Over the last six weeks, there have been many new ideas and concepts that we have faced in relation to information management.
Prior to undertaking this course, every other assignment I have worked on previously has been on a topic that I have chosen. This had meant that I was able to focus on my strengths or my interests and avoid topics that I either had no interest in or did not particularly understand or want to participate in. This was the first assignment I have had to complete where the tasks were set up for me and the topics were planned out, which I believe to be an advantage in a course like this and with this particular assignment as it has ensured that us as students have had to address each of these new terms and concepts, whilst still allowing us the freedom within our own blogs to explore those set topics as we wished.
Personally, this task goes beyond study and encourages practical participation whereby we as students are made to become at least familiar with a number of different facilities on the web, helping our employability and increase our skills for our future endeavours.
In undertaking these tasks each week, I believe I have become familiar with these new terms, 'Web 2.0', 'Social Bookmarking', 'Mashups', in a way that I do not believe would have been obained if the assessment did not require a level of involvement as has been required of us the last six weeks.
Personally, this course has so far been quite removed from the study that I have carried out to date, and there has been much that I have been able to learn and take away from completing this assignment. The structure of this assignment has pushed the boundaries of what I know as a web user and I am hopeful these tasks and the familiarising with numerous forms of information management systems will be beneficial for all of us in our futures.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Summary - The Assignment
Throughout this assignment, we have been working through different information management systems and assessing this knowledge in relevance to our future careers and ambitions.
Over the exercises over the last six weeks, we have worked through many different forms of information management such as blogs, RSS feeds and social networking sites. Personally, this task has been beneficial in providing hands on access to many of the resources that we are likely to be required to be familiar with in the future. There has been a lot of new information that we have been required to familiarise ourselves with and for myself, every week there was a new challenge as the only week that I could say that I was already familiar with the topic was the social networking site, but even then I was still able to attempt new functions such as adding a new group on facebook for my buddy group and I to interact on.
I found Week 4 (Social Bookmarking) and Week 2 (RSS, podcasts and Wikis) to be the most beneficial and relevant topics for this course and was able to put the systems that we had heard about in the lectures and touched on in our labs into practise. Furthermore, the convenience of being able to access the assignment regularly online was helpful considering the amount of interaction that was required within the buddy groups.
As to incorporating buddy groups into the assignment, I think it is useful to be able to discuss the assignment with a group of people who have a vested interest in your blog being as best as it can be. Another advantage of the buddy groups is that there is a lot to learn from people from their own backgrounds and what they take out of the course each week; everyone has their specialities and I think the buddy group system is helpful in allowing people to introduce their individuality into the assignment and within their own buddy group.
One thing that I did find that in a group with five members, it is hard to keep track of commenting on each other's blogs each week and following up on these comments as there are a lot of conversations happening in a number of different areas and it is sometimes hard to do right by your fellow group members and follow up on their blogs each week. In a big group, there is a lot of additional work for each member as their is more to review and discuss. For our group, we did spend a lot of time communicating around classes (though not on each other's blogs), discussing our assignment and our goals for the next week, though this is not always reflective on our blogs.
The concept of having tasks to work on week to week was an advantage for this assignment as it not only provided a timeline for students to adhere to or at least be aware of, as well as being able to break down the assignment into each section and focus your attentions on that topic.
Over the exercises over the last six weeks, we have worked through many different forms of information management such as blogs, RSS feeds and social networking sites. Personally, this task has been beneficial in providing hands on access to many of the resources that we are likely to be required to be familiar with in the future. There has been a lot of new information that we have been required to familiarise ourselves with and for myself, every week there was a new challenge as the only week that I could say that I was already familiar with the topic was the social networking site, but even then I was still able to attempt new functions such as adding a new group on facebook for my buddy group and I to interact on.
I found Week 4 (Social Bookmarking) and Week 2 (RSS, podcasts and Wikis) to be the most beneficial and relevant topics for this course and was able to put the systems that we had heard about in the lectures and touched on in our labs into practise. Furthermore, the convenience of being able to access the assignment regularly online was helpful considering the amount of interaction that was required within the buddy groups.
As to incorporating buddy groups into the assignment, I think it is useful to be able to discuss the assignment with a group of people who have a vested interest in your blog being as best as it can be. Another advantage of the buddy groups is that there is a lot to learn from people from their own backgrounds and what they take out of the course each week; everyone has their specialities and I think the buddy group system is helpful in allowing people to introduce their individuality into the assignment and within their own buddy group.
One thing that I did find that in a group with five members, it is hard to keep track of commenting on each other's blogs each week and following up on these comments as there are a lot of conversations happening in a number of different areas and it is sometimes hard to do right by your fellow group members and follow up on their blogs each week. In a big group, there is a lot of additional work for each member as their is more to review and discuss. For our group, we did spend a lot of time communicating around classes (though not on each other's blogs), discussing our assignment and our goals for the next week, though this is not always reflective on our blogs.
