RES701 – 12. Final Blog Post! Reflection on the Course

Overall I have enjoyed my time with RES701 as it was probably the only class I have been able to manage to keep on top of.

But on a more serious note, it has been very interesting to learn the different types of ways of research and how big research is as a topic. I know most people do not like blogging but I have enjoyed the blogging aspect of RES701 as I find it very helpful to express my thoughts and feelings and then reviewing them to solidify my learning.

I feel like the course does prepare you for PRJ701 and I do feel more ready to tackle a project more than I ever have been before starting RES701. I think the tutor was great and he is a great fit for a research tutor and had very insightful knowledge on all the topics covered throughout the course and the way we made groups to discuss and come up with ideas was also great.

The journey has been a long and winding road but it has been a worthwhile road to have had traveled on! I feel like I know a bit more now than what I did and in my books that’s always a win! I look foward to the PRJ course and wish everyone taking the same path as me the best of luck on all their individual and sometimes shared journeys as we live life together but apart!

Thank you for reading all my blogs and I wish you the best future reader! 🙂

RES701 – 11. Intellectual Property, Copyright, Copyleft, and Creative Commons

How do we share knowledge without getting in trouble for it?

Well, there are a few ways to do that now!

Creative Commons is a good place to start as it makes it easy to select exactly what you want your work to be under. They offer various Licenses to choose from to customize how you want your work to be shared and modified.

It’s a way to protect your own work, letting them live the way you intended them to live. Instead of having other people decide it for you, you have full creative control of your own creations. This helps you not have any regrets as something you once loved is turn into something unrecognizable it would be like your daughter doing porn and that would not be the greatest thing…

Money, money, money… Sometimes you have to make money and can’t just hand out everything for free. Securing rights to make a living out of your ideas and creations is a good idea and something that should have some serious thought put into it.

Open source can make things better through collaboration but typically once it is open source it has to stay open source so be careful if you want to go down this path.

Sharing it out with the public, growing the work, and collaborating with others to make things bigger and greater. Sometimes things get too big for you to handle on your own or maybe you’ve reached a limit where you can’t add anything more and still would love to see something you’ve made continue to grow.

Licensing issues. Expiry dates could lead to big headaches and even end up in court.

So lots of thoughts on this one… Copyright should always be thought of when creating unique ideas heck you should even check to see if the idea hasn’t already been thought of before yours! Once you know your idea or work is legitimate your own then you can decide whether or not to pursue creative commons or any of the other ones!

RES701 – 10. About Ethics – My Personal Reflection

What is Ethics?

• Ethics is more about social values as opposed to laws set by higher-ups
• Ethics is when you treat others how you would want to be treated
• Ethics is considering your actions/choices and thinking about how it could affect others around you whether it is negative or positive
• Ethics is the expectation to be treated like a human being and being treated equally

What do I think of Ethics?

I think ethics is an important thing to consider and should always be thought about where applicable. As we dive into research sometimes we can forget that what we’re studying and researching things that could have feelings and emotions so sometimes we need the reminder that we’re all still human and science or research shouldn’t overshadow basic ethical rights.

Human experimentation could go too far without ethics as an example.

I think sometimes we forget about ethics as it’s not really a focus when researching but we must always remember to consider it when doing anything that may involve ethics.

RES701 – 9. Deciding Whose Blog is Most Useful to Other Students

I hate doing this like this where I have to try and single out a person and embarrass them but it must be done so!

I have decided that I personally like AJs blog posts because they read like they are real and genuine. I am perhaps a bit biased as I reviewed one of his blog posts and took a look at the rest and I felt like they have a good cohesive flow to them and it was just a good time reading as they are full of information and insight. I’d recommend anyone struggling or just want an example of how to blog to look at Ajs blogs 🙂

RES701 – 8. Areas of Possible Research Interest Review of AJs Post

Review of Allan Fry’s Research Interest Post

Short Description

Topic seems very interesting. I don’t know much about it but it sounds like it could be a lot of fun to look into and do a project on!

