Cloud Technology and Cloud Gaming

Cloud Technology


In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer's hard drive. The cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet.

Cloud computing is a synonym for distributed computing over a network and means the ability to run a program on many connected computers at the same time. With cloud technology, we are able to store data on the cloud (the internet) and access it from any computing device, use web mail services, web apps etc. For it to be considered "cloud computing," you need to access your data or your programs over the Internet, or at the very least, have that data synchronized with other information over the Net. In a big business, you may know all there is to know about what's on the other side of the connection; as an individual user, you may never have any idea what kind of massive data-processing is happening on the other end. The end result is the same: with an online connection, cloud computing can be done anywhere, anytime.






























Cloud Storage

We can use cloud storage and backup services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Sugarsync, Box, Skydrive etc. to backup or store our data, without the need to have a pyhsical storage device. It has the advantage of mobility, accesibility, cost efficiency, space efficiency and a lot of other advantages.


Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming, also called gaming on demand, is a type of online gaming that allows direct and on-demand streaming of games onto computers, consoles and mobile devices, similar to video on demand, in which the actual game is stored on the operator's or game company's server and is streamed directly to computers accessing the server. This allows access to games without the need of a console and largely makes the capability of the user's computer unimportant, as the server is the system that is running the processing needs. The controls and button presses from the user are transmitted directly to the server, where they are recorded, and the server then sends back the game's response to the input controls. Companies that use this type of cloud gaming include Gaikai, OnLive and Big Fish Games.

Users can play games without downloading or installing the actual game. Game content isn't stored on the user's hard drive and evertyhing occurs primarily at the server side, so the subscriber can use a less powerful computer to play the game than the game would normally require, since the server does all performance-intensive operations.

Imagine that your computer doesn't have a powerful proccessor, or a lot of ram, or enough storage. You just have a netbook. Normally, you wouldn't be able to play the latest games with high-end graphics and all. But you can always watch gameplay videos on Youtube. Why? Becayse it's just a video. Your computer have enough proccessing power to play videos. It doesn't have to do any intensive computing while watching the videos of that game. That's the main idea. That's how cloud gaming works actually. You watch the video of a game which is working on another computer. The only difference is, you push the buttons, you move the mouse, and when you push the button to go left, the program sends that information to the other computer, and it applies that command to the game, and the character goes left. The game is working on another computer, you watch the video of that game, and you control the video. That way, you don't have to download and install the game, you don't need any storage, you don't need any processing power or RAM. You just need a fast internet connection and a low-end computer.

Internet Celebrities

An Internet celebrity, cyberstar or online celebrity is someone who has become famous by means of the Internet. Internet allows people to reach a wide audience across the world and so become famous within one or more Internet communities.There are lots of internet celebrities around the world. Most of them became a celebrity on social media networks. Here are a few examples:

Justin Bieber

Born March 1, 1994, Justin Bieber is a Canadian pop musician, actor, and singer-songwriter. Bieber was discovered in 2008 by American talent manager Scooter Braun, who came across Bieber's videos on YouTube and later became his manager. In July 2010, it was reported that Bieber was the most searched for celebrity on the Internet. That same month his music video, "Baby", surpassed Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" to become the most viewed, and most disliked YouTube video ever. It remained the most viewed video until November 2012. In September 2010, it was reported that Bieber accounted for three percent of all traffic on Twitter, according to an employee of the social-networking site.

PSY

Park Jae-sang (born December 31, 1977), better known by his stage name Psy, is a South Korean singer, songwriter, rapper, dancer, record producer and television personality. Psy is known domestically for his humorous videos and stage performances, and internationally for his hit single "Gangnam Style." The song's refrain "Oppan Gangnam Style" was entered into The Yale Book of Quotations as one of the most famous quotes of 2012. On December 21, 2012, his music video for "Gangnam Style" exceeded 1 billion views on YouTube, (currently 1.710.390.647 views in 23.07.2013 - 07:40) becoming the first and currently only video to do so in the website's history.

Rebecca Black

Rebecca Black (born June 21, 1997) is an American pop singer and dancer who gained extensive media attention with the 2011 single "Friday". Her mother paid $4,000 to have the single and an accompanying music video put out as a vanity label. After the video went viral on YouTube and other social media sites, "Friday" was derided by many music critics and viewers, who dubbed it "the worst song ever." Between its February 10, 2011 upload date and its temporary removal from YouTube on June 16, the video video received around 167 million views, gaining Black international attention as a viral star. Black re-uploaded it to her own channel three months later.

Chris Crocker

Chris Crocker (born Christopher Darren Cunningham; December 7, 1987), is an American Internet celebrity, songwriter, blogger, and recording artist residing in Los Angeles, California. Crocker gained international fame in September 2007 from his viral video "Leave Britney Alone", in which he tearfully defended pop singer Britney Spears's comeback performance at the MTV Video Music Awards; his video had over four million views in two days. The video received international media attention, hundreds of parodies and criticism for Crocker.

