Week Twelve

Lecture Summary

Week twelve focused on the issues with the internet concerning social and ethical matters, looking at the rights and responsibilities of people who use the web. The things everyone should know were listed and explained in the lecture. A main one is that music, movies, and especially ideas, are all a part of somebodies intellectual property, so it is essential that everybody complies with the copyright laws. If they anyone fails to do this, then they are committing plagiarism, that is, "...using other's ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information".

Other problems concerned with internet usage come under the 'social' heading of the lecture, as they are problems that occur when when communicating between computers. Security of personal information is one of them, because this can be stolen by methods of interception by hackers at any time. There is also the risk of contaminating your computer with viruses if you open unsafe email attachments or download contaminated software. So in a bid to protect ourselves against these problems, it is useful to install firwalls and anti-virus software.

The lecture also advised that giving any personal information about yourself on the internet is not a good idea. By following basic suggestions such as, turning the preview option in your email off, you can prevent viruses from harming your computer.

Tutorial Tasks

From the website http://www.copyright.org.au/publications/infosheets.htm, I found that these following topics of the information sheets were the most relevant to me as a future undergraduate student:

Internet: Copying and Downloading: This is definitely an important thing for undergraduate students to learn, since it happens too often that we don't realise when we are copying something from a site for an assignment or presentation, we may not be complying with copyright laws. This information sheet outlines everything in detail, mentioning almost every possible situation that can occur when getting inoformation, or downloading files from the internet. Some of the most informative ansers to the frequently asked question that i found are: Emailing material from a website or bulletin board to other people without expressed or implied persmission is an infringement of copyright; Printing or downloading material from the internet without permission is an infringement of copyright; Printing or saving material onto a disk is alright only if it is actually used for your research and "doesn't interfere with the legitimate market for the item."

Education Institutions: Important points I found include the following: There are special provisions in the copyright act that give permission for educational institutions to use copyright material, provided that they are using it for educational purposes, so they do not necessarily need direct permission from the copyright owner.

Maps and charts: In order to reproduce all or an important part of the map/ chart, by means of photocopying, hand copying, scanning, or saving onto a file, we need permission (a licence) to do so.

Research or study: After reading through most of the frequently asked quetions, I found out that it is acceptable to copy or save work from the internet, provided it is only for research purposes, or unless the website specifically claims that you need permission.

What you need to know about music on the web

• Everytime you download music onto your hard drive or upload music onto a server, you are not complying with copright laws if the artist of the songs hasn't given consent for their work to be reproduced in these ways, because their music is a part of their intellectual property which they have every right to protect.

How to protect yourself and your computer from attacks

• Make sure your computer has an anti-virus software to be on the safe side.
• Avoid opening email attachments with extensions such as EXE, COM, or VBS, as these are executable files, so if they are opened and contain viruses, they have the permission to do anything it wants on your computer, making it potentially damaging.

Readings

EFF's Top 12 Ways to Protect your Online Privacy

Stanton McCandlish basically outlines in detail, twelve ways that should keep you safe from theft of identity. These include: being careful with the amount of personal information you give online by using a pseudonym instead of your real name; When signing up for accounts that need you to provide an email address, make sure you examine its privacy poilicy, and stick to well known sites such as yahoo and hotmail; Don't give your contact details to sites that claim they will give you a prize in return, as they could use it and sell it to other marketers for marketing purposes; Be wary of spyware, which can be in any application you install and will silently spy on your online habits and report it back to the company whose product you're using. To rid this potential infringement of privacy, install a program that can disable any spyware from your computer.

For the last bit of week twelves tutuorial, we were asked to insert two youtube videos, one set to start immediately (just like the setting that youtube has), and the other set to only start when you click play. I have also reduced the size of the video box to make its resolution look clearer.

Here are some cool videos from youtube:

Week Eleven

Lecture Summary

The main message of this weeks lecture was how data, information, knowlwedge and wisdom, all link to one another in the sort of hierarchal form: data leads to information, information leads to knowledge, and over time, knowledge leads to wisdom. It went through the characteristics, importance, relationship, and examples of each term, which the tutorial activities required us to investigate anyway.

Tutorial Tasks

Before I came up with my own definition for each of the terms, data, information and knowledge, I found two definitions that I liked on each; one being a simple defintion and the other taking the meaning of the word to a more complex and thoughtful level of understanding.