Things You Know

I think the things you know already are very relevant and seem like you have a good understanding of it already and can only gain knowledge if you decide to take this topic. The thing about the vending machine was pretty cool to know. Sort of like a quirky fact.

Things You Believe

These seem like believable things you believe haha. Very insightful and informative. I like how you believe that they could make things easier and are over paint a positive picture on it but also acknowledge the difficulties.

Things you don’t know

Good things not to know means things that you can research and begin to understand. Technical questions but should be fair enough to solve.

Possible Questions

Really good questions in my opinion I like how all of them cover a lot about the topic

Selected Questions

Also really good selected questions and I feel like you have the right idea about researching it and how you would go about it.

Chosen question

Again really good chosen question as you identified it having problems and flaws and would need to ask this question so you could avoid future problems when pursuing this project

Title

I like the Title nice and to the point

Ethical issues and IP

Valid concerns in this section and it’s good to see you aware of them this will help to reduce or effectively eliminate any of these issues.

RES701 – 7. What interests me about IT and what doesn’t!

This is just a fun little exercise to help us get ready for the real deal 🙂

The IT area/subject I have most enjoyed is

Software Development

The IT area/subject I least enjoyed is

Database
The IT area/subject I was most interested in is

Development and creating things.

The one IT thing I never want to have to do again is

Heavy databasing

I chose to study IT because

I wanted to study something but didn’t know exactly what I wanted to pursue. All I knew was that I was interested in computers and have played around and have had experience with them so it was something that I would like to develop more. I enjoyed Photoshop and making posters and logos and branding for companies so I thought it would be a good step.

If I couldn’t study IT I would study

Psychology probably

When I was a kid I wanted to be

A policeman or a game tester/developer

One IT thing I would like to know more about is

Game Development

RES701 – 6. Academic Article Search Exercise

Title and Author(s) of the article

Title: Multiparty Delegated Quantum Computing,

Authors: Kashefi, Elham; Pappa, Anna

APA reference (give it your best shot!) (try using the ‘cite’ option on Google Scholar)

Kashefi, E., & Pappa, A. (2017). Multiparty Delegated Quantum Computing. Cryptography; Basel, 1(2). http://dx.doi.org.nmit.idm.oclc.org/10.3390/cryptography1020012

How you found the article and what keywords you used

ProQuest search: “Quantum Computing”

What kind of article it is, ( journal paper, conference paper, masters thesis…..)

Journal Article

All the reasons that you think it is an academic article

It’s informative and looks professional with sources cited and everything.

How well it fits the ‘structure of an academic article’  that I described in my previous post

I think it fits pretty well.

How many references it has

It has 26 refrences.

How many citations it has (if you can find out)

Quite a lot

For articles that you found online,  the URL of the article

https://search-proquest-com.nmit.idm.oclc.org/docview/2124636919/fulltextPDF/D1AFDF7A10834269PQ/1?accountid=40261

Say whether you are interested in properly reading the article or not (and give some reasons!)

I think I would be pretty interested in knowing more about Quantum Computing mainly because it sounds cool and I don’t know much about it.

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Title and Author(s) of the article

Title: Jukebox: A Generative Model for Music

Author: Prafulla Dhariwal, Heewoo Jun, Christine Payne, Jong Wook Kim, Alec Radford,
Ilya Sutskever

APA reference (give it your best shot!) (try using the ‘cite’ option on Google Scholar)

Dhariwal, P., Jun, H., Payne, C., Kim, J. W., Radford, A., & Sutskever, I. (n.d.). Jukebox: A Generative Model for Music. 20.

How you found the article and what keywords you used

“AI project”

What kind of article it is, ( journal paper, conference paper, masters thesis…..)

Journal Article

All the reasons that you think it is an academic article

Layout is good and citations and refrences are made.

How well it fits the ‘structure of an academic article’  that I described in my previous post

I think it fits the structure very well.

How many references it has

84!

How many citations it has (if you can find out)

A heck of a lot

For articles that you found online,  the URL of the article

Click to access jukebox.pdf

Say whether you are interested in properly reading the article or not (and give some reasons!)