Grumpy Cat

Grumpy Cat (born April 4, 2012), real name Tardar Sauce, is a female cat and Internet celebrity known for her grumpy facial expression. Her owner Tabatha Bundesen says that her permanently grumpy-looking face is due to feline dwarfism. Grumpy Cat's popularity originated from a picture posted to the social news website reddit by Tabatha's brother Bryan on September 22, 2012. It was made into an image macro with grumpy captions. "The Official Grumpy Cat" on Facebook has over 1 million Likes. Grumpy Cat was featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on May 30, 2013.

Famous Internet Hoaxes

What Is A Hoax?

A hoax is a deliberately fabricated story made to masquerade as truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment, or rumors, urban legends, April Fools' Day events that are passed along in good faith by believers or as jokes. This is how Wikipedia defines a hoax. The difference of a hoax from an urban legend is that a hoax is deliberately fabricated to decieve people.

This is what media literacy is all about. With the rising popularity of social meda websites, it has become easier to spread rumours and hoaxes. There are some examples of famous social media hoaxes below:


Racist Mc Donalds Sign

A highly offensive picture started making the rounds in June last year, featuring what was purported to be a new McDonald’s policy – charging African American customers an additional $1.50 “as an insurance measure due in part to a recent string of robberies.”
This wasn’t the first time this image had surfaced, but it was certainly a PR disaster for the fast food chain. McDonald’s Tweeted about the picture and pointed out the obvious fact that the photo was fake. Despite that, the image still managed to make it into Twitter’s trending topics, and continued to be shared.

Justin Bieber Cancer Hoax

The website called 4chan started this hoax. The hoax started on Oct. 22 with a screenshot of what appeared to be a tweet from Entertainment Tonight's official Twitter account, the tech website writes. The fake tweet announced that Bieber had been "diagnosed with cancer" and "suggested that fans go #BaldforBieber" in support of the pop sensation.

"Pop Star Justin Bieber was diagnosed with cancer earlier this morning. Bieber fans are shaving their heads to show their support," the tweet read.

Before long, tribute videos, Facebook pages and a website -- BaldforBieber.com -- were launched, fueling the claim. Although there were no information about the situtation on Bieber's official twitter account, hundreds of teenage girls shaved their heads in support.

Fake Hurricane Sandy Photos

As Hurricane Sandy descended upon New York, Facebook and Twitter were full of photos showing clouds around the Statue of Liberty, sharks swimming through the streets of Staten Island, scuba divers navigating flooded trains stations, and so on.

Back to the Future Hoax

People of all generations love the "Back to the Future" movies, but nobody can seem to remember the date in the future to which Doc and Marty travel in the second movie. Internet pranksters take advantage of this, and every so often a photoshopped image of the date from the movie will appear on Facebook and Twitter. This happened on June 27 of this year, and then again just two weeks later on July 11. But the real date is October 21, 2015.

Celebrity Death Hoaxes

People periodically spread hoaxes about celebrity death news. In Turkey, fake news about Münir Özkul's death was an example, and there are numerous examples around the world about these fake death news.

Facebook Privacy Statement Hoax

In June, a fake "Facebook Privacy Notice" took the social network by storm, urging users to re-post a message that would allegedly protect their privacy. Facebook members were quick to share the post, and before we knew it, the false claim had overtaken the site. The posting is based on the idea that Facebook’s recent listing as a publicly traded company will negatively affect its users' privacy. But actually, if Facebook ever significantly changed its privacy settings, it would have to notify users about the changes to those terms.

Gezi Park Protests and Social Media

Gezi Park protests in Turkey started on 28 May 2013 to initially contest the urban development plan for Istanbul's Taksim Gezi Park. The protests were sparked by outrage at a brutal eviction of a sit-in at the park protesting the plan. Supporting protests and strikes took place across Turkey protesting a wide range of concerns, mainly about police brutality, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly.

Again, the social media networks played a major role in organizing the protests. At 1am on 2 June CNN Turk was broadcasting a documentary on penguins while CNN International was showing live coverage of the protests in Turkey. Some newspapers too were largely silent on the protests: on Saturday morning [2 June], the lead article in Sabah, a major pro-government newspaper, was about Erdoğan's campaign against smoking." Sabah's front page on 2 June did not feature the protests at all.

As a result of the lack of mainstream media coverage, social media played a key role in keeping people informed, with Twitter hashtags #OccupyGezi and #DirenGeziParki ("Resist Gezi Park") being adopted. In the 12 hours from 4 pm 31 May, there were more than 2 million tweets for the 3 leading hashtags, with 88% in Turkish and 90% of geolocated tweets coming from Turkey. Erdoğan said in a speech that "There is now a menace which is called Twitter. The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society." A December 2012 Pew Research Center study showed 35% of Turks using social networking sites.


