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 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 3 – Web 2.0 – Back to the Future?

The web was developed in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee. According to
an answer to a FAQ on the W3 website

“The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential…. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it become a realistic mirror of the ways in which we work and play and socialise.”

Soon fences were erected, first by Netscape (1994) and then by Microsoft in the so-called browser wars to become the dominant force in web browsers. The software produced was proprietary and thus locked users into using particular types of software. Netscape ,Lotus and Word Perfect eventually gave way to Internet Explorer, Excel and Word as Microsoft dominance grew. It was also around this time that saw a massive growth in internet companies. The mantra during that period seem to be grow market share and do not worry about profitability (see The Investors Journal.com (November 2007) .

The concept of Web 2.0 began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International in 2004(O’Reilly Network:What is Web 2.0). In essence they realised that the web was not dead and new applications were being developed with regularity. The web 2.0 conference was born.

But what was web 2.0.? In Paul Graham’s article , the 2004 conference notes read:

While the first wave of the web was closely tied to the browser, the second wave extends applications across the web and enables a new generation of services and business opportunities.”

There have been many attempts to arrive at a definitive definition. These range from “The Web as a platform” (Richard MacManus in February 2005 to Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Compact Definition

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

So where does this leave us? Have a look at Tim Berners-Lee’s Dream back in 1990 and then compare it to O’Reilly’s definition in 2005. Do you see the similarities? Both espouse the idea of universal usage, both talk about social networking, and both refer indirectly to harnessing the collective intelligence.
Paul Graham sums it up best when he suggests that Web 2.0 mean using the web the way its meant to be used.

Like the title of this blog Back to the Future

 

Module 2 – Reflections on Chat /IM

I decided to have another look at the task requirements for this module as well as the posts I had made . I feel that I covered off the basic requirements but something was missing.

I had never extensively used chat/IM  before. I was aware of IM because  some of my nephews and nieces had been using it for years.I just never felt the urge to be as available to friends and family as they seemed to be. . At work I like to focus on the task at hand without extraneous interruptions. I can hear you say that is not possible. I can assure you that it is not only possible but also the only way I could get my work done and still have a life. All email notifications were off and the telephone diverted and the office door closed,

During the course of this study period, I have installed MSN and ICQ .Both very straight forward to download and install. I have managed to have several one on one text chats with fellow students on both MSN and ICQ, as well as Skype and found the experience satisfying. The drawback for me was the act of typing the message.  Years of training and rereading text before publishing seems to go out of the window as I try to keep the conversation flowing. It is not easy sitting there looking at a blank screen with only the occasional “name” is typing appearing on the screen.

The other thing that struck me was the length of time that a conversation can take. A simple voice conversation covering the same topic may only take several minutes. Text conversation takes much much longer. My daughter tells me that I need to multi-task and do something else whilst waiting for the next text to pop up on the screen. This is difficult for two reasons, firstly in general men do not multi-task well. Have a read of The real difference between men and women. This article although it turns into an advert for brain food,summarises in simple language a lot of the thoughts that you can find online without any sexist overtones found in Men and Multitasking. And secondly, when conversing with someone  I was taught that it was impolite not to concentrate on the conversation at hand.

That bring us to last night (Sunday 4th January). Brett had organised an ICQ meeting for 7pm AEST . In the week preceding I had added  ICQ numbers to my contacts list as they appeared on the discussion board. When I added contacts, I also made sure that I renamed them with their student name , this would make it a lot easier to track who was talking during the group chat. At the appointed time I was added to the conversation along with a dozen others and the fun began.  I was amazed at the speed of the conversation. No sooner had one message appeared and there was another in its place. It was difficult keeping up with the conversation. There appeared on occasion to be several conversations going at the same time. By the time I had typed a message in reply to a point, the screen had moved on. It helps to be a speed typist. I need to look at the keys as I type, not good in a chat that moved as fast as last night.

If this sounds critical, it is not meant to be. The experience was exhilarating and and good fun. I learnt a bit about fellow students and their preferred methods of communications.  In fact this could be a regular feature for the rest of the study period as Tess has set up aNET SP4 Chat Group. This will give us another method of discussing issues that arise in the course of our learning journey.

In summary I have found Chat/IM to be a very easy medium to utilise. I think the drawback is that all your friends need to be on the same platform. It may mean that you need to have several chat programs installed. I have just become aware of Meebo which opens all of your chat accounts in one platform. I have not used it to any great degree, but it seems to simplify the process.

 

Reflections on Module 2 – Communicating in the Infosphere

created by Clogwog at http://www.wordle.net

How do I talk to you? Let me count the ways. (with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

In the recent dark ages (before internet), communication was simple. The choice was either a letter that could take many days to reach its destination, face to face contact if you lived reasonably close to each other and the telephone (usually a public one because home phones were not that widespread). Today there are a myriad of ways  to stay in contact with family, friends and colleagues.

In recent time we have seen development of the fax machine (a photocopier built into a phone), and the phenomenon of text messaging on mobile phones. Indeed now you can send video messages as well as photos via the mobile phone.

Since the development of the World Wide Web in 1991 by Tim Berners- Lee new forms of communication have evolved. It is now rare to find anybody without an email address. In an article in PCWorld , Sept 2000 Ferris Research claimed that by 2002 we’ll spend more than 4 hours each day reading and answering 50 work related messages. To counter this, the article offers tips to manage emails. These tips have been explored in previous blogs as part of the Module tasks.

I cannot imagine spending that much time each day on email. I can recall during my corporate life that I spent a large amount of my time dealing with electronic communications. My method of dealing with this was to only check emails first thing in the morning, at lunchtime and just prior to finishing for the day.  This did not necessarily please my peers, but was an effective way of managing time and getting things done. In my opinion, this explosion (in email) actually increased the Time Management education business at the time.

Since then other forms of communication have developed. Instant Messaging on the PC actually pre dated SMS on the telephone. These are similar methods of communication. IM though generally requires all parties to be subscribed to the same IM service.  You thus find (just like in this class) people actually subscribing to several services.   Like the telephone, IM is usually a synchronous form of communication providing that both parties are available. Both forms also offer asynchronous chat as it is possible to leave a message either on an answering machine or as an offline message.  In the internet world there are also Email lists and discussion boards. Both of these have also been discussed at WebCT and in my previous blogs. A later addition to the world of communications is Twitter a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? This has been described as SMS on steroids.

With all of these choices where are we really. Are we any better off?  Do we actually socialise with our friends any more than we did before all these options became available? How do we  manage to use all of this technology and still have time to do things like shopping (oops forgot we can shop online) , sports and going out to dinner or a few drinks?

When we go out we are never far from our technological gadgets. We are available 24/7. I wonder at the sense of it all. Do we find quiet time or are we like the drug addict that must get a daily fix.

I am not anti-technlology. I believe that technology exists to serve us, not the other way round. From personal experience it appears that we are becoming slaves to the technology. Is it time we stopped to smell the roses (depending on water restrictions) or do we launch into further development?

As I said in the thread at WEBCT. No real answers only more questions.