AI is a very interesting topic especially since it’s an ever evolving topic so knowing anything about it would be very cool 🙂

 

RES701 – 5. Presentations

In our first online class back we were to present our findings on research topics from way back when we had physical classes. Everyone went and presented their own topics assigned to them and it was really great to be able to know more about each topic in quick succession.

Our group presented Exploratory Research.

What is it? Exploratory Research is additional research that is done upon initial research.

What kinds of questions/problems might it be useful for?

• You would use it when your initial research did not come to a conclusive end
• When the topic your researching is very broad and you require more information

How could it be used in IT research?

If you’re trying to develop a software application in a specific language then you would have to research and learn that specific language and if you were still unsure then you would apply Exploratory Research.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the approach?

Strengths:

Gathers more information

Strengthened knowledge on the subject

Weaknesses:

Could get stuck in an ongoing loop if you’re not careful

Time Consuming

Final point

More in-depth research when you know what you want to research and you really zoom in on that problem.

Random quote

“Exploratory research is really like working in a fog. You don’t know where you’re going. You’re just groping. Then people learn about it afterward and think how straightforward it was.” – Francis Chick

And that is the quick summary of our presentation 🙂

RES701 – 4. Computational Thinking and Virtualisation Technology

Computational Thinking

Three URLs I have found:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zp92mp3/revision/1

https://csunplugged.org/en/computational-thinking/

The search terms used

computational thinking

How you found it (e.g. Google search or followed a link from Wikipedia)

Google search

Who wrote/created it

BBC, Csunplugged and Paxton/Patterson

When it was written/created/recorded/published

Unsure, unsure and May 8, 2018

what kind of ‘publication’ it is (e.g. news item, youtube video, white paper)

Learning material, educational and a Youtube video

How ‘credible (believable)’ you think it is – includes your reasons

All three seem reasonably credible as they all present believable information and cover the same information just in different capacities and forms

Virtualisation Technology

Three URLs I have found:

https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/virtualization/what-is-virtualization

https://www.vmware.com/solutions/virtualization.html

The search terms used

What is Virtualization Technology?

How you found it (e.g. Google search or followed a link from Wikipedia)

Google search

Who wrote/created it

Red Hat, VMware, and danscourses

When it was written/created/recorded/published

June 2018 for the first one. Not sure about the second link. Youtube video was uploaded Jan 15, 2018

What kind of ‘publication’ it is (e.g. news item, youtube video, white paper)

I’m not sure what the first two could be maybe a resource? and the last link it a Youtube video

How ‘credible (believable)’ you think it is – includes your reasons

Again pretty credible as they seem factual and give a lot of information.

 

I think while doing an exercise such as this I could have probably tried searching more without the use of Google to get more varied results and finding proper articles or blogs written by people might have been more insightful as well.

RES701 – 3. Research Paradigms

From my understanding, a research paradigm is a set of beliefs or what is widely known and agreed upon on how problems should be understood and dealt with.

There are many different ways and types of Research Paradigms. We’ve already covered two being Ontology and Epistemology and there is another main one which we have not covered yet and that is called Methodology which basically asks the question How? How do you go about finding something out?

All these different Research Paradigms relate to one another and can influence each other also the approach you take can influence your research style and the approach and mood may change depending on how you go about researching something.

In my personal opinion, I think the best research is done when you appreciate and try to understand them all instead of just choosing one and going for it as they all offer different things and ways to interact with Research. However, I am but a novice to research so as I delve into my own research I may discover something that may change my opinion the matter but for now, this is where I stand. Being aware of these could increase the research quality as opposed to not knowing them at all.

These paradigms overlap a lot and need to be understood to achieve quality research. Your beliefs and personality can affect the way you choose to research, whether you lean toward a more positive approach or a more realistic approach.

The topic can get very confusing as many people have different thoughts and definitions for what it is exactly so don’t sweat if you’re still totally confused because heck even I am still confused! There’s a lot more that we haven’t mentioned because there’s just so many but just consider this a taste of more things to come 🙂