Honestly, when I think about copyright issues with pictures I have never really thought it was that big of a deal. Unless the photographer clearly states that they want that credit, but honestly if you are posting something on the internet or on different social media websites you have to know that your work might not always get credited to you. 

Before I had watched the ted talk on online filters, I felt very comfortable using the internet and confident that it was a fairly good tool to use. After watching this ted talk, my brain instantly started racing through all the scenarios that google could be doing with just my search history. I couldn’t believe that even when you are not online, google is running through 57 different tests to see what type of person you are, and what type of personality you have shown through your search engine. It has definitely changed my perspective and I am starting to believe that the internet is a bad thing. One thing I have always feared is our world turning to technology too much, and eventually someday our earth would be ran by robots and computers instead of humans like it was intended to be. After watching this, that fear of mine is becoming closer and closer to real life than I ever thought it would be. I completely disagree with what websites like google and Facebook are doing to “help” our searching of the web.

I found that article to be very informative. It was written well and had some really great points. One thing I always have to remind myself about when I am writing a research paper, is plagiarism. If you aren’t staying organized in your research it can be really easy to have an idea written down, and not remembering if that was information you had before you started doing research, or something you learned after. 

I sometimes have a hard time differentiating between what is common knowledge, and what you need to back up with research/stats, because a lot of the areas that i tend to focus on in my research papers overlap each other. That is where it can get dangerous. Always back it up with citations and giving credit where credit is due. I have found it very helpful to keep organized in the beginning of my research and write down all of my sources right away. Working on your reference page as you go saves you a lot of headache and a lot of time instead of waiting until you are done with your paper. 

For one of my education classes that I took a couple of semesters ago, we spent a lot of time talking about Cyberbullying. We watched numerous videos that interviewed kids that had been cyberbulied and it really opened my eyes to how big of an issue this is. Technology has changed in a lot of ways the way we interact with people. It is so easy to text, call, or whatever is convenient for you instead of directly interacting with that person. That is convenient, but also can be a problem when we are talking about this subject. Social media is HUGE in kids’ life. It is a measure of popularity and status. I volunteer as a mentor in town and work with high-schoolers and it is amazing to me how much they care about how many “likes” they get on a photo, or how many followers they have. So getting publicly dissed on a site can be the biggest blow to ones confidence. I definitely think you act differently online vs. offline. It is so much easier to sit in front of a computer screen and post what you are thinking/feeling than it is face to face with someone. That can be a good and a bad thing. You have a lot more time to think about what you want to say/ or what you are feeling when you are online, versus when you are face to face you can’t have awkward silence, you have to have a response immediately. I think in a way it is making it harder for people to interact socially face to face, because we don’t practice it as much.

Citations are the number one problem that I have with writing research papers. I dread them every time. I related to that article on so many levels, especially when it comes to scrambling at the last minute to get all of my references together. I usually try and leave all of my tabs open too, so that I can remember where I got my information, or sometimes I will save the article as a file in my computer and keep track of the name of it so that I can go and find it later. I have never used hyperlinks, but it is clearly something that I should do in order to save a lot of headache. I will have to do some research on how to use those properly, because it seems like an easy way to stay organized and could really help me improve on my research papers as a whole. 

Throughout my collegiate career I have encountered and used all of the different types of sources. I am a senior this year, so I have had to write all sorts of papers, and while doing that was forced in a way to use various sources.

I have had to interview people for papers and that would count as a primary source. I use secondary sources the most while doing research. I would say I use secondary sources weekly, and those are the most helpful to me when it comes to writing papers.