Throughout the lecture we covered…
Online persona, this refers to the way that we portray ourselves online. Here are a few questions we asked ourselves to develop our online self; what is your online presence? Who do you want to be? How are you representing yourself online? What interests you?
Throughout writing our blogs we need to consider our voice and who we are and how this impacts on the reader. Blogs in themselves are a heuristic form meaning that they inherently enable you to discover or learn things for yourself.
In our lecture for this week, we were introduced to the simple forms of code such as
- HTML
- CSS
- PHP
- XML and RSS
Code is something that I find generally really interesting, its something I have absolutely no knowledge about whatsoever, but I’m eager to learn even just the basics of what is is and how it works. I think especially in today’s society coding has become more prominent in our everyday lives, it’s in everything we do online. I think in some ways learning the basics of coding could help me in the future when I’m in the industry of Film and TV.
Something that was really important to cover in this lecture was copyright and plagiarism, this links more to our readings for next week but it was good just to quickly reference it. We were told to tread very very carefully with copyright, to ensure we don’t publish content created by some else on our blog, unless of course we can link to the work for our discussion and make it clear it is not our work. We MUST ensure that the original creator is recognised and attributed.
To ensure we don’t plagiarise, which is the presentation of work, ideas, or creations of another work as if our own, we must:
- only use things we have created
- properly reference and like an essay prove a detailed citation
- use content we are allowed to
This is something I am very aware of, as we covered it heavily in year 12 media when creating our short films. However I think I underestimated the seriousness of it, we so often see news stories,blogs, youtube videos and other websites breaking the rules and using copyright, that we can undermine the importance of copyright. I am going to ensure that with this blog I will use my own content, photos and such, and if I am referencing a movie or post I will cite it and make it clear this work is not mine but is used to support my ideas and my discussion.
We also briefly went over network literacy, the difference between blogs and books, this relates to our reading for this week which we went over in our class today. Our reading (Miles, Adrian. Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge [online]. Screen Education, No. 45, 2007: 24-30.) This overall discusses having the ability to find what you want, grasp an opinion of it and contribute to the works of the piece. Through network literacy we can navigate blogs to find the things that we’re interested in. It in general leaves a lot up to reader, as writers we tend to lose a bit of authorship because you give them different ways to move through content. We no longer are giving them a book in which they read start to finish, this blog in a way is there space to find key information and its up to them with what they want to see. This can occur through tags, categories, embedding and even links.
Here is a list of things we came up with in class about how to be Network literate on our blogs:
- links to other blogs, websites, etc.
- posts,
- tagging, categories and embedding (a way for it to be easily navigated around our blogs
- comments
- RSS feed
- widgets
- a way to communicate with the readers and author, direct
- No rambling posts
- Cheap to publish – expansion of subjects, freedom of opinion, single collective idea
Our technology is constantly changing and adapting, so looking back to books and TV which is a one to many style of communication, whereas network literacy is more a two way communication between both the reader and authors. When we reflect on reading newspapers, books etc. the reader is very much inactive and has little if any connection to the publisher. When we look at blogs, and online sites like youtube, twitter etc. the reader has become more interactive, they comment, like, share, interact, share opinions and sometimes collaborate with the author.
