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
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Week 4 - Social Bookmarking
For this week's exercise we were to register with Delicious.com if we hadn't already, as well as two other social bookmarking sites to investigate. Prior to working on this subject, I did not have a Delicious site so I have registered and worked on this to begin with as an introduction to the world of social bookmarking.
From reading about Delicious and watching the video on the web 2.0 page, it is easy to see how social bookmarking can be an advantage in referencing and expanding your knowledge and complements the referencing system a person might have as it can be as detailed or as simple as you need.
When registering for Delicious, I allowed it to simply create tags from my bookmarks, which led to tags being created that have absolutely no relevance to the sites within them so I then had to backtrack and edit these tags so I would have some chance later of being able to find what I need. Perhaps this is one recommendation that I would suggest for anyone in the future that allowing the program to simply create tags for your based on your own bookmarks may not be a preferred option as the computer's ideas of what is relevant may not at all be relevant to an individual (eg Bookmarks_Menu) was one of the tags that the computer created which had some social networking sites as well as news headlines and other websites, nothing of which I would be able to find at a later date with those tags.
At first glance, sites such as Delicious are a bit intimidating as there is so much information on the web, that it is hard to know where to start in developing your own references. My problem was solved once I began exploring other people's Delicious sites to see what and how their reference were listed. Once able to view other people's sites, I was able to get a better idea of the sorts of things that I would need to add to my own site. One of the advantages of Delicious is how easy it is to update your page once the buttons have been added to your browser. Personally, the convenience of this site sets it apart from other information management strategies that we have looked at so far as its practical application is so useful, relevant and easy to update review, that once grasped, would be very useful for future endeavours.
The second part of this weeks' task was to go and investigate a few other social bookmarking sites, so I went straight to Furl, however upon going to this site, I found that the site is being absorbed by Diigo and is being phased out, therefore in order to stay up with current information management systems, I decided to look no further with Furl and to instead investigate Diigo. Upon first inspection, it is clear that this is an up-to-date site as it has capabilities with iPhones and very new technology.
Diigo appears to complement Delicious (certainly as they link up with one another) very well and certainly looks as though it is perhaps a more detailed version of a similar thing. In researching this site, I found that this is able to be set up for a group, in completing work based tasks. This would be a helpful tool in the future for group assignments and future careers as a member a group is able to highlight a section of text and make it available for the rest of a group to view to help with correspondence and group study. Personally, although Diigo provides the user with many more options, I did not find it to be as organised a site as Delicious. This may be my own doing but I did certainly find Delicious easier to use. Perhaps as Delicious does not offer the user the same amount of functions than Diigo is the reason why it was easier to use, however that may just be my own findings though I do believe Diigo to be very useful and complementary to Delicious.
After Diigo, I also had a look at Connotea, with this one, I did not sign up to be a member, though I certainly think that is something that I would look to do in the future as one of its major advantages compared to a program like Endnote is that it is linked to the web and is therefore accessible from any computer, whereas your Endnote library is customised to the computer that it was saved on (or at least the network). Connotea appears to work in a similar way to Endnote in that it stores references for bibliographic use. It differs from Endnote in that a user is able to share their libraries, parts of their libraries or certain references with other users, and vice versa.
I believe that one major advantage for all of the bookmarking sites is the social capabilities in that it works to increase knowledge rather than just store your own. Whilst it is good to have a program that stores your references, from looking at these sites and researching their capabilities, I believe that it is an advantage for future learning and research to be able to look at other people's libraries (with their permission) and be able to view other resources that they have found and perhaps better ways of organising their own references.
Programs like Endnote are making the task of referencing much easier and less labour intensive, as well as helping to make learning a progressive thing rather than starting from scratch for every assessment and task. Social bookmarking sites complement this and enable the user to be able to utilise their references from any computer with internet access, as well as allowing the user to view other people's libraries which shares enables us to share knowledge and ideas.
From reading about Delicious and watching the video on the web 2.0 page, it is easy to see how social bookmarking can be an advantage in referencing and expanding your knowledge and complements the referencing system a person might have as it can be as detailed or as simple as you need.