The concept of having tasks to work on week to week was an advantage for this assignment as it not only provided a timeline for students to adhere to or at least be aware of, as well as being able to break down the assignment into each section and focus your attentions on that topic.
Week 6 - Maps, Mashups & More
For this week's exercise, we were to create a Google map of our next holiday destination or our last holiday. As my next holiday is not yet planned nor do I have any idea I would like to go, I decided to stick to my last holiday: Cambodia.
This trip was meaningful to me in many ways in that it combined history and culture, and opened my eyes in many ways to the sides of the world that I had read about but not seen first hand before.
In using Google maps, I mostly used trial and error in trying to make the map fit correctly onto my blog page. I experimented with sizes and shapes, as well as viewing the map in the various formats. Being able to customize the map to show what you wanted in terms of size and foxus was a feature that I liked, however outside of that, I felt that Google Maps can be limited in the amount of detail that you may want to add. Like Shell's comment that she was only able to embed videos of Edinburgh that were from YouTube, I found that the additional features that can be added to the maps such as travel distances, accomodation information and images, could be selected but they could not be manually managed, thus there were images and details on the map that I did not believe were relevant to my map, therefore I decided to leave these other functions out, though I am certain that it will be useful for others with different ideas of what they would like their map to represent.
Along with my map of Cambodia, I have added a short video from YouTube from National Geographic regarding the temples of Angkor, I hope anyone who watches the video enjoys the history and the phenomenal architecture of the temples as much as I did!
In reviewing relevant mashups, I found a site 'Mashups: The New Breed of Web App' which is an interesting site showing the most recent Mashup awards and what the winners were. It is interesting to note and is possibly a sign of the times that the most successful mashups were social networking sites mixed with photo/media sites such as Flickr. I was particularly interested in a mashup which showed 10-day weather forecasts all around the world, however I found that the site was limited in the countries that it reviewed (most notably, Australia wasn't part of the short selection and therefore was not much help).
Failing this, I searched through mashups involving Delicious as discussed in my earlier blogs, I am quite interested in the functions of Delicious and find it to be quite useful for stockpiling information management. Instead, after more browsing, I found Delizzy, a mashup that works with your Delicious site to search through your bookmarks like Delicious, though it has the added features of searching through page content, title and descriptions of the saved articles. I logged into Delizzy and have tried to set it up with my Delicious website.
My tries at searching for standard terms such as 'Networking', 'Icons' and 'Web2.0' which are frequently tagged and bookmarked within my Delicious page however I was not able to successfully search for these terms. I did more research on Delizzy and believe that sometimes there is an error with Google which prevents searching properly.
Despite my problems with searching on Delizzy, I believe that this site can be particularly relevant to information management systems. Just as Delicious is a handy tool for Social Bookmarking, sites and features that Delizzy offers aim to make the process of searching and bookmarking much easier. The aim of Delizzy is to provide users with a tool that can search for sites with relevant keywords within their own bookmarks.
This trip was meaningful to me in many ways in that it combined history and culture, and opened my eyes in many ways to the sides of the world that I had read about but not seen first hand before.
In using Google maps, I mostly used trial and error in trying to make the map fit correctly onto my blog page. I experimented with sizes and shapes, as well as viewing the map in the various formats. Being able to customize the map to show what you wanted in terms of size and foxus was a feature that I liked, however outside of that, I felt that Google Maps can be limited in the amount of detail that you may want to add. Like Shell's comment that she was only able to embed videos of Edinburgh that were from YouTube, I found that the additional features that can be added to the maps such as travel distances, accomodation information and images, could be selected but they could not be manually managed, thus there were images and details on the map that I did not believe were relevant to my map, therefore I decided to leave these other functions out, though I am certain that it will be useful for others with different ideas of what they would like their map to represent.
Along with my map of Cambodia, I have added a short video from YouTube from National Geographic regarding the temples of Angkor, I hope anyone who watches the video enjoys the history and the phenomenal architecture of the temples as much as I did!
In reviewing relevant mashups, I found a site 'Mashups: The New Breed of Web App' which is an interesting site showing the most recent Mashup awards and what the winners were. It is interesting to note and is possibly a sign of the times that the most successful mashups were social networking sites mixed with photo/media sites such as Flickr. I was particularly interested in a mashup which showed 10-day weather forecasts all around the world, however I found that the site was limited in the countries that it reviewed (most notably, Australia wasn't part of the short selection and therefore was not much help).