For Data, the simple definition that I liked best was from http://www.dictionary.com/, which states that data is essentially: "A body of facts, statistics, or items of information" and also defined it as a "matter of direct observation". A more in depth look, however, came from http://www.success.co.il/is/dik.html, which contains a definition of 'Data' by Proffessor Maria Teresa Bagetti: "Data is every thing or every unit that could increase the human knowledge...and that can be recorded, on whichever support, or orally handed. Data can arouse information and knowledge in our minds". From these two definitions, I came up with my own meaning of data, and it is this: As basic units of facts, statistics, or any other matter of direct observation, data has the potential to increase the knowledge we have by giving us basic starting points to work from.

The basic meaning I found for Information is from Proffessor Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic: "Information is the end product of data processing". A definition that gives slightly more meaning to the word is by Proffessor Michael Buckland who says that Information is "anything percieved as potentially signifying something...and that which is learned from some evidence or communication". The meaning I make from these is: Information in itself has a meaning, which can only be gathered in the mind by interpretting data, or by having it directly communicated to you.

From dictionary.com, I found the perfect simple definition for Knowledge, and that is thats it's "The sum of what is known". The more complex meaning is from http://www.success.co.il/is/dik.html by Proffessor Haidar Moukdad who states knowledge "is a resevoir of information that is stored in the human mind. It essentially constituted the information that can be 'retrieved'from the human mind without the need to consult information sources". What I interpret from this meaning is that knowledge cannot be taken away from you.

For our second activity, this is the graphical representation of the relationship between data, information, knowledge and wisdom, that I came up with:

As you can see above, It is like climbing stairs to reach the ultimate destination which is wisdom, but everybody starts from the bottom because wisdom only comes with experience. Understanding this relationship is helpful when thinking of my studies in university, as it gives me an incentive to work hard because we all want to achieve a level of knowledge that will one day make us wise, becuase without achieving this, I wouldn't be satisfied. So, knowing that we have to start at the bottom with the basic data and information, helps us concentrate on the 'boring' parts of learning so that we can make our own interpretation, which if we have correct, illustrates our knowledge and thus later on, our wisdom.

Readings

The difference between data, information, knowledge and wisdom

1. In the first reading, the content of the human mind is divided into five main categories, being data, information, knowledge, understandin and wisdom. According to this, each category represents a different state of knowledge held by a persons mind that goes like this: Data refers to the starting point where you recognise symbols but have not yet made any meaning out of them; Information is the stage when the data has been processed for utility, and there are now answers to who?, what?, where? and when?; Knowledge refers to the stage when you are able to anser the 'how' questions with ease; Understanding is when you have reached a level of appreciation for the knowledge and information, and you clearly understand the 'Why?'; Last of all, Wisdom is the product of evaluated understanding.

Week Ten

Lecture Summary

The essence of this weeks lecture was on Atom-based information versus Bit-based information, and the ways in which to manage Bit- based info. such as documents, images, webpages, presentations, etc. into an organised structure so that when it comes to retrieving them, it is not such a difficult task to find them. The lecture went through the pros and cons of atom-based information and bit-based information, in terms of their accessibilty, costs and convenience. One pro of ABI is that it's real in space (we can hold it), but a pro is that it is costly to obtain. BBI on the otherhand, is cheap to obtain and easy to produce and broadcast for audiences who seek it, but the information may be false as it can be easily altered and subject to change. What followed in the lecture were examples of how the change from atoms to bits has increased in recent times, such as in internet banking, email use (rather than snail mail) and music. BBI tends to accumulate to a point where there is information overload. The best way to deal with this is to organise it by creating folders and subfolders, as well as meta-data about your documents so that we can easily see what the documents contain when searching for them. The use of the 'search' function is also helpful when trying to locate deeple hidden files.

