Week 8

This week, ironically, we focused on computer viruses and Netiquette.

It's ironic because I have just experienced a situation which caused my MacBookPro to crash, and I had to purchase a new iMac. While it wasn't due to a virus but my own stupidity (laptops + water = disaster), it was still a very traumatic experience, and I'm sure that it will be on my mind for a while!

While completing my undergraduate degree, I worked at Best Buy as an Epson representative. I saw person after person rush to the Geek Squad counter with a computer virus. It's one of the reasons we have Apple products instead of PC's.

Reading the article, "How Computer Viruses Work" was very informative. Despite having experience working in the computer industry, I had never looked at the psychology behind the person creating the virus. I also liked the comparison between a computer virus and a biological virus; they really do work the same way.

The type of virus which I have experienced the most is an e-mail virus. Everyone who has an e-mail account through a Kentucky school will have seen emails from the district tech supervisor warning of specific e-mails that are viruses.  I know several people who have experienced viruses via e-mail.  If you have Facebook, you've probably encountered viruses sent via messages. My cousin downloaded a .jpeg picture over Thanksgiving break, and it infected her phone. Every single contact received a text that had a virus attached to it. Thankfully, she sent out a text to almost everyone before they opened it.  There were a few people who got the virus, though.

The Netiquette website was missing a plug-in to complete the quiz. I wanted to take it before viewing any of the information, but a pop-up prompted me to download something and gave a warning that it wasn't responsible for the content of what was downloaded. Having just viewed the article about viruses and purchased a computer that took a huge chunk out of my emergency fund, I decided to pass on the quiz. Ha!

One of the things I liked the most from this website was that it's really hard to understand your correspondent's meaning.  I have a great example of this. While I worked at Best Buy, I also worked at Walgreen's as a pharmacy technician.  Our computer system was set up so that we could send a message to notify a patient's doctor when they were out of refills on a maintenance medication (like insulin for diabetes). I had job shadowed a doctor while in high school, and I had to send her a notification. I sent a message that said, "Hello! Patient X needs a refill auth on Drug Y. Thanks so much, and have a great day!" The doctor had had a really difficult day, and she assumed that my message was sarcastic rather than overly friendly. The system didn't automatically send an enclosure, so she didn't know who had sent it. She called to speak with my boss about it, and was very unhappy. Once she realized that I was who sent it, she knew that my tone was meant to be polite and friendly. Point being that it's very hard to convey tone through messages. I experience this with texts all the time. My husband will text me something and I will give up trying to interpret his tone and just call him instead.

I also liked the part about asking whether or not you would say it to the person's face. Without getting into the bully zone, it's important to know that you definitely shouldn't say anything that you couldn't/wouldn't say face-to-face. Especially when you consider the fact that once it's in print (or type as the case may be), it will always be there. It's virtually impossible to erase something that has been sent.

I think that both of these articles would be great resources for schools. Perhaps at a PD given by the media specialist? Or, a middle/high school classroom? Students would benefit from having this information as they are the ones most likely to encounter and understand the ramifications. I can't see a primary classroom benefiting from it; most of the concepts are above their heads. But, the teacher could take it and convert it to their level. I think that these two resources are a great way to end our technology explorations!

As far as security measures, I seem to go overboard because of past experiences with computers. While I haven't had a virus (knock on wood), I have had a power surge fail and a computer's hard drive get fried during a lightening strike, and, most recently, I left my bag open while walking to my car during a heavy rain. Water got between my computer and skin protector. When I got home, I took out my computer and sat it flat. As soon as I did, the water (unknown to me) drained into the keys and flooded it. I have two external hard drives. I do photography on the side and had been editing two weddings. Thankfully, I still had the originals (i NEVER delete anything on my memory cards) and back-ups of the main files, but I had to redo all of the edits. The ironic thing was that the only reason I had my computer with me that day was because I was afraid that, with my luck, my house would catch fire while I was at work. I always back up files, but a fussy 19 month old and a stack of papers led me to put it off a day. Had I just left it at home, all would have been okay.

I keep all of my online passwords in a home maintenance binder that stays in our fire safe. At one time, they were all very generic and all the same. Now, I can't even remember them. I pay my life insurance premiums online annually, and I always have to get the binder out to find my password.

My students are writing novels for NaNoWriMo. We're using Google Drive, and despite telling them to sign out of the iPad each day, a few of them don't. Just after Thanksgiving break, one of my students came to me in tears, holding her iPad up for me to see the message. "Sucks to be you! You should have logged out!" The entire paper was deleted. She had about 6,000 words and had been working on it for 3 weeks.  Talk about a life-altering experience. She now goes around class making sure that everyone has signed out of the app before putting away the iPads.

I think it's important to have security measures in place, especially in a large network. If one teacher gets a virus, it can spread to thousands of people within a few hours.

Again, this was a great note to end on for this class!