Final Reflections

And now, the end is near;
And so I face the final curtain.
My friend, I’ll say it clear,
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain.

(lyrics My Way by Frank Sinatra)

And so we come to the end of a Study Period in NET11 The Internet – Communications. During this time ,under the guidance of Cynthia and Peter ,we have all helped one other to achieve our individual goals.

During the study period we were encouraged to think critically about what we were doing as well as publishing our thoughts about the how and the why. This was certainly daunting for most of us but we embraced it openly. The ideas that flowed in our student blogs were wonderful. I read as much as I could and found myself changing some of my attitudes towards blogging.

Encouraged, by Peter, I re-established my Twitter account. It is a wonderful tool. It can be used to have short conversations or you can use your followers to find information, or stolen property (in the case of Lance Armstrong). During the Bushfire Crises, news was filtering through Twitter quicker than on the official sources. A great tool, I am sure there are more uses.

We were encouraged to look at the tools we were using to communicate with. Are there any better tools available. I have used Skype for VOIP calls with friends. I had not thought about using it as a typed chat medium. As a group we used ICQ for a few Sunday evening chats. A great experience, but I prefer a simple one on one chat as my typing skills are not quick enough to keep up with ten conversations at once.

We also found out more about social bookmarking sites. I had only ever previously used Firefox bookmarks, but now I have been introduced to Delicious and Diigo. These two products will be very useful as I proceed along my journey to achieve a B.A (Internet Studies) as well as for my own personal research into my chosen hobby.

The use of these social bookmarking products also heightened my critical thinking. Diigo has space to enter an annotation for each article that you save. I doubt this will occur for all articles, but for university research articles, I will make a concerted effort.

We were introduced to Web 2.0 and Cloud computing (thanks Simon). The possibilities for these platforms is endless. There are questions of security in my mind. Am I prepared to store all my photos and documents in a cloud, or am I better off leaving these on the hard drive of my own computer.?

The one overriding thing that I have learnt is that there are not always answers but there are definitely always more questions.
This unit has provided the skills to critically assess the information and to make informed decisions about the directions we take.

In conclusion, I wish to thank all my fellow students for their help and support. I thank Cynthia and Peter for their guidance.

 

Module 5 The Future

The Future of the Internet

Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.
Alvin Toffler

I remember reading Future Shock by Alvin Toffler in the 1970’s. From what I remember the book’s message was about change and the ability of humans to adapt. I am sure that there was much more , but that is now hidden in the dark recesses of my memory.

The only constant thing that has happened over the last 40 years since that statement was made is change. In the 70’s there was no thought about computers on every desk, or that telephony would be mobile or utilising Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP). Everyday communication was carried using telephone and postage. Computers could only be used by computer operators, data was fed into machines via paper tape and magnetic cards.
Vint Cerf , a net pioneer, (in an interview with BBC News in January 2004) said that he thought that the telephone network would become a part of the net.

The science fiction writers such as Asimov and Arthur C Clarke wrote about Robots and Space Travel before these became actuality.

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction in an essay in Profiles of the Future (1962).

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The MIT Technology Review published a 3 part article in december 2005 with the Title “The Internet is Broken”. The major thrust is that many resources are being used to address the security on the net. The article pointed out that in the beginning the net was designed to facilitate communication between a few hundred academics and government users (David Talbot, The Internet is Broken Pt 2). Obviously since that time many more millions have discovered , use and rely on the net for everyday needs.

The argument is that the net has become unsafe for users, the analogy of Times Square in the 1980’s is a good one. Times Square is exciting and vibrant, but it is best to keep you head down lest you are offered drugs, robbed or harangued by the insane. The net is getting worse with spam, pornography (of all sorts),viruses and security attacks. All due to the insecure architecture of the Web. The article argues that all avenues of protection are ad-hoc additions to an insecure system.

In order to address this governments around the word have proposed systems to monitor the various networks around the world to ensure that we are protected from any net nasties. Our own Senator Stephen Conroy has gone against advice to introduce legislation to censor the net by the ISP’s . This legislation looks like it has been stopped in its tracks by the Independent South Australian Senator Nick Xenaphon (Refer The Age ). Hooray for common sense.

With all of this happening, how can we sensibly predict what will happen in the next 10,20 or 30 years?

I would like to leave this rambling post with a quote from Vint Cerf ” The Internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see. If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society.”