Tutorial Tasks

Our first task was to create a 'favourites' list of sites we often use, as a helpful mechanism for web page locating. Here is a screen shot of mine:





Review:

After reading Negroponte's 'Being Digital', These are the points that i found show he knew what he was talking about when he wrote it:

• The part where Negroponte refers to the value of his laptop being "roughly, between one and two million dollars", which he meant in terms of its bits rather than the atoms of the laptop itself which would only cost around $2000. The same goes for now, If we lose all the files in our computer or on our USB's, it is like losing everything you have worked hard for.
• His comment on the mail delivery system being a pain in atom based form is also true. Physical material sent by snail mail is subject to delay in arrival at its destination, but sending emails over the internet is not.
• It is true that we have not yet been able to convert food or products into bits yet, as that is way too advanced of a concept (for now). However, nowadays it is possible to have traditionally atom-based services in bits now, such as internet bookings, internet banking, etc. There are even website communities or games where people become so obsessed or involved that they pay real money for bit products.

Readings

Week Nine

Lecture Summary

The Lecture summary this week was all about ICT (Information Communication Technology). Communication via the internet has become a daily activity, whether it be between individuals for social purposes or between companies for business purposes. On the internet, there are four types of communication. These are: Same time, same place (chat rooms); Different time, same place (forums); Same time, different place (Instant messengers); and different time, different place (email). The Lecture then listed a few other examples of ICT including the mobile phone and tele-conferencing, but what the remainder mostly focused on was ICT via the internet, the main forms being email, IM, discussion boards/ forums, chat rooms, and social networking sites such as myspace and facebook. It went through each one of these individually, explaining in detail the basic protocols for each and outlined their benefits as well. A few of the lecture slides then went on to discuss the importance of 'Netiquette'; Using ICT requires us to be careful with the way we communicate our thoughts and ideas online because once we have communicated, we can't take it back, so for this reason it is important that we practise our etiquette. Then what briefly followed before the conclusion was some suggestions on how to avoid the problem of spam and spreading it to others when using emailm by avoiding forwarding or using 'BCC' (Blind Carbon Copy) rather than 'CC' so that email addresses of others aren't also forwarded.

Tutorial Tasks

When i went to the google groups page, i saw the list of 'popular groups' and clicked on the 'Atheism vs Christianity' because i knew there would be plenty of arguments in the discussion board since it is a touchy topic. In the 'search this group' box i typed 'universal beginnings'. Looking through the results i was mostly interested by the one titled 'Dawkins on Faith' as I have read two of his books before so I was interested to see what people had to say on him. The first discussion posted was by a theist who basically disaproves of Richard Dawkins' ideas in his book 'The God Delusion', in reference to his view on faith. The replies by others on the discussion board were quite interesting and everyone either objected the first comment or agreed with it, although as they the postings started becoming more defensive the so did the fall of etiquette...but of course you would expect some level of rudeness in discussion forms.

This is the original message posted on the discussion board:

"I was reading the God Delusion yesterday and Dawkins view of faith does not make sense in Christian theology. The problem is that he divorces faith as a belief devoid of evidence (in the strictly scientific norm of the nature of evidence as externally verifiable) from any notion of trust. In Christian theology faith is a form of trust. This means that it is not rooted in the absence of evidence, although the evidence in which it is rooted is clearly not of the scientific sort. But one does not come to faith based on what one has been told in the past or through simple logical formulations."

Now this is one of the postings opposed to the original message:

"Yes, but the point is one cannot tell the difference. We can't
tell if, in fact, God DOES want us to die heinous deaths at the hands of natural
disasters, or anything of that nature. The only way we can tell the difference
is by going OUTSIDE of the faith to our common humanism and determining what is
right there. That is why I say faith is ineffectual. It literally adds nothing
to the system of morality, unless it is used blindly (in which case it is almost
always used badly)...the problems come when "guess" and "believe" turn into
"knowing the mind of God" which is where the faith comes in. So the only place
where the faith is USED meaningfully to make decisions is in the "guess", but
all other places where it's used, it's misused."

So after reading various replies i came to conclude that on discussion boards, it is obvious that people take a long time in carefully forming their argument before they post it, and the argument, depending on whether they fall on 'deaf ears' or not, can continue on unsettled.


Podcasts:

I was unable to listen to any podcasts as one of the ones I searched on yahoo were free to download, and I couldn't locate any on the ECU site. However, these are the points on podcasts that I gather, may be of benefit to university students :

• Listening to audio is sometimes more effective than reading or viewing.


• University students may desire occasional changes in methods to how they learn


• Some of the podcasts come with visuals as well, so when viewing them on your computer it is an extra effective way to learn.

