One post to rule them all!
Ahhh well I just made a rather disturbing discovery going through the unit guide and that is that despite that I have been writing up posts for the duration of the semester I have not been actually posting about what we were supposed to. That’ll teach me for not reading the unit guide properly, anyway I decided rather than going through and editing every single post I’ve done I’ll now attempt to write a summary of the semester; what I’ve learn’t, what I think about it all, and what I’ll take from this course.
Firstly I must admit I was a bit bemused with this course at the start of the semester, starting this blog was wierd for me. I’m not really one to be interested in putting my opinions on the internet, whilst I’m not shy at expressing my opinions I prefer to do it face to face as I enjoy the banter that happens between actual people. The other thing I found rather horrifying was discovering that when you tag things with your name for assignments and the like you then end up coming up in search engines when people type in your name, so it took me a while to overcome the sheer horror at the thought of having to do this. Now that we are at the end of the semester I’m still not that keen on the whole blog thing, although I have found it interesting to learn more about them and see what people write about. One interesting page of blogs I found was http://domain.nationalforum.com.au/ It has some really interesting blogs regarding Australian Politics which is something I and I’m sure many others are interested in. This website was particularly relevant to what we’ve been learning over the semester http://blog.sherifmansour.com/?p=245 It talks about how the candidates in the U.S presidential election are using programs such as twitter, and how Australian politics doesn’t seem to have quite caught on to this as an effective new form of communication.
Lecture 1: What is Networked Media?
Some of the stuff we covered in this lecture was a recap of information we learnt in Internet Media, which was good as it helps to refresh what I’d already learnt. Stuff like the history of the internet, TCP/IP etc. These days especially in Australia the internet plays a vital role in day to day lives. As the amount of users and contributers has grown it has become a credible source of research and information, this isn’t to say that there isn’t a hell of a lot of crap out there as well, but as it continues to grow sources such as Google Scholar mean that as a student you are able to find academic and credible sources in a much easier way. I have used this search engine several times since starting my degree and have found it very useful. I also regularly use email to keep in touch with friends and family all around the world, and have found that facebook has been a great way to find people that I’ve lost touch with and vice-versa.
Lecture 2:
I pretty much covered blogs earlier.
Lecture 3: Carving up the world
This would seem a fairly straight forward context, dividing up the world so it makes sense. What is interesting is how much web designs have advanced and changed over the last ten years. As I really love films one of the websites I use the most is www.imdb.com this site is great for finding out pretty much anything you want to know about any film. It is divided up into different categories to provide info on different topics such as upcoming films, it also has message boards in which people can post messages and comments, and allows people to rate films so you can get an idea of what people think of a particular film. It has links, suggestions, trivia and much more and if I want to know anything about a film, I pretty much go there first.
Lecture 4: Web 2.0
This lecture I found really interesting as I have definitely always just expected things on the internet to work and have no real understanding of the background behind it all. I’d never heard of RSS, CSS, XML which allow us to use things such as blogs without having knowledge of these things. I’d have to say I am defiantly someone who likes a nice user friendly page where I can just click or type and I get to where I’m going. Although sites such as wikipedia which are user generated data, are not always guaranteed to be totally accurate its also great for getting some basic info and then getting more reliable sources to back it up.
Lecture 5: HTML and how to do it
We covered some basic info in Internet Media last semester, what was cool about this topic was actually using it to create a page in the tutorial. I know actually understand what it does.
Lecture 6: Data Visualisation
Data Visualisation is a really interesting concept. Basically making data which can be pretty boring to look at and turning into a visual concept. The Radio Head film clip we watched was just insane, they are a great band for doing new and interesting things. I chose to do a data visualisation for my assignment. My original concept was to look at indigenous health stats compared to the rest of the country, however I found it really difficult to find stats that would be suitable for it, unfortunately I lost a lot of time trying to research this, and with only two weeks to go I had to change my concept. It didn’t leave me a lot of time to collect data. What I decided was to collect data over a week of what my husband and I spend out time doing. I was then going to graph it using excel however I experimented with this and was not happy with the results. When I was thinking about how busy and complicated life is, even when I only had 5 headings and tried to visualise it reminded me of a hectic train map or tube map so I researched tube maps from around the world and found that the London underground system suited it perfectly. I spent a lot of time ensuring that the data appeared to look like the London Tube map. I think it worked well with the data I’d collected.
Lecture 7: Remix, API, Mashups
Another side of digital media I really knew nothing about. From what I understand It enables you to source information from existing sites and build into a new one. Although I don’t think I would use a site such as twitter, it is a really interesting concept.
