This course has been one of the most engaging and interesting courses I’ve taken in college thus far. I guess if I had to summarize it, I would say that the class has taught me how incredible the internet really is. From learning, to educating, to researching, to making people famous, to sending aid, to clinical psychology, the internet’s reach is unfathomable. People are often very resistant to technology, especially those in older generations. They fear that technology is replacing “the good old days” when people used to read books and write letters. This class has taught me that those claims are simply a product of stubbornness, because everything that used to be done without the internet can now be done with it. The internet can be used for good, and for evil. We learned about cyberbullying, and also how we can help to prevent it. We learned about internet anxiety, and also how to prevent anxiety by using the internet. We learned about how the internet can coerce us into forming certain habits, and we learned about how the internet can help us break those habits. We learned about how the internet seemingly takes away from our education, and we learned about how the internet can be used for educational purposes. Often times, people make bold predictions about how technology will look in the future. From flying cars to teleportation to paying with your fingerprint (something that’s actually probably going to exist in the next few years), technology all around us is rapidly evolving and changing every aspect of our lives. While sometimes I do miss the high school days where we learned from a teacher writing on an overhead with a vis-à-vis marker, I realize now that this era has essentially become extinct. I walked into my high school a few months ago to pick something up for my brother, and when I went in to talk to some of my old teachers I noticed that almost all of them had smart boards in their classrooms. Children are allowed to use their cell phones in class and in between classes, and almost all rooms incorporate some kind of laptop work into their teaching method. Homework is posted online simply because it’s easier. Papers are submitted electronically simply because it’s easier. The internet is making everything easier all around us, and while some people may be hesitant to adapt to it (my father), eventually they’re going to have to. The evolution of society is revolving around the evolution of technology, and the impossible reach of the internet is the main reason for this. I’d like to thank Professor G for her exceptional teaching methods and dedication to this class. It has truly been a pleasure and I’m sure I will take what I’ve learned here into many of my future endeavors.
May 4th
Well, turns out yesterday wasn’t the last assignment of the semester and I have a chance to redeem myself with this one. Today we read articles about people’s predictions about technology in the past 100 years or so. We always read about people predicting things like flying cars and teleportation, but never have we actually read predictions that came true like these. In the 1920, Nikola Tesla predicted that we would eventually have wireless communication that we can talk to each other on. He had literally zero grounds for making such a prediction, but he was completely correct. This era knew nothing about technology and had almost no technology at all, but this genius was able to correctly predict where we would be in the future. Granted, he was one of the most brilliant minds of all time, but I’m still fascinated by this article. This was a perfect wrap-up for the course because it brought together everything we’ve been learning so far and encompassed it into one day of reading.
May 3rd
We were supposed to make our own survey earlier this week and have people take it…I must have completely missed this part of the assignment because I did not do this at all. I’m a little upset at myself for not reading this thoroughly, I thought we just had to read the articles and talk about what we learned about survey making. I took some other people’s surveys and they did a very good job on them. This was essentially the last assignment of the semester and I forgot to do it. Finish strong, as they say.
April 30th
Today we wrote responses to students. I hope these are the last sets of responses we have to write in this course. I know I’ve been complaining about it all semester, and I do realize that it only takes 10 minutes and positively contributes to our learning environment, I just don’t like doing it. Students wrote very insightful posts about their articles and I was actually enjoying reading them this time around.
April 29th
Today we learned about how using social media/internet posts can help people solve epidemics and other problems around the world. The topic that was the most fascinating to me was the section about disease outbreaks and twitter. Essentially, researchers looked at tweets about being sick combined with what people ate, where they’ve been, location data, and many other factors and were able to make conclusions about flu outbreaks and other illnesses. This relates a lot to a television show that I used to watch, Person of Interest. In this show, there is a super computer that monitors essentially everyone and everything in the world, looking at data on their communication and interactions and combining it all into a very complex algorithm to stop crime. This is a much larger and more futuristic method of interpreting data, but it’s on the same wavelength as what we learned about today. I can see this method of interpreting data evolving into something huge that can be used to help people all over the world.
April 28th
We are continuing to learn about conducting research on the internet. Today we read a bunch of abstracts regarding forms of internet research versus other methods. The ones that stuck out to me the most were the ones about internet lab techniques versus standard lab techniques. It’s crazy that using computers to do lab work can be nearly as effective, if not more effective, than traditional lab methods. Collecting data using computers has always seemed more practical to me…computers think and analyze in a much more rapid and efficient manner than normal humans do, so it makes sense that using them for lab work would be more effective.
April 27th
Today we began learning about internet surveys and how they are set up using a variety of surveying websites. There are way more techniques than I thought there were for setting up survey questions and how to make them effective. This includes not making questions “leading” in any way, which can be a real problem for generalizing results and interpreting data, and also putting “other” at the end of your answers can often times be a positive because it doesn’t force the participant to answer in a way that he/she may not be inclined to answer normally. After reading these articles I thought about surveys that I’ve taken in the past that were poorly designed and why they were poorly designed. Often times the questions were just too directional and did not let me answer how I wanted to. This is a key point that I took away from this article.
April 26th
In this chat we helped each other through whatever stressors we might have about our term project using what we learned from our cCBT training earlier this week. We were all feeling a bit stressed about our term projects, me especially because I haven’t started anything yet, and we helped each other come to terms with the fact that we will have to do a lot of work over the next week or two on our projects. Honestly, looking back at this diary I’ve been keeping, this seems more and more like something I could turn into a term project because I essentially have all the term information right here in this document. Backup plan is becoming plan A. Stay tuned.
April 24th
Today we learned about addiction to the internet. The articles described internet addiction in the same light as they described addiction to a substance, which I personally don’t find that outlandish. Although the addiction might not elicit the same physiological response from a person when they are denied their “fix,” the same emotional addiction is very believable. I also think that it does make sense to “unplug” from the internet once in a while because, in my experience, it feels good to get away from all the communication and constant media intake that you receive when you use the internet. It’s incredible how much we use the internet and technology throughout the course of any given day, so sometimes just dropping everything is very cleansing and refreshing. I do this once in a while…putting my phone down and just going outside and just enjoying the weather or the company of my friends without technology. Reminds me of a simpler time…
April 21st
Today we learned about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and cCBT, which is essentially CBT but on a computer. cCBT is only beginning to be integrated into modern psychological research, but there have been very positive results with the small sample size thus far. Going along with our theme this week of the internet used for clinical purposes, this really shows how the internet is being integrated into areas that it really has never even been considered in before. Cognitive behavioral therapy has been, for a long time, strictly thought of as an in-person method of psychotherapy, but somehow scientists are able to integrate the internet into this method.
Psychology 501 