 

Module 5 Peer to Peer and Piracy

Reflections on Piracy

Today I went to see Slumdog Millionaire at the local cinema. Prior to the commencement of the movie we were subjected to the usual advertisements and film previews. I sat up very quickly when a preview for a movie called The Boat That Rocked.
This film is based on the pirate Radio ships that broadcast off the English coast in the 1960’s.
The following two paragraphs from the BBCgive a very brief reason :

At the beginning of the 1960s, an event occurred that changed the sound of Britain’s radio forever – the growth of ‘pirate’ radio stations. What started out as a protest for the freedom to play music ended up challenging the British government and the BBC’s rather conservative radio broadcast output. If it had not happened it is possible that commercial radio as we know it may not have been allowed to develop.

At the beginning of the 1960s there were only three national radio stations in Britain, all run by the BBC. In the spirit of public service broadcasting, the government insisted that all programmes were respectable, hopefully educational and impartial – hence the BBC was not allowed to broadcast commercials for fear that advertisers or sponsors could try to influence the quality or content of the programmes.

The reason I mention this is only to point out that piracy is not something new and could as Janis Ian suggests lead to better outcomes for all concerned.

The Record Industry has been making noises about its demise for many years. The screamed when blank tapes were being used to record from vinyl (remember those black pieces of plastic? I still have some). The Film Industry screamed when you could get blank video cassettes to record from the TV etc.. Both Industries seem to be healthy and can afford to spend a lot of money protecting their copyright.

Mark Pesce (2005) in Piracy is Good?How Battlestar Galatica Killed Broadcast TV makes a point that in the case of television , the industry has conditioned the viewer that watching a TV program is free. The Pesce article gives a very good example of a pirated downloaded episode of Doctor Who caused the biggest audience to watch the actual episode on TV a few weeks after the pirated version was released.

It seems to me that the industries mentioned above need to change their way of thinking and marketing. They are all working on a business model that will not survive in the current digital environment. Instead of trying to use the court systems and spending many millions of dollars trying to stamp out the “problem”, they should be investing this money in creating a business model that is more in tune with the times.

I do not have any answers to this, but I suggest that a close look need to be taken at industry infrastructure costs and distribution models. Mark Pesce in Part Two of Piracy is Good talks about a new model in the television industry.

I am not a advocate for the illegal downloading of music and film. I believe that all artists should be fairly rewarded for their artistic effort. After reading some of the articles it appears that the major recording artists do very very well, it is the fringe artists that are the ones to suffer.

 

Module 5 Information Ecologies

As I have worked through the tasks and readings for this subject I have come to realise that there is more to the internet than than just the technology. I was tweeting with fellow NET11 students about whether there was a task for Module 5. During the “conversation” the penny dropped. A good angle for this would be “Beyond the Tool Shed”.

If we think of technology as just a tool  it limits our thinking to “How do we use it?” , rather than thinking “Why do we use it and how can we make it better”

The how implies that we just work out which buttons to push to make it work. Admittedly , we need to know the how to make it work. Helen Merrick (2004) in the ilecture on the Curtin website stated that new technology already had a social aspect to it when it was first introduced. I did not really understand this at first, (this is also part of the subject matter in NET12) but then with the help of a few examples  this changed. The internet when it was first thought of was about sharing data /information between academics. The idea that the internet would become a prime means of communication and storage was not in the picture. These aspects of the internet came later as more people became familiar with the concepts and thought about what could be done.

I digress from my original purpose of trying to come to grips with the metaphor ” Information ecology”.  Merriam-Webster Online defines ecology as “the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environments”.
This helps us how? Nardi & O’Day (1999)

define an information ecology to be a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment. In information ecologies, the spotlight is not on technology, but on human activities that are served by technology.

Felix Stadler gives us 4 basic dimensions of an information ecology:

• interdependency
• change
• time-boundness
• differentiation

These 4 dimensions are similar in nature to the characteristics that Nardi and O’Day specify in their book Information Ecologies (1999). These were:

• System
• Diversity
• Co-evolution
• Keystone – Species
• Locality

You can read for yourself an extract at First Monday.

After you have read it , think about our class in Study period 4 in NET11. Our ecology is the members of our class (including tutors). We have all come together and have developed relationships between each other and are dependent on our tutors to guide us along our journey. We have also been dependent of the information that each of us has contributed in the various forums we have utilised (blogs, twitter,ICQ etc).

