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Well – I am done. I may not have gotten to read all the course materials I wanted to, and I may not have been able to contribute to the forum as much as I wanted to. But I feel I have gotten something from the course, if only to make me be more reflective of my use of communication technologies in the future.
I hope you approve.
Claire signing out.
Thinking about the flow of information through communication as an ecology gives us a framework from within which to view and evaluate our own use of the internet. It reinforces the idea of connectedness that is inherent in the common usage term, the web. We are all bound to one another, and to the technologies we use, via the communication of packages, or streams of information that flow throughout the system. Whether this information will give computers (namely artificial intelligences created by programs or other AI’s) the ability to predict the probability of complex future events, or to create a pseudo god, as happens in the Dan Simmons book Hyperion is up for question. But the information and concerns explored in this book are becoming more pertinent as our information ecology grows, becomes more complex, has less palpable boundaries and is controlled by decentralised parties.
The ability of an individual among thousands to navigate their way through this information, and to collate information from many different users into a coherent whole (think file sharing and bit torrents), gives rise to a new kind of currency, in which information can become power, but can no longer be contained or controlled. Traditionally the distance which individual information would travel was small, and information that was widely available in one locality was vastly different to the information available in another locality, dependent upon the occupations, knowledges and environments of each community. The community of information has, however, grown to include many different locations, even many different times, and is made possible through the use of information sharing (communication) tools, such as the WWW, and the many different environments created for it. This environment will only continue to get bigger and more complex, as more and more communities world wide tap into the information available, and share their own knowledge and expertise (have a read of my concepts assignment for a little more about this).
The thought of the information that I add to the internet being available almost universally others makes me think twice about adding information about myself, while also making me keen to add some valuable knowledge, allowing others to learn from my mistakes and to create a more equitable and informed society. My desire to act as an individual contributing within a community operates with and against my desire to protect myself from any harm others in this community may be able to inflict upon me, based upon the information I have given.
Why don’t we talk about a communication ecology? Well – I guess communication is more of an action than a thing. We talk about a rainforest ecology but we don’t talk about a predation ecology. If communication is the core of the ecology, then what is there to communicate? Communication is meaningless without information, information is not meaningless without communication.
Hmm, this task asks us to use a source from our previous task, and annotate it. Easy enough. But it also asks us to make sure it is relevant to this unit, not so easy seeing as I was searching for rock climbing….I wasn’t aware that the search was meant to be relevant to the course (makes sense but seeing as it wasn’t explicitly stated I assumed we could search anything.) I may have to do a quick search for a site that is relevant to this unit. Let’s see what I can do…
Typing internet +search -google found me the following page which I will be annotating for this task:
Annotation:
The website, published by the Media Awareness Network, is entitled How to search the internet effectively. It states that its target audience is teachers and then provides information about how search engines work and how you can make them work for you. This includes information about keywords, boolean searching, use of punctuation and phrasing. The information was originally published by the WebTools company but has been reproduced with their permission. This information may have originally had a commercial purpose but is now being published on the site of a not-for-profit organisation, meaning the purpose of the information is more likely to educate and inform. The pages content is not advocating that the reader use a particular product or service and provides a useful and simple overview of basic search techniques. If the reader is interested in finding out more comprehensive information about the topic then a link to the full document from which it was taken is provided.
Reflection:
I cannot imagine myself annotating sites for my own reference. It is quite time consuming and while I imagine it would be very useful to read an annotation of a site to establish it’s value, reading it before visiting it would be more beneficial (such as the example provided in the web2.0 post). For my own personal use I would simply note down the title/URL and menu information of a site, so that I knew who it was by, where to find it and what I would find on it, if it was a site whose contents were not credible then I would not bother recording this information in the first place.
I had a look through the learning logs I have added links to from my log and am surprised to note that many people have not completed most of the tasks. I can only assume that these people have given up, dropped out and decided the course wasn’t for them. While there are probably many successful students whom I just haven’t linked to (adding the links turned out to be an incredibly time consuming activity – I am very impressed with people like Rhys who seem to have linked our entire course), the proportion that I have seen which are incomplete makes me feel quite proud to have come this far.
