Techie in Training

            At a glance, there does not seem to be much that connects the world of libraries to that of IT, outside of the obvious free usage of computers to those cut off from networking by the digital divide. Upon closer examination, it is easy to see that they two are actually woven closely together.  

Technology is an amazing thing that has led to many advancements of humankind. The status of today’s level of technology has made it possible to commu nicate via written and video messages, as well as audio, in real time. The advent and popularization of the Internet also has brought mountains of information to the fingertips of anyone that can access a computer, mobile or otherwise, and the largest network we have. Unfortunately, with all these amazing cap abilities, there also comes a significant risk, both to the individual person and businesses around the world.   

                              While my goal is to eventually be a librarian, I do not yet have any real life experience working in that environment. Therefore, for this post I am choosing to write about the standard box store retail environment and the role computers play in them. Computers, with their more recent trends of becoming more powerful and portable, have become increasingly significant in big box retail stores. It is important for these employees to be computer literate on the most basic of levels so that when registers upgrade from a keyboard function to a touchscreen, they are able to use logic and knowledge of computer software to determine how to navigate the programs run in order to ring up a customer's cart. The employees that monitor the self-check registers need to have a basic understanding of troubleshooting in addition to the software operating system so that they ca...

                Packets of information travel through the Internet by navigating along a path of routers between your computer and the destination sought, such as Google. Like a dot-to-dot exercise, the information “hops” from one router to another along the web to reach its destination, which is the domain name or IP address selected by the user. The entire process is incredibly fast, as evidenced by the fact that the packets’ delivery is measured in milliseconds. By using the command "ping" on ones computer, you can see the path the packets travel to request and deliver the desired information. Here are the results of my ping exercise for Google, a villa resort in France, and Amazon UK (completed on my Windows 10 desktop computer):

The following is the result of using different software programs to document a typical day in my life, and my summary of each of the ones I utilized for that project. Microsoft Word Processor is a fantastic tool for the written word. It allows for a multitude of characters to express things from creative writing stories to journal entries to essays. The paragraph format, as used in stories and essays from the above examples, is the way that most people use Word. Bulleted lists are also easy to create in Word because of all the formatting options. Things like spellcheck and grammar check are now a package deal with Word processors, as are a million other formatting choices such as wrapping text around a graphic, highlighting specific text, changing colors and fonts of text, and indentations or alignments. This elevates the presentation of said text above an application such as Notepad, which has none of those formatting features. Given that I tend to be a person that writes in paragra...

The mobile app that I have chosen to review for this post is called Wizards Unite. It is a game app made by Niantic, the same creators of Pokemon Go, and is based off the world of Harry Potter.  

Follow me to the programming project! Before using the features at the Scratch website, aside from the interactions with the online textbook (Vahid, 2017) for my current course, I had no experience with coding or programming. Going into this project with no experience on the subject was daunting, to say the least. From the first loading of the webpage, the bright colors and simple words were evidence that it was a tool that was easy enough for a child to use. The tutorials gave the simplest of instructions on how to begin creating with their site. Even with that, as an over-thinker, I still found the task of writing something with a minimum of thirty blocks to be overwhelming. The only thing to do to conquer the fear and anxiety was to jump in and start creating. While I didn’t have to worry about actually writing out the words for the code, let alone compiling the information into binary, I struggled to find the right blocks to build the code in order to make the cartoon character o...