We all definitely are a very diverse group . We all come from different backgrounds and ranges of experience. I would find it difficult to say that we have not evolved over this study period. I know that I have learnt many new things and have grasped new tools to take away and experiment with. Some I have used during the last few months, others will be very useful as I think more about uses.

I puzzled a about a keystone species. The definition is a species that is crucial to the survival of the ecology. The easy answer is to say that Cynthia and Peter would cover that definition. But have a look through the discussion board. I think that we can honestly say that at various times each of us played that role at various times during the period, by giving advice and help to others in the group.

As to locality, you could argue that we are all in a different place, but I would argue that we have all come together in a place in cyberspace. Our physical locations may differ, but we all have a common location during this study period.

Nardi and O’Day summarise it well when they say :”only the participants of an information ecology can establish the identity and place of the technologies that are found there. Indeed, this is a responsibility, not just an opportunity. Designers of tools are responsible for providing useful and clear functionality, but they do not complete the job. As users of tools, we are responsible for integrating them into settings of use in such a way that they make sense for us.”

I argue that we in Study Period 4 have created our own information ecology. It has been a great pleasure studying along side you all.

 

Module 4 Evaluating Web Information

I wish that I had gotten to this point prior to the concepts assignment being completed. My thoughts during that exercise, were: why am I doing annotations to a reference site? This seems to be a waste of time.

I no longer think this way. I can now see the point. What I needed to appreciate was that the information I was using to make my case was reliable. I also needed to show my reader(s) why I thought this was the case.

So, what makes one site more reliable than the next. The tutorial form Ohio SU net.Tutor sets out 6 points to determine a sites reliability:

• Purpose
• Author
• Content
• Coverage
• Currency
• Recognition

My process in determining the reliability of a site is to take much of what is written with a grain of salt. A commercial site is always going to be biased towards it own products. An author is always going to be biased depending on his own prejudices etc. It is up to me as the user to determine whether the author has the experience or credentials to hold that opinion and whether his arguments make sense. An author and site will also be stronger if other sites and authors have used them as a citation.

Annotation
This is the annotation I wrote for one of the topics in the concepts assignment :
Suler ,J. (1997) The Blackhole of Cyberspace(and the unanswered email)

John Suler, PhD. is Professor of Psychology at Rider University who explores the psychological aspects of environments created by computers and online networks.

This article explains the thought that go through our minds when we are waiting for a reply to an email that never comes. The first thought are immediate that our mail servers failed to transmit or the communication has been sent into the blackhole of cyberspace.
How do we feel when a blog we have written fails to attract a comment? Suler points out that we need people to react to us and are consistent. I tend to feel a disappointment and endeavour to do better next time. We need to invoke a reply or a comment. Not by being provocative but by asking for a response.

Reflections

Social Bookmarking sites have a space that enables a user to provide an annotation of the site being bookmarked. This annotation is more useful to me and external users than the usual information used to identify bookmarked sites. It is my intention to utilise this facility in the future . Many is the time I have forgotten why a particular site has been saved. Social bookmarking sites also utilise the tagging concept. My tags need to be a little more descriptive to enable me to easily retrieve the stored information.
In this blog site I ensure that all blogs are tagged Curtin University and NET11, I then use the module number as the next level of tag. After that I may add specific words to identify a subject , e.g web 2.0. In Iterasi I create separate folders to group like topics together and have started to consistently apply tags.

This topic has been an important step in my learning journey. In the past I have searched and found information, but this module has provided me with a better armoury to store and evaluate information than I previously utilised.

 

Module 4 Organising Web Information

Organising Search Information
As we saw in the previous post the web contains millions of pieces of information.Of course not all of this information is relevant to our needs. As we search each of the articles, there comes a time when we need to file the retrieved information away for further reference. We could do this the easy (and ecologically unfriendly) way of printing out the information we require. In computer speak we would create a hard copy. This of course has many benefits. We can write notes in the page margins, we can take the paper with us and read it later at our leisure and eventually file it away until we have the inevitable clean out at the end of the study period, and the paper ends up in the recycling bin.

Alternatively, we can bookmark the information. A bookmark is defined as :A stored location for quick retrieval at a later date. Web browsers provide bookmarks that contain the addresses (URLs) of favourite sites. Most electronic references, large text databases and help systems provide bookmarks that mark a location users want to revisit in the future. (PC Mag.com).