My search result for 'Lenny Kravitz'

Readings

Guide to Using e-mail

Correct etiquette procedures are important when using email as a form of communication, because you cannot just assume that the person you are sending the email to, will understand your thoughts or question if you don't express them clearly. You must also be aware that you don't know what the recipients current emotional state is, and sending email messages pose the risk of seeming insensitive or rude, thus it is imortant to be careful with what you say in the message and how you word it.

Week Eight

Lecture Summary

Since it's a given that throughout our university years we will be required to make oral presentations, the lecture outlined what we should and shouldn't do in order to deliver good quality oral presentations. It began by showing a youtube video on 'Death by Powerpoint', where a standup comedian makes fun of all the common errors people make when using powerpoint in their speeches. The lecture then followed with suggestions on how to structure our presentations correctly within a basic frame of an Introduction, Body, and Conclusion, in order to produce an effective result. Using powerpoint was also the main theme of the lecture, and it mentioned an important basic rule to comply with when using it; KISS, which stands for 'Keep It Simple Stupid'. This point takes us back to the opening youtube video that shows us people tend to overload their powerpoints with too much, all too often. Further points that the lecture made was that slides should be used for illustrative purposes and to summarize the key points of what you're talking about, and also most important of all, making sure that everything is relevant.

Tutorial Tasks

Five good strategies for a top-notch presentation:

• Organise your talk around a central theme, and make sure that when trying to make your point it doesn't get lost in detail.


• With slide presentations: use a minimum amount of flashy graphics or none at all, as this tends to distract the audience; keep text in slides short, prefferably one or two sentences so that the audience can still folow what you're saying.


• Be outgoing so that the audience thinks that you are enjoying giving them the presentation--If you don't seem interested in what you're saying, then the audience wont be interested in what you're saying either. As James Hayes Bohanan suggests, humour may even be used occasionally to keep the audience's interested.
  
• Don't make the speech too long as the concentration span of the audience may only be around ten minutes, and making it short also leaves time for questions.


• Practise and come prepared. Practise is the key--If you don't practise beforehad it will be more nerve-wrecking when you're giving the presentation as you're more likely to make mistakes that you haven't had time to correct.
  

Powerpoint Presentation:

Here are the six slides of the Powerpoint presentation I made on 'What not to do'.

These are the references for the pictures used in my slide:
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1429/1115683604_09a5ba6c4e.jpg?v=0

http://www.publicspeakingskills.com/pages/P.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1433/1436911565_16ee961f5b.jpg

Week Seven

Lecture Summary

The Lecture this week basically went through explaining the What, Why's and How's of the Endnote referencing program. It began by explaining the reason that Endnote is such an essential tool for using when creating research papers, being mainly because it maintains a reference list in the correct formatting style required by our university (API style), producing error-free reference lists, and overall just helps us to manage the references we use for our assignments. Since Endnote can be use in different ways, being by itself or intergrated with MS Word, the lecture briefly decribed these, as well as how to use Endnote on Vista.

Tutorial Tasks

Electronic Format references examples:

ARTICLE IN AN INTERNET JOURNAL:

Fredrickson, B.L (2000, March 7). Cultivating positive emotions to optimise health and well-being. Prevention & Treatment, 3, Article 0001a. Retrieved November 20, 2000, from http://journals.apa.org/prevention/volume3/pre0030001a.html

AGGREGATED DATABASE (e.g. ProQuest):

Borman, W.C., Hanson, M.A., Oppler, S.H., Pulakos, E. D., & White, L. A. (1993). Role of esarly supervisory experience in supervisor performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78, 443-449. Retrived October 23, 2000, from PsycARTICLES
database.

ELECTRONIC VERSION OF A DAILY NEWSPAPER ARTICLE MADE AVAILABLE BY SEARCH:

Hilts, P.J. (1999, February 16). In forecasting
their emotions, most people flunk out. New York Times. Retrieved November 21, 2000, from http://www.nytimes.com/

WEB PAGE:

Technical specifications (iPhone). [n.d.] Retrieved Noveber, 2007, from Apple: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html

eBOOK:

Wilkinson, R., & Marmot, M. (Eds.). (2003). Social determinants of health: The solid facts (2nd ed.). Retrieved December 2, 2007, from http://www.euro.who.int/document/e81384.pdf

Endnotev11 exercise for Vista:

This is the reference list I used and created in Endnote for the exercise.