I may be racing to the finish line, trying to get this log and another essay completed by the coming friday, but I have stuck to all my courses, all four of them. I have completed all the assignments on time (so far), while still maintaining 5 shifts a week at work, 2 shifts a week volunteering, a week long holiday to Sydney, an intense diet change (I have become a vegan since the course began), a concurrent bout of anaemia, and managing to juggle a really tight budget. All of these things are personal, and as such maybe it is not appropriate to write about them in an assignment which I will be handing in, yet I feel that they must be said. Especially seeing as I’m sure the only people who will really appreciate my perseverance are my tutors and fellow students.
I feel I have gained a lot from this course, and am enrolled to complete my first unit of internet design next study period (along with only one other course). I am looking forward to finishing my log before I head off to volunteer today (fingers crossed – I will get it done!) and then leaving some very positive feedback about the course on OASIS.
I cannot wait until SP1 begins, and I have time to concentrate on two courses, and do them both to the best of my ability. I have learnt a lot from trying to do four courses at once, namely that I should focus on doing the courses I am doing well (which means that I enjoy them more) rather than just trying to get the courses done for the sake of having their names on my degree.
The way in which I organise the information I retrieve from my search results varies wildly depending upon the purpose to which it is being put. If it is a page that I think I will have to access fairly regularly over a period of time then I will add it to my ‘bookmarks’ bar. I will also do this if it is a page that regularly updates it’s information (such as a forum or auction site) so that the latest information is always just a single click away. For assignments I am generally searching for journal articles and these are normally able to be saved as pdfs, for which I create a special folder, and which I name according to author and/or topic. Here is an example of how I recently organised the information I had collated for an assignment:
Assignments for which I have to reference websites (such as our concepts assignment) I don’t use anything other than safari to record the information that I need. This often means I have 7 or 8 tabs open in Safari while I am doing an assignment, something that clogs up my browser but also means that it is so crowded I am not tempted to open up tabs to search for irrelevancies (such as looking at youtube etc) while I am completing the assignment. As I tend to do assignments over an intense period of three to four days this doesn’t really become an issue, if I was to be searching for longer then it definitely would.
In the past I have recorded web pages in a specially created word document, which is how I am going to be recording my top three hits from my previous search. I am going to use pages for this as it handles images much more easily than ms word, so will be able to easily format the screenshots that I will be entering into the document. Here is what my completed document looks like.
The reason that I would do it this way, instead of using software specifically for catching this information is that this way I can select what information I can record, and only need to record the information that I will need. The links in pages are easily clickable, allowing me to access the page almost as if I were using a bookmark, and I could arrange the pages in the order in which I want them. If I thought I would like to record such information regularly I probably would look into buying software to help me do it. But I am not a huge fan of installing new programs onto my computer, and find that even if they do do useful things, I still tend to ignore them in favour of more simple program, like pages.
I have failed dismally in trying to find a meta search engine for my Mac, as I couldn’t work out how to download glooton on their site with all the French and I have the new OS which doesn’t have Sherlock on it. As dashboard and spotlight were meant to replace Sherlock I have looked into finding a widget or using spotlight to conduct a web-wide search but these apps only look for specific things in specific places. I am therefore going to use WebCrawler, a meta search engine made by Yahoo that searches all the major search engines, for this task.
I searched ’rock climbing’ in google to start with and recieved 15 million and 400 thousand hits. The top hit was as follows:
Webcrawler, when the same search was entered returned 52 results with the exact same top hit.
Here are my top five hits in Google:
Here are my top five hits form WebCrawler:
BOOLEAN SEARCHING
I am going to search for rock climbing again but this time I am going to exclude those pages that deal with indoor climbing. The boolean search as I entered it into Google (advanced search) looks like this:
This give me 19 million and one hundred thousand results, strangely more than when I was searching without an exclusion. I think is because when I search for rock climbing it recognises as it a defined search term (it knows the two words belong together) but when I search for rock and climbing it searches for any document containing either of these words.
The same boolean search in Webcrawler (rock +climbing -indoor) gave me 55 results, also more than I received for rock climbing alone.
In my experience boolean searching is much more easily recognised in university library searches than in google searches etc. I was explicitly taught how to boolean search in my first year at my last university and have found it makes searching, especially in journal article databases (where the key words are almost universally found in the relevant titles), almost infinitely easier.
