Lecture 5 & the tale of the Blog

I am starting to think, in some ways, that I am not cut for the Web (2.0). A few years ago I set up a FaceBook page so that I could keep in touch with friends. During my years on facebook I never really got into it - all the poking, writing on walls, using it as my main email server etc. It just never happened. In fact the only thing I really enjoyed was posting photos to share with my friends instead of emailing them.

Even today I struggle with social networking outside of my profession. I have a LinkedIN account and I use it regularly as the feeds get sent to me by email and then all I have to do is click on the post that is of interest. I am linking up with others in my profession and actively participate in conversations as well as having posted my own questions to bounce around.

I struggle to find the time to maintain the tools that we have setup for this course and rarely check my facebook account anymore (mostly only when an email is sent to me to confirm a friend or notify an email sent).

I have nothing against any of these tools, but for me personally, unless I am gaining a value I can measure instantly I just can't get into them. It's funny really because we watched the clip of Clay Shirky talk about how much 'free time' we spend watching TV. I was stunned by his figures. Mostly because I don't really have that free time to do such a thing. I watch around 8-10 hours of TV a week, and for at least half of those 8-10hrs I am doing something else (eating dinner with the family, washing dishes, ironing/folding clothes). There are only 2 programs that I sit and watch and do nothing else.

I hate to admit it but I find it hard to have a regular social life, let alone a virtual one. It makes me wonder what is happening to the regular family out there? Is it getting washed out by the wave of Web2.0 and social networking?

... and what is the World Wide Web

Eeeek, I feel like I'm falling behind not having posted a learning reflection for last weeks lecture. I guess there wasn't much to post really. Not that they are new learnings but the most important things I guess I will note here about the WWW are:

• it is known as the Internets public face
• its 'tools' are hypertext, web server, html and a web browser
• URLs makes it easier to remember a pages address and is linked to the IP address of that content

And finally, it was interesting checking out the way back machine. I didn't check out much other than the sites we were asked to look at but I did also enjoy going through their histories from the their first page until the 2000's and it brought back some memories of when it all began. And scarily enough there are still quite a number of those amateur sites out there.

What is the Internet?

OK so I recently listened to the second weeks lecture of WEB101 - What is the Internet? I suppose what I have learnt here is that we use the terms internet, world wide web and cyberspace rather loosely without much consideration to their actual meaning. While not overly interesting it is quite important when we come to our assignments and assessments for the unit.

On another note though it was said that the Internet is 40 years old! This was surprising but also a statement that as it was presented I disagreed with. I found no real differentiation between the Internet and a Network.

If anyone out there is reading this and are (or not) part of the Curtin Uni's WEB101 I'd be interested to hear your thoughts or any readings you can point me to on this matter.

Reflections - Wk1

I have been working on Intranets for around 5 years now. Being ambitious I have realised that sometimes formal qualifications speak louder than actions. So I decided to give uni another try.

What was I thinking? Working full time plus being a mother of 2, how do I think I am going to cope??? Let's hope my husband is ready for my committment.

But here I am giving it a go. I don't really expect anyone to read this but it will be interesting to see who does (if anyone like I said).

So each week I will come and post my "reflections" of learning as part of an ongoing assignment for my first unit of studies.

This week we had to check out a site called namechk.com and see if we could establish a single username against a selected 7 of the 72 social networking sites listed - pretty boring. But what did surprise me is how many of these sites there are and the number of people using them. Even though I work with websites I work with internal websites for a company so I only really knew of the sites you hear a lot about, you know, Twitter, Facebook, uTube and the likes.

I was surprised to see so many blogging type sites out there. Now as you may have already guessed this was one of the sites we had to check a username against and register with. So here I am using it as my place to reflect on my weekly learnings.

I really only thought that I would use these kind of sites when they directly impact on my work, for example I use LinkedIN a lot. But I will soon find out if these kind of sites can have the same devestating effect as Facebook where you can literally get sucked into a vortext of virtual social interactions. I have never really been into any of these sites before but now that I have to explore them for my intellectual growth it will be interesting to see if my behaviour continues to be predictive.

I have already had an influx of Friends requests through Facebook - generally I would reject facebook stalkers but now I am not sure which ones are genuine through my online study group and which are not!

And if anyone does read this, and you happen to be from OWA - Curtin WEB101 I invite you to share your thoughts. I will guess some of you will think me quite cynical and that's OK because I think that too. Let's see if we can prove me wrong :-)