Here, I have highlighted in yellow what the 'Cite while you write' option in MS Word did for my document. The only thing that i adjusted myself manually was the indentation of the references that were automatically added to the bottom of the document.

Cite while you write Endnote exercise:

This is a screen shot of the end result of the 'Cite while you write' Endnote Exercise, showing both pages.

Week Six

Lecture Summary

Evaluation and Authentication was the main theme of this weeks lecture, the reason being that as university students it is essential that the sources we gather from the world wide web are of scholary standard since it reflects the work that we produce. In order to find quality information on the web, we need to be able to differentiate between what is quality and what isn't. Once we have done that, we need to decide whether the information is appropriate for, and in the right context, of what we're specifically after, and whether or not it's useful. The Lecture then went through the various reasons why the web can't be fully trusted: Practiccally anybody can make a website or create content on an existing page without any credentials in the topic they are writing about (a good example of which is http://en.wikipedia.org/ in which editing of the web pages is open to anybody); There is no governing system for the WWW, meaning that the web's expandability is not controlled by anyone, therefore it is full of false information put up by unqualified people and liars. So, the basis' on which we would evaluate web pages are: Accuracy, authenticity, objectivity, currency, coverage, credibility, reason, support, bias, referral to other sources, vertifiability.

Tutorial Tasks

Review of the ICYouSee and ICO48 Web Pages

On the ICYouSee critical thinking page, the tips on strategies for evaluating web pages really are all about thinking critically with the main theme seeming to be on 'being careful'. The page provides us with a list of 6 suggestions on what to have in mind when we're on a suspicious website/page or simply examining a page that seems promising, but can't be assured until it passes all authenticating criteria. The list consists of the following points: 'Make sure you are in the right place', for your purpose, because if it's too difficult to find what you want on the web, it might be because it's not there and probably easier to just get a reference book and look there instead; 'When in doubt, doubt', and don't stop doubting until you have cleared the site of any signs of ambiguity, manipulative reasoning, and bias, as well as checked the information against other sources to compare and see if there are any variances; 'Consider the source' because not all web authors are experts, and much of the time their purpose for writing on a topic and posting it on a web page, may only be to express their own personal opinion. So we should look around for links on the author, or on extra sources/ readings/ and bibliographies to assure us that the information was not simply invented. We should also check the purpose, i.e. Is it commercial, governmental, personal, or academic?; 'Know what's happening' because much of the time the persuasiveness of a text can be hidden, or the aim of the site may be to advertise; 'Look at details', is the presentation of the site good, clean and fit for purpose? Are there any minor errors?

The INCO48 web page contains similar points to ICYouSee, but an extra ones that i found useful are: 'Continuity' to be quetioned as, Will the internet site be maintained and updated?, the rest of the points, however, were not effectively worded as in ICYouSee.

Web Site Evaluation Assignment :http://kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/decade60.html

ACCURACY: After reading through the site, I found that much of what was said about the sixties was already quite familiar to me, but to double check i looked up some of the dates mentioned in the site on events to see if the information was the same, and i found no differences.

AUTHORSHIP: The copyright of the site belongs to Kingwood College Library, and the content of the web page was written by Susan Goodwin, on which there are no links to provide information on her, except for a link to email her.

PURPOSE: This is outlined in the first bit of the text, which says in very simple terms, that its purpose is "...to help the user gain a broad understanding and appreciation for the culture and history of the 1960s". Upon reading the content of the page and looking at detail, there is no sign of any alternative aim, so the site's claim on purpose is quite fairly justified.

DETAIL AND DESIGN: The design of the page is quite simple, much like a report in the sense that it contains many headings and sub-headings, and a few pictures to illustrate some of the mentioned content. The design is clean enough to allow viewers of the page to skim through and find what they're after, with no obstructive advertisements or annoying unrelated images.

OVERALL WORTH: The Overell impression i get from this page is that it's not harmful, just an informative piece of writing, that is not exactly high in its use of vocabulary and academic writing standard, but at least it doesn't stray from it's purpose of providing accurate and interesting information on the sixties.