The trick is to do a general search first, based around the area of study and the topic within that area, and then to narrow down your results till you are left with the most relevant articles, normally a smaller number through which you can search for the best. Searching for rock climbing in university libraries yields very few results and excluding indoor climbing doesn’t narrow the search down by much (from 65 results to 62 at the Griffith Uni Library). But as I am looking for only general information about outdoor climbing – technique guides and crag details, then this narrow reduction is to be expected, outdoor climbing is a pretty large subject matter.
Module 4 seems to be addressing those areas of internet use that I actually have learnt about over my years using the internet. I have learnt that you should never download an application without reading about it in a few forums first, and that you probably don’t need that application in the first place. I have found with my Mac that most of the things I want to do can be done using the software that comes with my OS. I have acquired some bits and pieces here and there, but have found that the only programs I use regularly are those from the MS office suite or iWork. When I first got the computer my internet savvy friend downloaded a few programs that he thought I would need, such as Cyberduck, but I still havent used them and havent the foggiest about what they do. The one tool that I have found to be useful is Flip4Mac, a windows media player for my Mac. I also use adobe alot as most journal articles are downloadable in pdf and my scanner only scans one page of something at a time, meaning I have to make them into one file using acrobat.
Out of all the tools offered for download the only ones I don’t currently have and/or use were the offline copier and a bookmark manager. I also don’t have a search manager, but I do use the spotlight function on my Mac. Indeed, spotlight is the one reason I would never use a PC again, why does windows have a search function if it takes forever to turn up unrelated results?! It’s beyond me.
After looking into glooton, URL sucker and Webcopier I am a little disillusioned with our course notes. The link for Glooton was to a page in french, and URL sucker and Webcopier require you to pay for the software. I have managed to download pagesucker but seeing as I’m not willing to pay I cannot access the full version of the software. I can see how being able to view a webpage offline would be useful, especially if it was a page that contained information you accessed again and again, but most of my web browsing happens on pages that get updated regularly, such as classifieds and forums, making it fairly useless for me. Other pages that contain the information I need there is usually the option to save as a pdf or pages does a great job of maintaining the format of copied webpages (much better than word for this).
I honestly don’t think I need any new tools at the moment, as I use the computer so much I have found ways of doing most things that I want to do quite efficiently. I also like to access information at it’s source, and keep as much of it free from my hard drive and on the web as possible.
The difference between HTML and web2.0 is pretty easily illustrated:
HTML
web2.0
They are different in almost all ways except that they both link to the same material. The html provides the bare bones information needed to identify the destination of the link and the web2.0 provides all kind of extra information, even allowing people to comment on the destination page.
I would probably prefer to use the web2.0 version simply because that is the layout that I am used to and I am familiar with how to navigate the information. The html is also a bit text heavy, the pictures in the web2.0 version make each site easily distinguishable from the other surrounding it, the synopses are also time saving as I don’t have to bother leaving the main page to visit a site to find out what it is about.
Then again, if I knew what I was looking for I would probably prefer the html version as it loads a lot more quickly. I think Google has struck a really good balance between layout, useability, aesthetic and loading time.
No wonder it is so popular.
The hard thing when writing about blogs is that they are all so very very different. A blog can be anything you want it to be, and can deal with any subject matter that you like. I will give you links to a few that I view relatively regularly or that I have enjoyed in the past. I will then discuss my experience with being a blogger and how I can see myself using this as a platform into the future.
Journalist Margaret Simon’s writes this blog about the happenings in the media industry. This blog is used in much the same way as a newspaper, presenting fairly formal articles on a topic but allowing room for discussion, response and criticism. She actually breaks news in the Australian media industry and has a fairly dedicated following of others within the industry. This blog is being used as an experiment in a new type of journalism. She is a professional blogger and her blog is hosted by crikey.com, who pay her for articles.
David Tribe is an Australian scientist who uses this blog to discuss recent events regarding genetically modified organisms. He is a strong advocate of their use to increase productivity and uses these events to present evidence of why they are so fantastic. He provides links to research and newspaper articles written by others and then generally gives a synopsis of what has happened. He posts on this page every single day so it is very information heavy, but is a good example of a blogger having a specific topic and covering it very comprehensively, providing an almost one stop shop for those looking for recent news.
