Completion!!!

Well, my journey of learning about internet communications has come to an end. I am now ready to face the big WWW and feel that I am much better prepared for making use of the huge range of tools, programs, and information that is available.

Even though, at times, I felt like I was getting no where and that I was falling behind, I now feel proud that I have completed this unit, and have put as much as I could into it. I am excited that I have learnt so much through studying this unit, and its actually stuff I will use almost every day of my life.

I look forward to starting the next unit Net12, as I feel more prepared and organised compared to how I felt when starting Net11. I now have gained many skills in being able to search the web, and locate appropriate information that Im certain will help me in my future studies.

Thank you to everyone who has made this journey an enjoyable, exciting experience! I wish everyone all the best with their future studies!

So long :)

Information Ecologies

From my understanding an ecology is the relationship between organisms and there environment. And information is knowledge, thoughts, ideas, facts which are derieved from study, experience and can be communicated.

Now to me, when we combined the above it pretty much explains what the internet is. The internet is an information ecology. The internet allows people (organisms) to gain information through sharing of studies, ideas, facts and so on. 

However one major issue is, that when using the internet (Information Ecology) we need to take into account at all times just how accurate the source of the information being shared is. As everyone who has access to the internet, has freedom of speech, so often the information can be false or misleading as it wasn't supplied by a valid source. 

Once internet users become to understand how the information ecology can work, and how sharing of information and contributing, we will not be able to fully utilise and make full use of the internets capabilities. But once it becomes more understood, if used correctly, it will benefit our society.

Evaluating the Web

I'm going to evaluate site "Which came first: the bunny or the egg?" using the guidelings set ou in the following tutorial by Ohio SU net.Tutor.

Site: "Which came first: the bunny of the egg?." Seatter, L., (2009) SuperLiving.com.au, (Online), Retrieved 30th May 2009 from
http://www.superliving.com.au/storyview.asp?storyid=1025737&sectionsource=Planning%20-%20Getting%20Ahead
Lorna Seatter writes a entertaining article about how the Easter Bunny and Easter Eggs came about being the symbol of easter. She discusses the views from different countries and religions using appropriate facts that she has researched. This article to inform the reader and Lorna does this using light humour, facts, other peoples points of view and historical events.
Also Lorna talks about how the egg was developed and how different courtries had their own style however eventually the egg became more standardised "The popular crocodile finish that we see on chocolate eggs today came from Germany, with the design originally used to disguise a chocolate egg's imperfections by breaking up the smooth surface." Lorna Seatter (2009). A very enjoyable article, with interesting facts, and easy to read.


Reflection:
If I was to come back to this article in the future, I feel that the original blurb would be more useful to myself. Its short and explains the article enough to remind me what it was about.
However if someone else was to come accross the article they would probably find my annotation more useful, as it states everything you need to know, and give you the details of the article, the author, the URL and a better overview for someone who hasn't read the article yet.

Web 2.0 vs FURL

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is like the 2nd generation of the web. It allows us to build on the information that is available with Web 1.0. Basically Web 2.0 is a platform.  

What is FURL?

FURL (File Uniform Resource Locators) is a bookmaking website tool which allows users to store copies of webpages. It allows us to rate the information we find, to comment, to share with others and it forms an asynchronous form of communication with others that are interested in the same information or topics. 

What do I like best? 

I think that FURL is extremely clever and is a very very handy website. I love the fact that we can save copies of websites and be able to still view them if the original website is removed. Its like having your own filing system of all the useful websites and articles you come across when searching the web. I think FURL is a fantastic idea, and will save alot of time having sites so easily book marked especially for assignments.  

At the moment, Im still not too sure about Web 2.0, and what extra benefits it will offer. Im still a little confused with the whole idea. To me its like expanding the web and offering more and more uses and options. 

I definitly feel that the Internet Communications furl list is far more appealing thatn the HTML version. The HTML doesn't look exciting, things don't stand out as easy and there isn't much you can do in the ways of give the information some sort of order or telling what is the best link etc. 

For U R Luxurious!!  

Blogs and me! One BIG thumbs up!!

Until I started this unit I honestly didn't know about blogs! I hadn't heard of them, never made one, and for all I knew never read or followed any. So the first task of this unit was to start my own blog, and boy did that seem a bit daunting.

Now that was a good 12 weeks ago... These days I hear about blogs everywhere! Blogs have SO many fantastic uses so I can't believe it toom me this long to hear about them. People use blogs to as review sites, personal journals, news sites, for assignments/projects just to name a few. 

I have found blogging to be quite an enjoyable straight forward task. With posting my drafts into a design template then when Im happy with what I have said I can publish it for the world to see. Many celebrities have blogs, this helps their fans keep track of what the celebrity is up to and see what the celebrity is thinking about etc. 