Failing this, I searched through mashups involving Delicious as discussed in my earlier blogs, I am quite interested in the functions of Delicious and find it to be quite useful for stockpiling information management. Instead, after more browsing, I found Delizzy, a mashup that works with your Delicious site to search through your bookmarks like Delicious, though it has the added features of searching through page content, title and descriptions of the saved articles. I logged into Delizzy and have tried to set it up with my Delicious website.
My tries at searching for standard terms such as 'Networking', 'Icons' and 'Web2.0' which are frequently tagged and bookmarked within my Delicious page however I was not able to successfully search for these terms. I did more research on Delizzy and believe that sometimes there is an error with Google which prevents searching properly.
Despite my problems with searching on Delizzy, I believe that this site can be particularly relevant to information management systems. Just as Delicious is a handy tool for Social Bookmarking, sites and features that Delizzy offers aim to make the process of searching and bookmarking much easier. The aim of Delizzy is to provide users with a tool that can search for sites with relevant keywords within their own bookmarks.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Try this link...
One of my friends just sent me this link, worth checking out... It's from the Conan O'Brien show, with comedian Louis CK discussing the spoilt generation...
Everything's amazing, nobody's happy
Everything's amazing, nobody's happy
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Week 5 - Video, photos and other media Pt 2
So for this week's exercise we were to browse through YouTube and post a video. After trawling through YouTube and the piles of random and sometimes misleading videos (I find a lot of videos from YouTube are listed as one thing in their title yet they actually show something completely different - perhaps an example of what searching for a topic on the web is like?)
I have chosen an old favourite for this exercise, Lee LeFever, director (?) of the 'Commoncraft' videos - I think that we have watched one of his videos before - but I think they are nonetheless excellent in laying down the main points of an issue in information management/internet/web 2.0. I had viewed some of his videos regarding wikis and social networking, but felt that this one was the most appropriate to embed in my blog as part of this exercise in the sense that it is breaking down blogs/blogging. In this video, LeFever states that most of us may know about blogs or have one of our own, but may not necessarily know much else about them. I think that is an important point with a lot of new technology; most of us have heard of different programs and applications but may not necessarily not know much else about them other than how to use it. Certainly for this week's exercise, I did not know how to embed a video in a blog, though I knew that it could be done. Furthermore, I did not know that it would be that easy to do. Most people are aware of YouTube and know how to searh for a topic within the site, but I wonder how many people are aware how easy it is/or even know how to embed a video within a blog. For me, this was a realisation that even something that you hear so often discussed and view regularly can still have functions that we (or myself at least) might not know about.
Part 2 of this weeks' exercise was to add a link onto your blog with some photos attached from a site. The following photos have been added onto my Flickr page and I have added links to a few of the photos below. This was a bit of trial and error to make this happen as I initially just added the image, obviously not the point of adding a link to the photos in the first place... After working out how to create a link, there was a bit of trial and error involved in just creating the link for the image only and not the image as seen on my Flickr page. Once I had this worked out it was simple to add these images so I hope that you like them!
Link to photos added on Flickr:
River at Airey's Inlet
Sunset at the Floating Village of Tonle Sap
Sunset in Sihanoukville
Tour boat in Sihanoukville
Floating Village
Beachfront at Sihanoukville
I have chosen an old favourite for this exercise, Lee LeFever, director (?) of the 'Commoncraft' videos - I think that we have watched one of his videos before - but I think they are nonetheless excellent in laying down the main points of an issue in information management/internet/web 2.0. I had viewed some of his videos regarding wikis and social networking, but felt that this one was the most appropriate to embed in my blog as part of this exercise in the sense that it is breaking down blogs/blogging. In this video, LeFever states that most of us may know about blogs or have one of our own, but may not necessarily know much else about them. I think that is an important point with a lot of new technology; most of us have heard of different programs and applications but may not necessarily not know much else about them other than how to use it. Certainly for this week's exercise, I did not know how to embed a video in a blog, though I knew that it could be done. Furthermore, I did not know that it would be that easy to do. Most people are aware of YouTube and know how to searh for a topic within the site, but I wonder how many people are aware how easy it is/or even know how to embed a video within a blog. For me, this was a realisation that even something that you hear so often discussed and view regularly can still have functions that we (or myself at least) might not know about.
Part 2 of this weeks' exercise was to add a link onto your blog with some photos attached from a site. The following photos have been added onto my Flickr page and I have added links to a few of the photos below. This was a bit of trial and error to make this happen as I initially just added the image, obviously not the point of adding a link to the photos in the first place... After working out how to create a link, there was a bit of trial and error involved in just creating the link for the image only and not the image as seen on my Flickr page. Once I had this worked out it was simple to add these images so I hope that you like them!
Link to photos added on Flickr:
River at Airey's Inlet
Sunset at the Floating Village of Tonle Sap
Sunset in Sihanoukville
Tour boat in Sihanoukville
Floating Village
Beachfront at Sihanoukville
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