This page is more diary style where the author blogs about her vegan food choices, her family and her life. She is also a cookbook author. This is a much more casual blog but still seems to attract a large audience. The blog seems to accent her profession.
This is a French blog where very new music gets posted, for all those interested in the french electronic music scene. This music is downloaded by DJ’s who then play it at clubs before the records have even been pressed. There are a few other blogs like this that have been shut down for copyright infringements yet this one is still going strong. I don’t visit this site myself but my partner is a regular purveyor. You can often find music here that isn’t available to purchase anywhere, let alone on iTunes.
These are the only blogs I have had much contact with and I do not read any of them on a regular basis. I have found it difficult to find blogs that interest me enough to keep me going back day after day. I have also found it difficult to write more than one post on any blog I decide to set up for myself (apart from this one of course – but this time I have been given set topics to write about and a set time in which to do it – this makes disciplining myself much easier!).
It is also being said that blogs are being used to create a new wave of media – dubbed citizen journalism. I have found that these pages are more likely to link to other news stories than to provide really new news, and that if any do contain new news then this is picked up by the media companies fairly quickly. I guess blogging does provide a good vehicle for expressing personal opinions, perspective and experience on current matters but it will never replace people who find news and publish it in certain well-visited media websites.
As for myself, I find it hard to write for an invisible audience without a clear goal. The only experience I have had in writing about my life on a daily basis has been in my diary, and there I write information that I don’t really want to share with people, and that people probably dont want to share with me. What else would I want to communicate to an audience? I don’t have a real career or area of expertise, I am interested in everything and yet expert in nothing. My personal relationships are successful and low-key, and I tend to keep insights that I have about these things to myself. So maybe being a blogger is not for me.
Yet blogging is a useful reflection tool, yet unless that reflection is being marked (as this reflection is in this course) then is it really necessary to publish that information for others? Probably not. Indeed most reflection is intensely personal, and applies to very specific contextual circumstances, unlikely to be encountered by most people, and even more unlikely to be googled by a stranger looking for answers (the only people I can think who would be interested in reflective blog). I believe you can still have a blog that is private and viewable only by the author and those who are permitted to do so, I can see myself setting one of these up as an alternative to using word processing software on my computer for personal writing and reflection.
Perhaps if I ever set up a business a blog may be a useful way to communicate with customers about my new products, services or innovations. Or if i become a freelance something and would like to sell myself over the internet – as a writer, photographer, designer, artist, and so forth. It could be a handy forum to display new works regularly.
I know I have only just scratched the surface of what it is to blog, to read blogs and to find blogs, but I have concentrated on what blogs are to me, and how I can see them being important to me in the future. I hope it has sufficed 
So, my webpage didn’t get validated and I wrote it so long ago that I am having a difficult time trying to work out why. My page has two errors and three warnings. I have tried opening up my web page using text edit but instead of showing me the code it is simply showing me the page itself. I might have to google this one. Yay! Problem solved with the help of Dave Taylor. So, now for nutting through my errors and warnings…
For the information of all here is a picture of the code itself:
Error #1 
Line 1, Column 0: no document type declaration; implying “<!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM>”
This error confuses me as I have clearly indicated at the top of the page that it is an html document…Ahhh I see. I have to declare a doctype so the validator knows what it should be looking for. Unfortunately I don’t know which ‘type’ of HTML I was learning in that tutorial. I will try declaring it to be html3.2 and see if it does the trick.
I revalidated my document and it has now tentatively passed with one warning. Lets check it out
Warning #1 
No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.
I wonder what UTF-8 is? Wait a moment while I Google it. Mhhm, so far I have learnt that character encoding is necessary, but not yet what it does. Oh wait, here it says that it changes bytes into characters, and I assume that characters are what I am seeing on my screen so I guess the character encoding is a way of letting the program know how it is meant to read the data so that it can display it correctly. I would love to hear if this is right, it is difficult getting around the language they use on some of these explanation pages…
So let’s see what happens if I add character encoding. Though finding out how to do this is not easy…? Managed to find the information I needed on wikipedia.
My document has been validated!
Though now I have a headache. I might go and celebrate by having a nap
Oh, but before I do, here is my validated html code:
