Monthly Archives: August 2014

Compulsory review of fellow bloggers

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Neeve was reminded of the Goosebumps (choose your own adventure) books as a kid when it comes to hypertext. I used to love these books and that’s probably about the closest we’ll get as a reader to interacting with print text. Amy takes a great quote from a reading “We must write with an awareness that we are writing in the presence of other texts” and asks if we know where to draw the line when writing for public and private purposes. And finally I’m totally with Kenton on his reaction to the reading in week four. I start my readings like this most weeks.

A symposium note

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I went to review my notes from the symposium last Tuesday and realised I had three points and these three points were basically notes I had written down from a reading that were just worded differently. So one point I have is…

“Having a porous platform to connect media to other media”.

Porous is about having an easy flow or passage in and out. So being able to apply this to information is exactly how the web works today. For me this was about understanding the history of connecting media. Great example here that explains the difference between the internet and the WWW.

When the web started it was Web 1.0, this was read only. There was little interaction from the reader. When Web 2.0 was introduced (popularized in 2004) it allowed for collaboration and sharing of information between users. This is where social media comes in.

I found this great slide share that gives a basic outline of the progression of the web. A couple of points it makes about Web 1.0 are:

  • Read only web
  • Limited user interaction

Web 2.0 was when the user was able to participate through blogging, podcasting and tagging to name a few. This created a more porous platform for sharing and connecting through the web.

 

Teenagers: the real world or the internet

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This article from Daily Mail (UK) discusses teenagers preferring the internet to real life. Something to consider when children are learning on the internet is their vulnerability. We talked in the symposiums about uni students not necessarily being able to tell the validity of stuff on the internet so what about young teenagers and children? There are far more concerning things than knowing if an article is academic or not like cyber bullying. I think children should definitely be learning by doing but there should be guidance, from both teachers and parents. I am not sure of the curriculum for primary aged children at school now when it comes to learning about the internet but I’d be interested to find out.

Hypertext 3.0

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This reading contained many ideas about hypertext and like I have said in a previous blog, not all of them sink in. Certain things stand out to me that are of interest, I write them down and have a think about them. One point that got my attention was that ‘hypertext becomes experiential’. This might seem strange but I really like this word, EXPERIENTIAL. Meaning we don’t just absorb passively but we gain something from an experience.

‘Experiential learning is the process of making meaning from direct experience’

Landow explains in this reading that idolatry of the author is limited because the reader participates in the text and therefore multiple beginnings and endings are created. I see it like the reader being an editor and can create new meaning from the text by placing emphasis on the particular parts they want to make meaning from.

This sparked the thought in my mind about Barthes’ theory. Death of the Author.

“To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.”

Who is network literate?

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DIL Framework - iStock_000018373461

I’m feeling it’s a little blurry when it comes to determining when I can consider myself network literate. Is it a matter of opinion? If I can navigate my way around the web, click on links, type in URLs, embed files in my blog, type a little bit of HTML and work out the validity of stuff I read on the internet is this not being network literate? Or do I need to take it that next step further? Understanding the behind the scenes features of the web such as the nature of databases and coding, does that make me network literate?  Where is the scale that tells me how I’m doing?

I am aware that changing a tyre on a car does not make me a mechanic (for the record I can’t change a tyre but this was the example used in class). So who says you have qualified for the title of mechanic? Is it when you do an apprenticeship and someone gives you a certificate? Or when you have been taught by your dad how to fix cars since you were a kid- this person may even have more knowledge than the person who received the certificate?  So is it then about having a piece of paper, level of knowledge, ongoing practice or something else I’m missing? You don’t need a certificate to be print literate or network literate. My Grandma is without a doubt network illiterate; she’s barely mobile phone literate. So if I know more about the internet than my Grandma but less than someone who creates the webpages and sets up databases then am I network literate or not?

Print literacy does not pre-exist us

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In the symposium this week there was a discussion based around the limitations of print literacy vs network literacy. Neither of these literacies pre-exist us- people must keep doing it in order for it to exist. One question was ‘will the printed book ever become non-existent?’ The answer to that is as long as people are reading them they will exist. It reminds me of a reading in another subject about Raymond Williams. In order for a technology (or technical invention) to be a technology it must be used, and to use something we must have the knowledge to do so. Where there is no knowledge and no use it will no longer become needed.

Predictions

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The big question I ask myself heading into the media industry is: ‘Will I be able to stay up to date with the industry?’.

Reading predictions from engineers and scientists written in the 1940s and 1980s about technologies we now have today gets me thinking where is technology heading? We seem to learn a lot about the history of communications and technologies but so far not so much about the future.  I’m not sure if that’s something that is covered in this course but what I do know is how important it is to stay current. I would say heading into any profession, university isn’t the end of the learning road, especially when working in media. So, how do you stay current? Well, I guess this is where network media and being network literate comes in.

Some predictions for social media here. 

To the floppy disk and beyond

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1117551-floppyHypertext’s physical function is allowing the user/reader to click on a highlighted text with their mouse and it will take them to another webpage, which may contain more text or images. The psychological function of hypertext is simply that it makes life easier for humankind. When I read often my mind will wander, some things that I read will sink in and some things won’t. The parts that sink in might spark an interest or an idea and unlike reading a book, with hypertext I can continue exploring that idea or thought in one click of a button.

When reading Nelson’s Literary Machine’s I pictured him as someone wanting to make the world a better place, to make it easier. This seems to be the same motivation that Douglas Engelbart had, he was the inventor of the computer mouse and developer of hypertext. Also Aaron Swartz who was involved in the development of RSS, Creative Commons and Reddit. Aaron’s goal was to make the sharing of information easier and make knowledge more accessible to the world.

So, rather than trying to understand the nerdy diagrams in this reading, one thing I took from it was the passion and motivation to move beyond the floppy disk (and thank God we did), to move into the world where offices become paperless and your thoughts and ideas you wrote on that fluro green post-it note this morning don’t get lost amongst the piles of rubbish on your desk.

‘Computers should bring simplification not complication’.  Ted Nelson