10 Sources for Free Online Technology Courses

Online Technology Courses for Credit

Free technology courses are available online that don't require students to register or pay tuition. However, these courses don't lead to college credit. Students who want to earn college credit might want to consider online sources that charge a nominal fee for online lessons. These fee-based courses can help students earn college credit.

Study.com's short, engaging video lessons and quizzes are available to registered members who pay a small fee. There are also free transcripts available for the videos. Both of these options can be used to earn college credit. Students can check out some of the chapters found in Study.com's Business 104: Information Systems and Computer Applications course below:

• Hardware and Systems Technology - Examine computer system components, computer memory devices, storage devices and ASCII and Unicode.
• Systems Software and Application Software - Topics in this chapter include hardware and software resources, operating system functions, file extensions, desktop publishing software and communication software.
• Decision Support Systems and Specialized Information Systems - Get info about decision making in organizations, business intelligence, management information systems, geographic information systems and statistical analysis.
• Data Management - Study database structures, management system models, relational databases, structured query language and data mining.
• Introduction to Programming Subjects include validation tools, analysis and design tools, code mapping, logic and syntax, object oriented programming and programming languages.

Free Online Non-Credited Technology Courses

Harvard University

• Computer Science 50

In the Computer Science 50 course, lecture topics include source code, JavaScript, computer security, HTTP, HTML and computer forensics. Students have the opportunity to learn through lectures, problems and other resources. Quizzes with answers are also provided for students to practice their knowledge. The final project outline PDF is also included.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Practical Information Technology Management
• Database, Internet and Systems Integration Technologies
• Information Technology Essentials
• Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
• Computer System Engineering

In the Practical Information Technology Management course, students learn about information technology logistics, managing information technology in businesses and information technology project management. The Database, Internet, and Systems Integration Technologies course can provide students with skills in software development, application development, system integration, system security, data modeling and databases. Students can also practice with course exams, since solutions are provided.

The Information Technology Essentials course covers topics in hardware and operating systems, software development, electric commerce, networks and computer security. The Introduction to Computer Science and Programming course provides students with a fundamental overview of programming using handouts, slides and lecture videos. However, students need to install the Python programming language and the IDLE interpreter to follow the programming instructions.

Computer System Engineering is a course containing video lectures, projects, assignments and exams. Students can learn about software and hardware engineering, networks, virtual memory, encryption and security.

University of California - Berkeley

• Computer Science 169

In the Computer Science 169 course, students are able to learn about designing software systems, project management and programming. This course is composed of recorded lectures, most of which are more than an hour in length. Taught by Professor Armando Fox, these lectures are available on YouTube.

University of California at Davis

• Unix and Linux Tutorial Center

The University of California at Davis course materials can be accessed online through a web page. Students can also find instruction on Linux installation if they choose to install the free software. The Unix and Linux Tutorial Center course materials provide students with information on topics like Unix process management, bits and bytes, C programming, recursion and signals.

University of Michigan

• Introduction to Information Studies

The Introduction to Information Studies course provides students with handouts and lectures. These materials contain information about intellectual property, computer and network architectures and computer hardware. There are 27 lectures that are podcast, and some include PowerPoint presentations or PDF files.

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International Networking

*If you can't find gainful employment where you live I encourage you to network in other countries. The process isn't that difficult and the greater portion of the paperwork can be done through the American embassy.

 Just a thought.

 "Niko J"

SystemsNicaragua.com

                             

Self-Reliance: A Philosophy of Disengagement?

"Turn on, tune in, drop out."

Coined by psychologist-turned-counterculturalist Timothy Leary, this iconic phrase could just as easily have been uttered by Ralph Waldo Emerson. And just like Leary's pseudoscientific prescriptions for enlightened living, Emerson's philosophy of individualism is unhelpful in establishing a progressive society in which individuals can achieve their full potential. 

In his famous essay Self-Reliance, Emerson laments the stifling of individual thought and creativity by the larger social matrix within which every individual is situated. "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," he argues, suggesting that achieving personal fulfillment requires disengaging from society and embracing physical and intellectual solitude.