I readily admit that I am a big user of paper as I print out the articles that I require for assignments and various other reading. I like the feel of turning the page and highlighting relevant bits that I want to quote or write about. I find it awkward to read articles on-line. I find it difficult to flick backwards and forwards as I come to grips with the information contained in the article. This is especially true if the article is particularly long.

But I need to change. Before this course I had used the Bookmarks tab in my Firefox browser. I had no system, despite having a system to file documents in appropriate folders and directories. I did not apply the same discipline to bookmarks. I also regularly deleted them as , I could not remember why I had saved them in the first place, or I had finished with them. The list would get quite long.

During this study period, thanks to fellow students and some research in to bookmark managers I discovered several great tools to help me become better organised. I examined several social bookmarking sites as listed in About.com. I also came across Iterasi. The benefit of this product, in my opinion, is that it saves the web page as it appears at the time of capture. There are many times when the URL of a particular page changes (for what ever reason) so that when you return to a bookmarked favourite, it is no longer there. This does not happen with Iterasi. The page is captured as is, and will always display as it was. This is especially beneficial when capturing a newspaper website. The page constantly changes. I can bookmark the page at 10am and when I click on the bookmark at midday, the page has change, With Iterasi, I get the page as it was at 10am. I thought it was cool.

The screenshot above shows an example of how Iterasi displays its information. For each site it shows a screenshot. It also then displays the URL and the title of the article. I am aslo able to explore what other Iterasi users have bookmarked.

This topic certainly has been an eye opener for me. I can now better organise my bookmarks. I can also look at other bookmarking sites such as delicious to see what other users have bookmarked in topics I am interested in.
Yesterday Simon Mainwaring (a fellow Student in Net11) alerted us to another social bookmarking product Diigo. I have not had a chance to fully explore this as yet, but it takes bookmarking to a new level by allowing highlighting and the insertion of comments.

I was but a lad just starting work when there was talk of paperless offices. 30 years later we do not appear to be any closer. Maybe this type of bookmarking and the cloud will be the start.

 

Module 4 Boolean Searching on the Web

Its a long time since I studied mathematics at any level. I was never that good but managed a pass at Higher School Certificate all those years ago. Boolean logic seemed to ring a bell. After having a look at the tutorial Boolean searching on the internet it sort of all came flooding back to me.
Google automatically uses the Boolean logical AND operator when you type a series of words in the search box. I thought then I could type in the logical operator OR into the search .This Nutrition OR Long Distance cycling. Google logically asked me whether I meant Nutrition for Long Distance Cycling and returned 615,000 hits.

I then realised that Google offered an advance search page. I have taken a screen print and shown it below.

Advanced Search Screen - taken from Google .com

You can readily see that Google will allow you to use Boolean logic to refine your search.

I first went for maximum hits (nutrition or Long distance cycling ) Ripper Rita! 180,000,000 hits see for yourself. I could probably get more if I asked for nutrition or long distance or cycling. This is outside what I am looking for , but only for interest 283,000,000 hits. But lets get back to reality.

Long distance cycling is also known as Randonneuring . Substituting , I ended up with 133,000,000. But the purpose is not to find an either or. I am looking specifically for nutrition advice to help me in my chosen hobby. Obviously I need to limit the search .

Therefore I need to search for Nutrition for Randonneuring. This search was limited to 13,800 hits. Having a short attention span, I scanned the first page of the information returned. There was one article that related specifically to what I was looking for, the others were general pages that described the sport and contained the word nutrition as part of the preparation for the sport. I then did a search on Nutrition for Long distance cycling. 305,000 hits, but the information returned was more relevant. This is due,I think, because the most common term to describe the sport is Long distance cycling. Randonneuring is more specific and it also covers more than just cycling.

BTW I also did the same search in Google scholar but the information was more at a medical level than what I required.

As I am in the sport, I could also use my inside knowledge to go to specific club sites or to sites designed to sell nutritional supplements to cyclists. These are biased but they do provide good generic guidelines as to proper eating and drinking habits. There are also the Institute of Sport websites that also provide good information.

Then I proceeded to look for information coming from university sources. As suggested I included education in the search parameter. This returned 67,600 hits. None came from universities but some good books were referred to.

So where does this leave my search. Admittedly I have a lot of information to trawl through to see which I should keep and which I should ignore. But I am going to get information overload?