When registering for Delicious, I allowed it to simply create tags from my bookmarks, which led to tags being created that have absolutely no relevance to the sites within them so I then had to backtrack and edit these tags so I would have some chance later of being able to find what I need. Perhaps this is one recommendation that I would suggest for anyone in the future that allowing the program to simply create tags for your based on your own bookmarks may not be a preferred option as the computer's ideas of what is relevant may not at all be relevant to an individual (eg Bookmarks_Menu) was one of the tags that the computer created which had some social networking sites as well as news headlines and other websites, nothing of which I would be able to find at a later date with those tags.
At first glance, sites such as Delicious are a bit intimidating as there is so much information on the web, that it is hard to know where to start in developing your own references. My problem was solved once I began exploring other people's Delicious sites to see what and how their reference were listed. Once able to view other people's sites, I was able to get a better idea of the sorts of things that I would need to add to my own site. One of the advantages of Delicious is how easy it is to update your page once the buttons have been added to your browser. Personally, the convenience of this site sets it apart from other information management strategies that we have looked at so far as its practical application is so useful, relevant and easy to update review, that once grasped, would be very useful for future endeavours.
The second part of this weeks' task was to go and investigate a few other social bookmarking sites, so I went straight to Furl, however upon going to this site, I found that the site is being absorbed by Diigo and is being phased out, therefore in order to stay up with current information management systems, I decided to look no further with Furl and to instead investigate Diigo. Upon first inspection, it is clear that this is an up-to-date site as it has capabilities with iPhones and very new technology.
Diigo appears to complement Delicious (certainly as they link up with one another) very well and certainly looks as though it is perhaps a more detailed version of a similar thing. In researching this site, I found that this is able to be set up for a group, in completing work based tasks. This would be a helpful tool in the future for group assignments and future careers as a member a group is able to highlight a section of text and make it available for the rest of a group to view to help with correspondence and group study. Personally, although Diigo provides the user with many more options, I did not find it to be as organised a site as Delicious. This may be my own doing but I did certainly find Delicious easier to use. Perhaps as Delicious does not offer the user the same amount of functions than Diigo is the reason why it was easier to use, however that may just be my own findings though I do believe Diigo to be very useful and complementary to Delicious.
After Diigo, I also had a look at Connotea, with this one, I did not sign up to be a member, though I certainly think that is something that I would look to do in the future as one of its major advantages compared to a program like Endnote is that it is linked to the web and is therefore accessible from any computer, whereas your Endnote library is customised to the computer that it was saved on (or at least the network). Connotea appears to work in a similar way to Endnote in that it stores references for bibliographic use. It differs from Endnote in that a user is able to share their libraries, parts of their libraries or certain references with other users, and vice versa.
I believe that one major advantage for all of the bookmarking sites is the social capabilities in that it works to increase knowledge rather than just store your own. Whilst it is good to have a program that stores your references, from looking at these sites and researching their capabilities, I believe that it is an advantage for future learning and research to be able to look at other people's libraries (with their permission) and be able to view other resources that they have found and perhaps better ways of organising their own references.
Programs like Endnote are making the task of referencing much easier and less labour intensive, as well as helping to make learning a progressive thing rather than starting from scratch for every assessment and task. Social bookmarking sites complement this and enable the user to be able to utilise their references from any computer with internet access, as well as allowing the user to view other people's libraries which shares enables us to share knowledge and ideas.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Counterpoint
Just been going through my RSS feeds from google reader and saw one dated 02/03/09 discussing the digital age and the role of the internet. I have added to my iPod to listen to and will list a review after listening to it to, may be relevant to what we have been discussing in this course as to the various ideas as to whether the development of the internet has been a good thing/whether we are now too ruled by the internet or whether the internet is just another part of life.
Watch this space...
Watch this space...
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Blog security
Following Linda and Michelle's advice that they were not able to post any comments on my blog, I have loosened up the security on my blog a bit so that comments are now officially welcome.In my defense, when I set up my blog, I had not the slightest idea what the ideal settings would be and thought more security would be better rather than less. Now however, I have loosened up the security so there should be less problems now.
From an analytical standpoint, I know now that I can tighten the settings on my blog to ensure that it can stay as private or as public as I would like and can see the effectiveness of the security settings if they need to be implemented. This can be marked down as a case study in blog security!
Happy blogging
From an analytical standpoint, I know now that I can tighten the settings on my blog to ensure that it can stay as private or as public as I would like and can see the effectiveness of the security settings if they need to be implemented. This can be marked down as a case study in blog security!
Happy blogging
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