There are many formats for blogging, and even more tools/features that your can use in your blog to keep things interesting. Whether it be a poll, or a game, or a chat group, a calander etc you name it, its most likely in available. You can even access and update your blog on your mobile phone!

I have been having a bit of fun searching for all sorts of blogs. And my god, there are blogs about anything and everything!!!!! 

I think blogs are great because they have no rules, there is the freedom to say what you like, and express yourself in so many ways. Pictures, screen prints, writing, diagrams and so on, and the best thing is, anyone who has the internet can view your blog.

Anyways, time to blog on! 

FTP Upload...

Well this task was a bit disappointing, I read, I tried, I re-read the instructions, I tried again but no go... I simply couldn't work out how to get the Webpage transfered onto my Oasis account. 

So I took the easy way out and went from this:

To this: 

So here is the results when uploading it into a browser. Not quite the same as FTPing, however this is the best I could do.

Organising Search Information Task

My best 3 sites are:

Site 1: "History of the chocolate Easter egg"
Author: Michael Lund (2008) Atricle from The Courier Mail
URL: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23389261-5013511,00.html





Site 2: "Which came first: the bunny or the egg?"
Author: Lorna Seatter (2009)
URL: http://www.superliving.com.au/storyview.asp?storyid=1025737&sectionsource=Planning%20-%20Getting%20Ahead
Blurb: "HAVE you ever wondered why the Easter bunny carries a basket of eggs? It seems like a haywire crossing of the species. Super Living investigates the origins of the Easter bunny and the Easter egg and how the unusual combo arose." Lorna Seatter (2009)


Site 3: "Shock news for chocolate lovers!"
Author: Jill Dupleix (2009) Sydney Morning Herald, Table Talk, Entertainment Section.
URL: http://blogs.smh.com.au/entertainment/tabletalk/jilldupleix/2009/04/14/shocknewsforchocolatelover.html
Summary: Jill Dupleix (2009) discusses in her article how "Joanne Harris the author of the very popular novel 'Chocolat' actually doesn't like chocolate. Jill then goes on to discuss how Australian like chocolate and how your tastes change as you get older and your choice of chocolate then tends to change."


The Software that I used when gathering and saving this information were:
1) Google
2) Print Screen
3) Paint
4) Copy and Paste

During these exercises I didn't really find anything that I felt would help me with the saving and coping of this information. I unfortunately didn't get to play around with the tools as much as I would have liked having been short for time. I felt that my usual way of copying, saving, and locating information was the best for me.
However I have found that the WWW offfers so many options that it is so hard to find the most appropriate for each task. And that if you downloaded all the great tools out there, you wouldn't have any room left on your hard drive for anything else. When searching the web and sorting through all the inappropriate sites to find what I was after I realised that this exercise is infact quite time consuming. Where as when I first read through the task I thought it would be quite simple and quick.

I still feel that Google is my search engine of choice as it is easy to use, has the most appropiate sites and offers many different formats of information.

Searching the Net Boolean Style!

When I first looked at this, I was like what the heck is Boolean searching! I mentioned to a few of my friends and family, no one had heard of it. So I was quite looking forward to reading about it further.

However once I started reading through the lessons on Boolean searching I realised I actually already searched this way when I hadn't been successful with just the standard search. 

My first attempt I tried was "cadbury chocolate eggs" in google which gave me 1520 hits. None of these seemed to be the sort of information I was looking for.

 

Second time I tried cadbury chocolate AND eggs in google which gave me 73,100 hits. Although there were heaps more hits than the first attempt, the first few sites it found were the most relevant so far.

Third time I tried cadbury chocolate OR eggs in google which gave me 455,000 hits. The first sites once again were similar to when I used AND for searching, however using OR produced a Heap more results. But this was still more successful than using the "".

So my findings conclude that using AND or OR in the search helps give more results and with this particular search, these results seem to be the better ones. Boolean is a useful way for searching especially when you are searching very broad topics. 

Putting the Search Machines to the test!!

I love chocolate eggs, so I decided what better to search then Cadbury Chocolate Eggs!!!
Using google I first searched cadbury chocolate eggs. My results were:

- 73,900 hits
- First site was Cadbury Chocolate Hershey www.hersheys.com/products/details/cadbury

I then used copernic to search and the results were: 

- 68 Hits (heaps less hits)

- First Site was Cadbury Chocolate Gifts www.cadburygiftsdirect.co.uk

I honestly didn't think copernic was as good as I expected. I feel that google provided more acurate results. Looking through the sites that copernic found, they seemed to be a bit off the topic where as good had a MUCH more extensive lits of sites, however the first two pages were what I was after.