My answer is a fence sitting ” it depends”. In my case I will look at a few websites and see whether I can obtain links to more specific information or find specific words that I can feed into a new search parameter. The topic I am looking for will have many contributions from experienced riders offering opinions. If I wanted to find the author of a quote, I would simply type in the quote. Google will still present multiple results but there will be a definitive answer.

When you are searching for general information, it will be necessary to read some articles that will lead you, eventually, to the information you are seeking. But importantly you may find information you did not know you wanted to find.

 

Module 4 Searching the Web

LOG ENTRY: record the first hit and number of hits in your learning log.

LOG ENTRY: set up a search using a metasearch engine , record the number of hits and compare to your first search. What differences did you notice? Why? Which search, on first glance gave you the most promising results?

My Pride and Joy - born on 4th July 2008

I have been cycling with a long distance cycling club (Audax Australia) for around 14 years now and I am still learning. One of the most important aspects of this sport is to ensure that the body gets the correct fuel in the quantity that it can absorb during the hours of exertion. I have only recently begun to get very interested in this topic. (I should really not admit this, but I seem to have survived by doing the wrong things). In the last twelve months I have dropped around 10kg of weight and purchased my pride and joy.

I tell you this because for this task I have decide to research more about nutrition in long distance cycling. My favourite (and everybody else’s , it seems) is Google. I type in the four words and ended up with 313,000 hits. The first 5 hits are shown in the screen shot below.

I had loaded Copernic Agent Basic in the previous task, so stuck with it for this search. Copernic returned 42 results. These are listed here:

Copernic Search 19th February 2009

The first thing that I noticed was that the first three hits were related to long distance telephone calls. Nothing to do with cycling at all. The other major difference was the number of hits that were produced. Some further investigation revealed that Copernic utilises 11 search engines and Google is not one one of them. The screenshot below shows the engine utilised.

I was not really satisfied with this result, so I went in search of another meta search engine. I came upon the online engine Search.com. This time the search returned 172,080 hits. The first 5 hits were all for cycling tours or advertisements , it was not until half way down the page that any reference to nutrition was found. For interest I have shown the first five results :

I have found that Google generally provides me with all the results that I need. I suspect that Google has the economy of scale to be able to crawl the web to produce the comprehensive results that it does. It also has a smart feature that gives results based on web history. I am not sure how it works, but it managed to filter out long distance telephone calls which are totally irrelevant to my requirements.

 

Module 4 Downloading tools / plug-ins Task – Part 2

In the previous edition I wrote about my new Acer Aspire. In this edition I will write about my everyday laptop (Dell D810 Latitude).

Home Office

Over time I have installed most of the software mentioned in our course notes.
Adobe pdf reader: this program is just about compulsory for anybody that either downloads books from the web or receives documents from other parties for business or pleasure. For better or worse Adobe Reader software is the global standard for electronic document sharing. It is the only PDF file viewer that can open and interact with all PDF documents (Adobe). W3C said in W3C Guidelines for Email Attachment Formats that you should avoid unnecessary attachments, but if required you should ensure that the format should be HTML, Powerpoint or PDF. They also suggest that at the very least it be a format with a readily available free viewer. I guess Adobe passes that test.

Flash/Shockwave Players: I have both on my laptop. I really cannot remember why I have them. I suspect that i tried to play a game and shockwave was required to view the animations. Again Adobe seem to have cornered the market with free software.

Media Players:I have all three media players installed (Apple Quicktime, Windows Media Player and Real Networks Player.) Why on earth do you need to have all three? I agree but the various formats do not like talking to each other. When I got my iPod, Apple insisted that for iTunes to work , Quicktime was required. Windows Media player is packaged with the Windows operating system, Microsoft is the gorilla of the industry, but some of their products actually work. Real Player was installed a while ago because some of the ABS downloads would only play using Real Player. I never did track down the reason for this. Basically I am covered when it comes to media playback.

As I asked in the above paragraph Why?. The internet should be easy to use. All development should be based on open source software. Or as I learnt earlier today all applications should live in the cloud.. Thanks to Simon’s Blog for bringing this to my attention. But mind you some of the developers in the interview were unsure what Cloud computing was. I digress because that is a blog for another day.