And those people who are not media literate fell into the trap of disinformation. Along with the true information about the police brutality, there were lot of misleading tweets and lies on the social media. There is a short list below:

Lies About Gezi Park Protests


1- Bülent Arınç's (Deputy Prime Minister) son is a business partner of the mall that is going to be built onto the Gezi Park area.
2 - Photo of a guy who was run down by a panzer. As it turned out, it was an old picture of another man who is a victim of another accident.

3 - Chief Police Constable has resigned. (It was tweeted by a fake account named Ntv_sondakika)

4 - A blurred image of a policeman

spraying tear gas to a dog.

As it turned out, it was a photo of an Italian policeman.

5 - The lie that if the protests last 48 hours, the government will fall.

6 - The lie that the chemical gas named "agent orange" was used on the protesters.7 - Photo of the 2012 Eurasia Marathon was used and it was said that it is the photo of the protesters passing through the bridge.

Social Media and the Arab Spring

Social media is so popular these days that it even has major effects on mass social movements. It especially had a major effect on the so-called "Arab Spring" that started in 2011 in North African and Middle Eastern countries.

The Arab Spring is a media term for the revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (both non-violent and violent), riots, and civil wars in the Arab world that began on 18 December 2010.

To date, rulers have been forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt (twice) Libya, and Yemen; civil uprisings have erupted in Bahrain and Syria; major protests have broken out in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Sudan.

Researchers from Washington University have analyzed more then 3 millions of tweets, thousands of blog post, hundreds of gigabytes of Youtube videos and created a massive database. They focused especially on Egypt and Tunisia, filtering the results using some keywords, and finally proved that the social media was the major driving force of the revolutions.

We can say that the most active use of social media in the revolutions were in Egypt. People used Facebook to become organized, twitter and hashtags for sharing instant information, and uploaded violent torture videos on Youtube.

Although the government blocked Facebook and Twitter, people found workarounds to access social media websites and organize protests. Here's an infographic on the social media revolution in Egypt:

Games and Education

The primary function of a game is amusement. You play games to entertain yourselves, but games can be used for other purposes too. Education is an example to that. Thanks to the competitive, entertaining, challenging nature of games, we can use them for educational purposes and to engage with students. Because, you know... everybody loves games.

There are many types of games: board games, card games, video games. They can all be used for education, but what I am going to focus on is the most popular one nowadays: video games.

When we say "educational games" it can refer to two types of games. One type is the games that are specifically designed for educational purposes, the other type is the games that are created for commercial use but has educational values.

There are a lot of games that are specifically designed for education. One example is Big Brain Academy for Wii. There are games about math, science, memory, puzzles, history, geography etc.

Here is a case study about the usage of video games in education, in this example, the teacher uses "Minecraft" for educational purposes:

America's Army

• Developed by the United States Army for education and training, and released as a global public relations initiative to help with recruitment.
• First released on July 4, 2002
• Since then, there have been over 26 versions released
• Dozens of government training and simulation applications using the America's Army platform have been developed to train and educate U.S. Army soldiers.
• Versions for Xbox and Xbox 360, arcade, and mobile applications

                

            Civilization

          

•         A Dickinson College class on the history of imperialism used Civilization. Ed Webb selected the game for his teaching, and Todd Bryant modified it to fit professor Webb’s course-specific requirements.  This Dickinson team published their notes to the Web.

—Tim Burke, Swarthmore College, “Did teach with it once (along with Sid Meier’s Civil War game) as examples of representations of history.”

Kurt Squire, University of Wisconsin-Madison,  based his dissertation on teaching with the game, Replaying History: Learning World History through playing Civilization III(2004).

• Mark Grimsley, Ohio State University, taught history with the game.

How to Use Social Media in the Classroom

 Social Media

Social media is a tool we all use in our daily lives nowadays. Almost everyone with access to the internet has some sort of a social media account. Facebook has around 1.11 billion users today. It is something you can use to socialize, share, collaborate, learn, teach and do many other things.

Among many things social media can be used for, I am going to focus more on the educational side.

Education in Social Media

Social media is a great tool for education, because it is used by everyone. Students are already using social media and they are already interested in social media, so it has a certain advantage over any other platform. On any other online learning platform, the students have to go out of their routine and remember checking a separate website for education, but they already have an account in one of the existing social media networks, so it is a part of their routine to check those pages.

The Twitter Experiment - Twitter in the Classroom

Dr. Rankin, professor of History at UT Dallas, wanted to know how to reach more students and involve more people in class discussions both in and out of the classroom. She had heard of Twitter but never used it. Then she decided to use it in classroom and a graduate student documented this experiment. See the video for more details.

  Teachers can use Twitter hashtags and Facebook groups for educational purposes. They can use them to open discussions, upload documents, give assignments, make announcements. Mobile apps of the major social media networks can also be helpful.

There are also some social networks specifically designed for educational purposes. There may be many examples but I am going to tell you about Schoology and Edmodo.

Edmodo



Edmodo is a social media network designed for educational purposes. Teachers can give assignments and homeworks, collect them, grade them, track the learning process of the students easily. It has many features to be used specifically for education. Here's a promotional video on Edmodo.