Final Reflection: Blogging

The main advantage of blogging for me is the fact that you can use the space as a gathering place for all your information, useful websites, videos, vokis, photographs and other people's related blogs. It is all at your fingertips and you can constantly update and add information. The organisational side of blogging was fantastic! One drawback of blogging is that it is restricted to your own postings and resource collections. Other people cannot embed links or videos and therefore it draws away from the collaborative nature of many web2.0 tools and does not allow for that idea of a collective intelligence and a building of knowledge from a shared experience.

It was useful to reflect regularly on the course content, because it forced you to re-evaluate your initial thoughts and listen to other people's opinions, especially those who had not been able to talk in class. It was also interesting seeing other people's postings and videos, though it sometimes was nice to look and not have to comment, as this was a bit of a laborious process. Feedback on my own blog was useful - the lecturers comments were always insightful and encouraged further thinking. Classmates also offered interesting opinions and it was fun to see what other people thought on a particular issue. So, I guess it was nice for others to hear our opinions (or at least I hope so!)

! If I were starting a blog now (with my new knowledge!), I would most certainly be more thoughtful in my postings, linking my ideas and opinions to research and existing theories. A lot of my postings feel very casual and I feel these could be developed so that others would find my blog more interesting to engage in. I would also like to explore podcasting and vodcasting more and perhaps experiment with a tag cloud to draw all my resources together in the blog. All in all, this was a great experience and I learnt a lot from it!

Virtual Worlds

Looking to the Future!

There are many elements of the future of technology which I find disturbing. However, I am trying to focus on the positive and do recognise some of the benefits of many of the technologies presented to us this week. It was really interesting to examine the Trends and Technology Timeline 2010 + and see that we are moving away from social courtesies and morals and more towards a survival-of-the-fittest (in a funny modern kind of way) where you have to keep up with technologies, become at ease with invasion of privacy (on current sights like google earth & facebook, as well as future trends, such as facial recognition and apps on iphones) and deal with a whole new set of skills for interacting (via social networking sites) in the vain hope that you will not fall behind.

On the plus side, there are some fantastic educational advantages to the development of technologies, such as virtual worlds. Being able to visit world wide museums and art galleries without the expense of travel is an absolutely fantastic learning opportunity. Also, being able to listen to conferences/lectures/lessons from the other side of the world and with people from a variety of cultural backgrounds is convenient and beneficial for teachers and any professionals or students travelling abroad. Virtual worlds are almost the next step from VOIP and mobile phones - not only can you communicate with people in distant places on a face-to-face level, you can also interact with each other in a new environment, using body language and a shared experience of a place in which to base your interaction. Plus it is all free, providing you have fast internet access.

The future holds excitement and opportunity, even though it is easy to become overwhelmed. Like any new technology, there are downsides, but it is important to recognise the learning opportunities and advantages of these technologies.

How to deal with information overload

Information overload is definitely a problem for people online today - after a few minutes of searching, we end up with multiple open tabs, all of which we intend to search before continuing our homework, assessments, or work. We browse one tab, then open a new one because we found something else that was interesting and we don't want to miss out on that information either! Before you know it, three hours have passed and its time for lunch...what did we achieve over that time....I can't remember! There is so much information out their on the web that it is easy to either waste time or feel overwhelmed because we cannot possible see everything. This is information overload - how can we possibly process so much information and be productive with it.

Our lecture addressed some of the techniques which can be used to deal with this problem. Specific ones of interest to me included folksonomies and RSS feeds. I believe folksonomies could be a great help, while RSS feeds could accelerate the problem. Tag clouds are a good example of a helpful folksonomy. Here, we can get the web to organise our information so that we can find articles/websites/resources more easily than ever before. Click on your tag and it will take you straight to a selection of specific quality articles. Tag clouds have the potential to get out of control if we tag carelessly- but if we keep our tags specific it can save time.

RSS feeds, on the other hand, seem to me as though they are encouraging information overload. They are a fantastic tool - feeding through specific information that you would probably look at anyway. However then there is no limit as to how much time you spend on line - you are constantly being bombarded with new stories, new podcasts - and you might feel obliged to read/listen/view every single one. This is very time consuming.

I think one of the main ways to control information overload is to simply designate certain hours to web-browsing throughout the day. Have a piercing alarm sound when it is time to get back into work/study mode and be disciplined about it! And also, I think it is important to realise and accept that while there is a lot of information on the internet, it is not our duty to look at every single link provided to us. That is the beauty of it - we can choose what information we wish to view, and what information we would prefer to ignore.

Digital Safety

The thought that everything we do on the computer is recorded, including google searches, interaction on social networking sites, photos etc, and that our identity can be traced from our searches, is both incredible and frightening. It is especially frightening! What is so frightening is that so many things can be misinterpreted - what looks like a list of disturbing searches could in fact be linked to a screen-writer who is conducting research for a murder-mystery novel! OR he could be the real scary deal in which case things need to be followed up more closely! But who is to know what is real and what is not? In the world wide web, what is truth and what is fiction?

What I find most disturbing from a real-life perspective, is the employers judge their future employees by examining social networking sites, such as Facebook. If employers want to see who we are as a person, please ask for an interview - our private life should remain private and our public life is what we choose to display. Facebook should not be accessible to just anyone! How did this ever happen??? Even if you did de-activate your facebook account, your information will probably still be floating around in a cloud somewhere...doesn't anyone else find this worrying??? :-)