Search Managers/Combiners This was interesting to think about. I had previously installed and used the previous version of Copernic. From memory the attraction was that it could search both the web and my computer utilising the same query toolbar. It was not necessary to switch to say email and perform a search , all searches could be instigated from the copernic toolbar, no matter which program you were utilising. Firefox was then upgraded and copernic there was no longer a compatible plug in. I subsequently uninstalled v 2 of Copernic. This was a mistake as the further upgrade seemed to remove some of the functionality of the program. (my memory is a bit hazy on this but the Copernic discussion board seem to have run hot over this issue.)
I installed Copernic Desktop search, but something was nagging at me, so last night I did a bit of further exploring and installed Copernic Agent Basic version 6.12. I tested this on a couple of personal queries and it seemed to work ok. I will delve deeper in to this when I work on the Web Search tasks.

Book Mark ManagersI have not previously utilised any bookmark managers apart from the standard bookmarks tab in Firefox. I have not been diligent in organising the bookmarks into any logical order. This is unlike the various files I save in excel, word and access. I have IMHO a good filing system. I have found in the past that I save very few bookmarks. This study period and return to study have certainly changed that. In Firefox you can certainly put your bookmarks into suitable folders, but it can still be difficult to remember why a particular entry was saved.
I have opted to use a product called iterasi.

Bookmarks don’t cut it. They lead you to where that information was — but not the information itself. With iterasi, you can save any web page and return to it anytime, from anywhere, forever.

The beauty of this product is as the advertising blurb says, you archive the web page as it is at the time of archive. You can also add a meaningful description using tags and annotations and file it in a specific directory. When you come back to retrieve an entry you are presented with a screen shot. This is particularly handy.

Off-line Browser/Copier:I have always on Internet delivered via cable. In the last seven years I can count on one hand the times when the internet was not available to me. So I could not see an immediate value in downloading an off-line browser. When you think a bit more about it , there may be times when you take the laptop on holidays an may wish to do some research. By saving webpages so you can read them off-line could then be a bonus. Mind you the consequences of upsetting the significant other need to be weighed up with doing some research.

I downloaded Page Sucker and tested it . It seemed to work ok, however I am not sure that I will utilise it enough to make it worthwhile paying the shareware fee.

 

Module 4 Downloading tools / Plug-ins task – Part 1

Our Acer at Home

About 2 months ago I purchased an Acer Aspire One Netbook. You know what they are:a small laptop with an 8 inch screen and weighing in at under a kilogram. It would be mainly used when we travel overseas to stay in connect with friends and family via email and skype. We would utilise some of the many wireless hotspots available.

Computers come with very little useful software preloaded apart form the operating system and some limited use trial software. The first thing that needed doing was to install Firefox. This is my preferred browser. As well as the browser itself there are many add-ons and plug -ins available. This was followed by McAfee Security (I have a 3 machine licence).Having previously experienced virus troubles, I am paranoid, so I take precautions.

The major purpose of this machine is communication with family and friends so Skype and Fastmail were installed. So basically we were good to go. But wait a minute. What about the iPod? ok install Apple iTunes, this automatically installed Quicktime.

Then nearly as an afterthought , Adobe PDF Reader was installed, just in case we decided to use the netbook for other purposes. Then to top it all off I decided to load Open Office. This includes a nice feature that allows you to save files in pdf format.

A few hours of time and the netbook is set up ready to use on the web. Best part about it was all the software is free. (I admit that the McAfee licence cost money, but I already owned the licence so adding the third machine did not incur additional cost).

Just before finishing off this small post I though I had better check whether Shockwave was installed. It was not. Shockwave is a very quick install. The only thing I disliked is that it also wanted to include a Norton’s scan. I am not a fan of this type of cross selling. Usually when installing software the user takes the easy option and assumes that the tick boxes are the recommended install, as opposed to a custom install. If you do not read the instructions carefully you could end up with unwanted software installed.

The Netbook set-up is a slimmed down version of the way our “home” laptops are set up. I did not explore any other software for it as the major purpose was email and VOIP communication. Installation of the software is straightforward and just requires some time to load the software.

In setting up this machine, I took into account the major items mentioned in our course notes, cost, ease of use, functionality utility and commonality. The interesting point of this , I set up this netbook two months before I started to look at this module.

Does this make me clever? I think it means that experience and experimentation has delivered an appropriate range of software for the purpose required. In time I suspect the software will change. But I also think about the saying by French novelist Alphonse Karr “The more things change the more they stay the same.”