Podcasting

Podcasting has made university so much easier for me.
Although I don't have an ipod, all of my kids do so I load the podcasts that I have to listen to and then take their ipods with me to whatever sport training they are doing. While I wait for them to finish training I use my time to listen to my podcast. It is a great use of time that I would otherwise waste.
Sometimes I wish the university put more of the course on podcast because after listening to a podcast the information is so much clearer.

Skype

Skype is known as VoIP which is Voice over internet protocol.

I was introduced to Skype in my first subject at CSU. I immediately fell in love with it, as did my husband as I was able to use it instead of the telephone to complete a group assignment. Of course this system is not perfect and it used to drop out just when you needed it the most. But as the saying goes, you get what you pay for....and as it is free I guess you have to put up with all of the problems associated with it.

After travelling to Europe my daughter has managed to stay in contact with a friend in Canada that she met in Italy. It is fantastic, although there are lots of pauses while they wait for the next person to have their turn. We have also introduced my mother to this method of communication and she now uses it to talk to her brother as he flies all over the world for work. 

On Christmas day we used it to talk with my brother who was in New Zealand. I wish we had this technology when my dad was alive and my children were little so that they could have talked to him and he could have seen them growing up as he and my mother lived a considerable distance from my house and only saw their grandchildren a few times a year.

Photo and video hosting

Well I have just found a new way to waste time.

Flickr is a fabulous way for sharing photos, although I haven't loaded any onto the site yet, I am a member and I have also joined the INF506 group. Personally I prefer using photobucket to share my photos, so I think that I will continue to use this site over the flickr site.

I have also wasted an hour or so searching through youtube looking at absolutely hilarious videos that people have made. as I said yet another way to waste time.

While doing my placement at Yamba library over the Christmas break I observed a man using the computers to look up youtube to find out how to do tie dying. He had decided to tie dye t shirts for his family for Christmas. What a great use of the site. The use for it is unlimited in a school library setting.

I absolutely love your tube.

Gaming and 3D Worlds- Module 2 continued

Well I have just wasted 2 hours trying to understand second life which is a 3D world that I am supposed to become involved in for this subject.

I clearly have no idea what I am doing. All I have managed to do is join and get my user name and password as well as a cool avatar. And that's where it ends.

I am now supposed to visit the CSU  learning centre and send a friendship offer to Lena.

Not only am I unable to find the learning centre, but who knows who Lena is! I have done the tutorial, downloaded the software like I was told to do and copy and pasted the links into my web browser to try and get to the learning centre, but I am unable to do so.

Maybe it has something to do with Firefox. I don't know, all I know is that I have wasted time that I really don't have and have not achieved the objective that was set.

Obviously this will not be one of the three online activities that I choose to add to my online journal for assessment.

Mind you if I had to do a critical evaluation it would be along the lines of....Who in the world would ever use this program? I guess the majority of users would be social misfits who don't have any friends and need to live in some kind of  a fantasy world. Mind you they are a whole lot more intelligent than me because at least they can work out the system, a system that I find too difficult and complicated to be able to use. Good luck to all of those people that have become friends with Lena you have probably just earned a distinction in this subject because you actually get this part of the module!!!

I think I will just move on and forget all about finding Lena!

Mashups

I am still stuck on module 2 after sitting here for most of the day.

I have been reading about mashups and I have subscribed via twitter to Mashable: The social media guide blog.

I think that this is a great use of twitter. Jake, maybe I am beginning to get this whole social networking thing....

A mash up is a combination of more than one online data source to create a new digital object or service (just in case you were wondering)

Creative Commons

Reading about creative commons has made me think that there will or maybe already is a huge market for lawyers in this potentially gray area of legal disputes.

Social networking

According to my notes social networking is the extension of personal relationships and community into the online environment. I think I will need to revisit my definition that I gave at the beginning of this subject.

Module 2 and my journey so far.

On Friday I felt like I was banging my head against a wall and just not getting this subject. You see I am not really into social networking and I just don't see the point of it.

I was also struggling to come up with a suitable project for my major assignment. 

So, I phoned Jake. He is just divine. He was patient with me and he helped me understand social networking a bit better and he said that it was ok I wasn't head over heels in love with facebook, twitter etc and it was good to evaluate these tools critically. I think it was at that point that I had a lightbulb moment in beginning to understand social networking. I feel privileged to be completing this subject and to have such a patient instructor in Jake.

So, moving right along into module 2.................

Blogs

A blog is short for web log and provides an easy platform for web publishing.

Microblogging is gaining in popularity with Twitter being the primary site..

Wikis

A wiki is an online space which can be jointly edited by a number of contributors.

Wikipedia is the most famous example of the wiki.

In a Sydney Morning Herald interview with encyclopedia Britannica president he appears to have sour grapes that Google ranks wikipedia above his encyclopedia in its search engine. He was not very positive about his views and to me it just looks like a case of sour grapes.

Tagging

Tagging is the application to an online resource of a word or phrase as descriptive metadata.

Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others). Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information. (Source: http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html)

We were asked to think about  what value a user-generated folksonomy offers in comparison with a taxonomy designed by information professionals.
Well I'm not sure what value it would have apart from being a quick and easy method because as Rosenfold(2005)  correctly points out, when there are only a few items tagged under a title it is a great way to locate things like photos, but when there are thousands under the same tag it isn't quite as easy to find the relevant photo. He also suggests that they don't support searching very well.
Overall quite an interesting piece of writing.


Delicious

Well I have just started an account with Delicious (I think).

It was extremely easy to do and was able to be done through facebook.

I am really impressed and I am going to start saving my readings etc to this site so that if the computer breaks down I won't lose everything that I have saved again like I did the last time.

Very impressive. I can't wait to start using it.

Once I have this thing up and running I think that I will come back and complete the online learning task for assignment 2.

Twitter

I have now joined Twitter.

Don't really see the point to this social networking tool.

Who cares what people are doing?

I have enough trouble keeping up with what is going on in my own life to worry about what other people are doing. Also who cares what I am doing???

I have an incredibly boring life!

On reflecting on the process to join twitter it was extremely easy, actually foolproof I would say. Much easier than facebook even!

New Flickr account

Well I have just joined flickr as well as requesting to join the flickr INF 206-506 group.

It was fairly simple to join as long as you agreed to all of the terms and conditions.

I'm not sure that I am really that happy with what I had to do to join.

One of the questions involved giving them permission to access a whole lot of information from my facebook status.

I'm not sure that I will actually upload photos onto flickr, although as I have just lost all of my photos from the computer it probably wouldn't be a bad idea as they would store them all for me.

Maybe after this semester of study I may feel more comfortable using this medium.

I have now joined facebook and flickr. I now need to look into joining twitter.

This is way too much technology for me, I'm at risk of social networking overload I think.