It's an easy criticism to make for a financially stable Harvard University graduate descended from a leading Boston family. Unencumbered by the pursuit of money or the procurement of food, medicine, or shelter, Emerson wrote from a standpoint of financial and social privilege unimaginable to most of his contemporaries.

And his writing shows it.

A well-educated white male with landholdings and steady employment, Emerson could afford to spend time thinking about how man is "clapped into jail by his own consciousness," how virtues are "rather the exception than the rule" and how "truth is handsomer than the affectation of love." Profound, incisive, and thought-provoking, Emerson's writings are nonetheless the musings of a man with few concerns aside from personal fulfillment and the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity.

Underlying Emerson's call for individuality and self-reliance is an insidious assumption that individuation and self actualization are universal priorities for all people. This couldn't be further from the truth: while giving voice to the "divine idea which each of us represents" is surely a worthy aspiration, the reality of most individuals' lives precludes placing high priority on such esoteric, self-centered goals. In truth, one's ability to focus on self actualization is a direct function of one's material circumstances.

Contrast Emerson with his fellow New Englanders at the turn of the 19th century. In a society predominated by farmers and laborers, concerns about "the relations of the soul to the divine spirit" were surely secondary to the five hungry children at home, the broken furnace in winter, or the sick mother in need of medicine. Indulged once a week during Sunday services, these questions of existence, individuality, and the divine were a release from--not an engagement with--the realities of everyday existence.

Aside from glossing over the role of privilege in determining an individual's capacity to prioritize connecting with his inner genius, Emerson's Self-Reliance rests on a second controversial assumption: that our genius comes exclusively from within and is obscured by the "noise" of the society that surrounds us. 

In reality, the opposite is true: while every individual holds the capacity to think creative, ingenious thoughts, it is only through our interaction with external people, ideas, and institutions that we are able to fully discover our genius. 

*I disagree.
Emerson of all people should have known this: having spent four years as an undergraduate at Harvard and additional time at Harvard's divinity school, Emerson experienced firsthand the value of argument and exchange in the formation of ideas and worldviews. Indeed, Emerson's own genius and non-conformity were undoubtedly informed by his interactions with professors, peers, and established intellectual traditions. 

The problem with Emerson's vision of individual genius is that it leaves no room for discursive exchange. In reality, it is only through the expression of our personal ideas to others that we are able to fully discover what these ideas are. Social structures--and the discursive exchanges they facilitate--are instrumental in bringing clarity and focus to the ideas that emerge from each individual's inner genius.

In confining genius to each individual's psyche and calling on individuals to prioritize non-conformity above all else, Emerson dismisses political action, social progress, and intellectual discourse as distractions to the more important goal of actualizing inner genius and communing with the divine. In so doing, he presents a vision for a society marked by political apathy, social disengagement, and a lack of intellectual exchange.

Self-Reliance is compelling because it lays out a radical path toward individual actualization that few had before considered. But in the end, achieving individuality--like turning on, tuning in, and dropping out--is not worth abandoning the very social and political structures that allow individuality to flourish.

Self-reliance may be useful as a starting point from which to enter larger social and political systems, but it cannot be an end in itself. 

*I post things that I don't fully agree with, all ideas contemplated.

Science-Based Public Health Approach to Gun Violence

The Need to Replace ‘Ideology, Intuition and Common Sense’ with a Science-Based Public Health Approach to Gun Violence: A Conversation

Click here to help spread the word with a tweet: Replace ‘ideology, intuition, common sense’ w/ #PublicHealth approach to #GunViolence: http://bit.ly/PreventGunViolence @phidotorg 

On an average day in the United States, 320 people are shot with a firearm, and approximately 90 people die from a gunshot wound. Meanwhile, funding for gun research at the nation’s leading public health institute has been “going in the wrong direction,” David Hemenway, PhD—one of the nation’s most influential injury researchers—stated during a PHI Dialogue4Health web forum last month.

“Since I graduated from college [in 1968], there have been more civilians killed by guns in the United States than soldiers have been killed on the battlefield in all of the wars in American history by any means,” said Hemenway, Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center, adding that this is a uniquely American problem among high-income countries. When compared to our peers, the rate of gun homicides among children ages 5-14 in the U.S. is 18 times higher than the rate in other high-income nations.

Yet we know incredibly little about such a sweeping public health problem, primarily due to a lack of funding for research.

In 1996, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had published studies implying that possession of a gun in the home dramatically increased the risk of murder and suicide, anti-gun-control groups began attacking the agency and its research. They pushed sympathetic lawmakers in Congress to threaten to strip all CDC funding for injury research and to stipulate that, in general, no CDC funding could go toward research that could be used to advocate for gun control. While this was not an explicit ban, it effectively prohibited support for firearm-related research, and the de facto ban has continued and been reinforced by Congress in recent years.

Three other experts joined Hemenway in identifying the need for more research to support a public health approach to gun violence on PHI’s web forum panel, Gun Violence Research and Data Collection: Getting the Facts Straight, moderated by Linda Degutis, DrPH, who from 2010 to 2014 was director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control—the agency whose funding for gun violence research was stripped by Congress 19 years ago.

WHY A SCIENCE-BASED PUBLIC HEALTH APPROACH

We must address gun violence for what it is: a leading cause of premature death in this country, Susan Polan, PhD, Associate Executive Director of Public Affairs and Advocacy at the American Public Health Association (APHA), told the web forum last month. In light of this, a public health response to gun violence is appropriate.

“Gun violence is preventable, but we know we need to move upstream,” said Polan. “As with all good public health approaches, we need to find the root causes to fully understand the issue.”

Data is crucial in this process, to validate that there is a problem, identify any root causes, and to evaluate the effectiveness of any interventions.

The problem, according to Alan Leshner, PhD, CEO Emeritus of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is that not only does the U.S. lack a public health strategy for dealing with gun-related violence, but it also has no database from which to develop one.

“All effective public health strategies are typically science-based. Those that we make up in the shower—those that are based on people’s ideology, intuition or common sense—rarely are effective," Leshner stated. “[The fact] that we don’t have a science base is heavily responsible for keeping us with this problem.”

 

WHAT’S MISSING

What do we need to know more about related to gun violence? Everything, according to Hemenway, who listed off a seemingly endless litany of missing data sources on issues like gun storage, gun training, gun use in self-defense, straw purchasers, assault weapons, guns and alcohol, and the list went on.

Key among the missing data sources are:

• The National Violent Death Reporting System - which lacks a representative sample of data from across the U.S. because several states don’t report.
• The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System - which lacks a current accounting of what percentage of households contain firearms and how guns are stored, by state.
• Trace data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives - which means researchers have no way of knowing where guns come from. The data exists, but due to Congressional action, it’s difficult if not impossible for researchers to get the data.
• Private surveys - because even privately funded researchers are unwilling to add questions to surveys related to guns or gun violence, fearing that someone will complain and their funding will be cut off as a result.

While securing funding for research in virtually all fields is difficult in general, the amount of funding for gun violence research is particularly restricted, said Hemenway.

The tragic December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut was seen by many as a landmark moment that would reopen public discourse on policies related to gun violence in the U.S. and that would result in meaningful changes, including changes in opening up funding for research. In the weeks that followed, President Obama enacted a series of executive orders related to gun violence, and directed the CDC to resume support of research to identify the causes of gun violence.

During this time, Leshner was appointed chair of a committee with the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council tasked with establishing a public health research agenda on dealing with gun violence. The committee identified key areas in which virtually no data exists and recommended what research questions needed to be answered to move a public health approach forward.

These included the need to:

• Characterize the scope of and motivations for gun acquisition, ownership and use characteristics of gun violence
• Characterize the differences in fatal and nonfatal gun use
• Improve understanding of what constitutes risk for gun violence at the society level, the community level, the situational level, and the individual level
• Evaluate the potential health risks and benefits of having a firearm in the home (e.g. suicide rates, personal protection)
• Improve understanding of the effectiveness of violence prevention interventions, including for instance, actions aimed at restricting gun access for violence-prone individuals and criminals, or programs to alter physical environments in high-crime areas
• Examine different gun safety technological approaches to reducing firearm-related injury and death, along with past consumer experiences with accepting other safety technologies

The committee produced a report with its extensive recommendations, and briefed “all the right people” – Senate and House staff, White House staff, leadership at the CDC – with no obvious backlash or objections to the recommendations. What happened after that? Fundamentally nothing.

“We posed all the right questions, said Leshner, “but sadly, there has been no real funding response.”

BARRIERS TO OVERCOME

Despite the elevation of the problem of gun violence in the media and public discourse (often prompted by mass shooting instances) and increased attention on the dearth of research on firearms, political barriers continue to stand in the way of funding.

Leshner said nothing has been produced by the CDC since it was instructed to resume support for gun research. The agency did ask in the President’s last two budget requests for Congressional approval of $10 million to study gun violence—a paltry amount—but no funding was approved by Congress. Two Members of Congress also introduced a bill supporting funding for the CDC to do gun research. Again, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted it down.

These political barriers to federal funding seem to also extend and have an effect on private foundations and nonprofits, as Hemenway pointed out when discussing the difficulty of getting questions related to guns on private surveys. There is less than a handful of “brave” foundations, he said, that are quietly providing some funding, but many other foundations could do so and are not.

“I think they are afraid they have a board member who might be a member of the National Rifle Association who would say, ‘We don’t want this controversy,’” he said.

The bottom line, Leshner said, is that we know without question that we need a public health strategy to tackle gun violence, and we know that we currently don’t have adequate science upon which to base that strategy, to ensure that it is founded on more than just intuition or a particular belief system.

“We know what research needs to be done, but nobody seems to want to make the investment necessary to approach this set of problems.”

Article > http://tinyurl.com/gryxgdk

10 Things To Do To Change Your Life Forever

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future”
~ John F. Kennedy

The one constant thing in our life is change. We cannot avoid it and the more we resist change the tougher our life becomes. Trust me, I know this because I was very skilled at deflecting change in my life. We are surrounded by change and it is the one thing that has the most dramatic impact on our lives. Change has the ability to catch up with you at some point in your life. There is no avoiding it because it will find you, challenge you, and force you to reconsider how you live your life.

Change can come into our lives as a result of a crisis, as a result of choice or by chance. In either situation we are all faced with having to make a choice – do we make the change or not? I believe it is always better to make changes in your life when you choose to rather than being forced to.

We however cannot avoid the unexpected events (crisis) in our lives because it is these events that challenge our complacency in life. What we can control when we are experiencing these challenging events, is how we choose to respond to them. It is our power of choice that enables us to activate positive change in our lives.

Acting on our power of choice provides us with more opportunity to change our lives for the better. The more opportunities we create to change our lives the more fulfilled and happier our lives become. Here are 10 things that you can do in your life that will change your life for the good, forever:

1. Find Meaning In Life

Spend some time trying to sort out what is important in your life and why is it important. What is it that you want to achieve in your life? What are your dreams? What makes your happy? Your meaning in life gives you purpose and sets the direction of how you want to live your life. Without meaning you will spend the rest of your life wandering through life aimlessly with no direction, focus, or purpose.

2. Create A Dream Board

When we were children we would daydream all the time. We were skilled at dreaming and visualising what we would be when we grew up. We believed that anything was possible. As we grew into adults we lost our ability to dream. Our dreams became hidden and once we started to feel like achieving our dreams was impossible.

A dream board is a great way for us to start believing in your own dreams again. Seeing our dreams every day on a dream board brings our dreams to life. Our dreams become real and we start to have believe in the possibility of achieving these dreams.

3. Set Your Goals To Achieve Your Dreams

Once you know what is important in your life and what your dream life looks like for you, you need to take action and set your long-term, medium, and short-term goals. It is acting on these goals that enable you to achieve your dreams

Remember your goals may change. Always be flexible with setting and achieving your goals as things in life change and your goals need to reflect these changes. It’s the small steps that you take that create the momentum for change to happen in your life.

4. Let Go Of Your Regrets

Regrets will only hold you back in life. Regrets are events of the past and if you spend all your time thinking about the past you will miss the present and the future. You cannot change what you did or did not do in the past, so let it go. The only thing you have control over now is how you choose to live your present and future life.

I had a heap of regrets that were holding me back in my life. I came across the “Balloon Exercise” and got rid of my regrets for good. What is it? It’s simple — blow up as many balloons as you need. On each balloon write a regret and then let the balloon go. As the balloon drifts off into the sky say goodbye to that regret forever. A simple and powerful exercise that works and can change how you live your life.

5. Choose Some Really Scary Things To Do And Then Do Them

This is all about you choosing to step out of your comfort zone. Public speaking is one of the most frightening things anyone can do. I was petrified of public speaking however, I knew that I wanted to be a motivational speaker. So I joined Toast Masters to overcome my fear of public speaking. My first speech was terrible, my knees were knocking, I broke out in a sweat and I couldn’t stop shaking. But I did it and the feeling of completing this speech, even though it was terrible was great. I chose to keep going and now I earn a living as a motivational speaker. I am still nervous when I get up to speak however it is an excited nervous and I love it.

Make a list of scary things that you would kind of like to do but are too afraid to. Put a plan in place and then go do them. Never stop doing scary things because if you do your life will become one of complacency and comfort.

6. Start Living A Well-Balanced Life

Our health does not remain the same. Our physical, emotional, and spiritual state changes, as we get older. What we can control however is how we feed our minds and our bodies. Living a balanced and healthy life builds our resilience to the physical changes of our body. Exercise is the best way in which we can attain a positive and optimistic attitude toward life.

Living a healthy, well-balanced life with lots of exercise is a lifestyle choice that without a doubt will give you a happier more satisfied and fulfilled life.

7. Face Your Fears

Its easy to ignore our fears and hope that they will go away. Unfortunately, it does not work like that. If you want to change your life, learn to master your fears so they can’t control you any longer. Our fears are only thoughts in our minds that are not real but over time we have become to believe that they are true. It is our fears in life that stop us from living our life to the fullest. We know when our fears are controlling our lives because we feel discontent, dissatisfied and unfulfilled.

Once we face our fears we take back our power to choose how we want to live our lives and when we do this we change our lives forever.

8. Accept You

The only person who is going to create change in your life is you! and to create that change you have to like you. There will be times in your life where you will face rejection and there will be people who will not like you that much. Accepting who you are and loving yourself helps you to move forward in your life. Putting yourself down all the time and wishing you could be better will only lead you to a life of unhappiness and discontent.

Find your courage, love yourself, and step out and do something crazy. Don’t worry about what anyone thinks or whether it is the right thing to do. In your heart if it feels right, act on it and go create the life you love.

9. Live In The Moment

Many of us tend to think that the grass is greener on the other side. Often, we get to the other side of the fence we find that this is not so. The motivation to change our lives comes from our desire to be happy. We are often so busy focusing on our pursuit of happiness that we miss the joy of actually living in the moment. Our desire to have happiness in our lives is a desire of a future state not of the present. We become so consumed with all our problems and discontent in the present we miss the precious beauty of the moment.

Sitting on the beach eating an ice-cream with your best friend or partner is a moment of happiness. Appreciating and showing gratitude on a daily basis is experiencing happiness in the moment. Helping those in need brings joy and happiness to us. This is what living our life in the moment is all about – don’t miss these moments because you are too busy focusing on your pursuit of happiness.

10. Experience The Joy Of Learning

Each time you learn something new you gain more knowledge and with more knowledge comes more confidence. Learning helps us to be more adaptable and flexible to new situations. Learning encourages us to be more creative and innovative in our thinking and we are therefor more comfortable with the unknown.

Reading books is a great way for us to learn. To fully embrace the joy of learning, never stop reading nor searching for more knowledge. Learning gives our life meaning and this is what makes our life worthwhile.

You have a choice to make as to how you want to change your life. Choosing to act on these 10 things will, without a doubt change your life forever. So what are you waiting for? Go do these 10 things now!

Article > http://www.lifehack.org/310325/10-things-change-your-life-forever