, up until October, 2014, the standard form of HTML was 4.01. Other forms of HTML that have been created are  2.0 and 3.2. HTML is the language that allows web pages to look and function the way they do. HTML makes going from web page to web page possible.

        People who code using HTML syntax use tags to identify page content and the content itself. When using HTML, you use opening and closing tags. For example <p> is the tag for a new paragraph. When coding you put that tag before anything else. At the end of the paragraph you put a closing tag (</p>. This signals the end of the paragraph. When coding you always put the closing tags in reverse order from which you typed them. For example if A, B, and C were tags you would put them in the document in this order; A B C C B A. There would be content in between those tags depending on what you want on the web page or document. 

In this image < and > represent tags. </> represents a closing tag. The colored words in between the tags represent the content.

To learn more about coding you can watch the video below.

Monday, April 6, 2015

Minecraft in Class

The first three images are a structure I made during class tonight.





The last two screenshots are my before and after screenshots of me deleting the Old Bent's Fort server.





Class 8: The Bitcoin Blockchain

     A bitcoin is a a type of digital currency that operates independently or without a central bank. Encryptions are used to help generate currency. Bitcoins are something that is gaining popularity. A friend of mine invested in bitcoins and says that they can be used for just about anything online. Bitcoins were designed to allow people to complete transactions of the internet in a quick and easy way.

     The blockchain aspect of bitcoin is a public ledger that lists all the transactions of bitcoins that have ever been made. As new transactions are completed, they are added to the ledger in real time. The ledger lists all the transactions in chronological order, so you can trace transactions all the way back to the beginning of bitcoin.

     Bitcoins are something that I believe will continue to gain popularity in the years to come. For more information about what Bitcoins are and what the bitcoin blockchain is, you can watch the video posted below.


Sunday, April 5, 2015

Class 8: Peer to Peer (P2P) & BitTorrent

        
      Peer to peer (P2P) computing is a decentralized network of computers. In a P2P network, each user has the same capabilities and each computer shares the workload. In a P2P network, the duties are shared among the computers or "peers" opposed to the traditional client-server model where clients requests services from centralized servers.
      
      P2P computing has many advantages, one being that the users do not need to rely on a centralized server. If there are issues with one computer, it does not effect the overall performance of the network as other peers will make up for the loss of a peer. P2P networks are also more affordable to maintain. One other positive to P2P computing is that all the files are shared between each user so the peers do not need to rely on one server as in the traditional model.
        
      BitTorrent is a P2P file transfer protocol for sharing larger amounts of data. When a user downloads a file, the file is downloaded into pieces. Each part of the downloaded file can easily be transferred to other users. In  simpler terms, as a person downloads a file to the internet, it immediately becomes available, in pieces, for other users to download. As they download the file it is downloaded piece by piece. As the pieces are downloaded, each piece is put together like a puzzle until the file is complete. 

For more information on P2P computing you can watch the video below.









Class 8: Botnets & Zombie Networks


     Botnet is short for robot network. A botnet is a group of private computers that are infected by malicious software and controlled without the user's knowledge. A person's computer can fall victim to a botnet by downloading illegitimate software or by clicking on spam ads. The creator of a botnet can control many private computers remotely once those computers are infected. Botnets are often used to perform illegal activities such as fraud or identity theft. A person's private information can be at risk when their private computer becomes infected.

   
A zombie network is comprised of computers who are under control of a botnet. A person that created the botnet can remotely control the computers that are infected and spread malware and spam to others. By using zombies, a hacker can avoid detection since they are not using their personal computer to spread the infections.

 
 The image above explains step-by-step, how a botnet attack works. The second image shows a very generic depiction of a zombie network. To find out more information about a botnet is, how it works, and how to prevent them you can watch the video below.

     


Class 8, The YouTube Network and ISPs

These images a step-by-step description of how Youtube videos reach your home computer. 


The next image shows how a Youtube video travels through its servers to your internet service provider (ISP) using the most direct route.  

The next image shows how once the Youtube video reaches your ISP, your ISP works to transfer the video through its network and to your home computer.


The next image shows how the video reaches your home computer. Factors such as wi-fi connection and number of devices connected to your wi-fi can affect the quality of the video.

The next image just reiterates then any issues in the path from Youtube's server to your home computer can affect the quality of the video. If everything works without issue, your video quality will be crystal clear.


The next and final image shows results of a test on my ISP. These results display the times where Youtube videos have worked best.