$$ Week 2 Thoughts & Reflections

PersonalIn 5-10 years time, I envision myself to be a tech savvy full time employee making effective and easy to understand visual reports. I would like my workplace to be anywhere that has little traffic. Describing myself now, I am starting to make visual reports at my part time jobs, and school placement work. The traffic isn't very bad, but I have yet graduated and found full time work. 
LearningTo get to where I want to be, I must learn different variety of digital tools to expand my capacity in making better visuals and informative reports. I will need search tools, such as Google, to find information. I also need capture tools, such as Paint, to capture information. I will also need compiling tools, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint, to put information together into reports. Sometimes, I would also need editing tools, such as Adobe Photoshop, to edit and create visuals from the information I gather. EnvironmentTo adapt my environment to learn better, without adding effort, I have cleared up my work desk to reduce distractions. In the future I intent to adopt more digital tools, such as Wordle, to better organize information and present them. Currently, I have adopted using Pinterest, Blogspot.ca, Google, and Sakai in gathering learning information for this class. I use Microsoft Powerpoint as a medium of converting text and images to edit in Paint and Adobe Photoshop. To compile assignments or reports, I use Word, and exports to PDF that can be viewed with Adobe PDF.                             Fan, L. (CC) 2015.                              Word CloudI have seen these visuals before, made of words. Sometimes the words are colored; sometimes they are of different shades of the same color. I never knew what they were called until this week. Word Cloud is an amazing way to not only express information, but to also make sense of information, amplify certain key points, and bring attention to the content with a new perspective. I learned that this tool can definitely do all of this and enrich my learning experience. See below for my Word Cloud made by Wordle!  Fan, L. (CC) 2015. 

As you can see above, I decided on capital letters for a font. It is a summary of everything I have written in the Week 1 Blog. I realized that the words I used are a lot more related to the mind than I would have thought. This may be because of my background in Public Health, where mental health and well being are an important aspect of today's healthcare priority. The words "world" and "voluntary" also resonates with my belief in personal choice and my dream of world peace. I realize that a person's writing can indeed speak a lot about their personality, beliefs and attitudes. Wordle is indeed an important tool to use. I think this could also be important in the human resources field as well, to learn more about a potential employee.

I have also learned from feedback, that having the right copyright caption is very important. I hope I did it right here in this week’s blog! By the way, it’s almost the end of January! Can you believe it?! What are you planning to do for reading week?
 

$$ Week 1 Thoughts & Reflections

Digital Footprint

            This week, I learned that digital footprint is just about any mark we leave online. The online world in this way is so very different than reality. In the real world, we may walk past an empty church during the summer, and no one, and nothing, would even know that we walked past. Online, when we are to visit a certain website, even if no one is monitoring the website, there is a record of our visit, and what we looked at. If we write any words, such as these I am leaving on this blog post, the words may be archived forever. Reality suddenly seems anonymous in comparison to the Internet. What do you think? Is the digital world more anonymous, or reality?

Netiquette 

            I like to highlight this topic as well because Netiquette did not exist for me as a vocabulary until this week. I would have thought this was the making of one of my co workers, such as the term: “Mangings” for “Men leggings”. On a more serious note, etiquette on the Internet definitely can positively define a person’s digital footprint, and become a resource for their offline experience as well. A well established online digital footprint can lead to opportunities, such as employment, offline. As more and more of our offline personal information and professional information are transferred online, such as with some employment sites, I wonder how we can use digital tools to improve society overall and encourage the population to be healthier.

            In Public Health, I’ve learned about current research that has shown how a person’s brain with mental health conditions (e.g. Schizophrenia) differs biologically in comparison to those who are mentally healthy. More importantly, I’ve learned how simple activities such as yoga and meditation can change the brain’s biology in a matter of a month or two for these people. And amazingly, all of these has been captured and is distinguishable by brain scans. While the technology is not yet perfected, this is a clear indication that mental conditions can be modified. And as these experiments could distinguish the changes in the parts of the brain that portrays a person’s personality, from how patient and humble they are, to how strong willed they are, brain scans may be the future in determining the mental condition of any potential employee.

     

               Imagine a company like LinkedIn that gives people voluntary choice whether to create a personal profile, and allows companies to access their profiles in selection of a future employee. Unlike LinkedIn, their voluntary profile will come from a voluntary brain scan, where the information is a true mental snapshot of what constitutes the individual’s mental capacity. Employers will know to near perfect accuracy the things such as how empathetic the person is or how patient they are. While individuals may not do well in creating their profile for the first time, they can meditate, exercise, do yoga, study, and do all the things to improve their mental health before doing another brain scan to “update” their profile. This could potentially become a tool not only to match employers in society with employees of high caliber, but also promote individuals in society to commit to personal development in the process. Moreover, there would not be a need for a drug test that could show either false positive, or false negative.

Notes

            After completing the Secondary Digital Driver’s License Exam with 20/20, I do realize that my computer does not even have a virus scan software nor do I know what brand is effective today. Any suggestions?

Week 1 - Some thoughts about Mental Health, from Public Health

Hi I'm Logan and this blog will be used for tasks related to the class ADED1P32 Learning in Digital Contexts. I have never done an online course before, so this may be a little challenging for me to adapt to at first. I will include links, images as well as videos in some of my posts, and hope that you will thoroughly enjoy reading what content I will produce here. I hope to learn about different information systems and tools used today to further my personal skill sets for the working world. I hope also to learn more about social media to adapt to the Health Promotion aspect of what I study: Public Health.

There may not be any other Public Health students in this class. So perhaps I should give a little introduction to Public Health as well as the importance of some concepts, if you are interested. Here are a few thoughts I have in regards to Mental Health:

I have learned throughout the years that Public Health is about prevention of disease as opposed to treatment. While developing health services to treat and take care of those in need is morally attractive, I believe that building a strong internal individual resiliency and capacity starting in early childhood deserves more resource allocation in the future of preventive healthcare. I believe it is much more cost effective and beneficial to society to work with young children and youth to prevent substance-related disorders, for example, as opposed to  as opposed to bearing the cost of treating a thousand people over a decade . If left to the latter option, the need for resources to take care of mental health issues will exponentially increase in comparison to the limited resources available over time.

Last year, I learned that about 50% of Canadian youth have used marijuana by 10th grade, as well as having had at least two serious alcohol over-consumption. However, in the case of people I have known that went to a boarding school, an introduction to addictive substances at such a young age was unheard of due to the remote location and the unavailability of these addictive substances. Perhaps future research needs to focus on modifying the setting of everyday life for young children and youth. We need to learn how to better prepare all population of the future to be resilient and protected from well-known addictive substances known to lead to serious mental health issues.

I feel that media today portrays everything in a way that puts responsibility on everyone else except oneself. By accepting that mental illnesses are the result of biological causes or lack of social support, are we then negating individual responsibility, and therefore reducing a person’s own need to develop individual ability and capacity to cope? A man who has to work for everything in life growing up will have better ability to do it than someone who has been handed everything their whole life.

Public Health policies are often created based on available objectionable data. Yet when it comes to mental health, there appears to be two different measurements: the signs and symptoms identified by the training and textbook respectively, which we can observe or measure during a person’s mental health evaluation. Some of my class readings touched upon the fact that citizens can also evaluate their own well-being.

So which type of measurement should be a standard in Public Health? Would it be what health professionals believe, or what an individual believes? This may be related to the pain scales that medical professionals use to gauge how much pain an individual feels compared to the worst pain they have ever experienced. I think that in Public Health, we need to create standards and policies governing the different ways data is reported to take these factors into account.