Category Archives: Personal

From Mr Adrian Miles himself

The other reading for our Networked Media class was on the benefits of blogging in media education (link here).

This reading is, of course, a little more relevant to our media course than the one I blogged about in the previous post. It is after all the explanation as to why the students in my Networked Media class are all writing blogs so closely interlocked with what we study in class.

I do definitely see the value in keeping an academic blog, the use of which Adrian Miles really pushes for in the piece. Even if no one else reads it, it is a great resource for I alone; particularly with tagging and categorising, the blogging community, the ability to create different media content and make use of the other technical aspects of blogging.

My issue with it is exactly as was pointed out in the reading,

“…even with the best of intentions if the use of the blog is not strongly integrated into the learning and assessable outcomes of a subject then students will, deservedly, recognise that it simply isn’t worth their while and will treat it as a rote activity.” (Miles, p2)

I need to know that I’m utilising the blog to my greatest advantage, and to do that takes more effort than I might sub-conciously be willing to give to such a new and long term tool. Long term in that the profits of blog use would be long term rather than short term rewards, which makes habits so much easier to stick to.

This is my blog, my academic blog and not my personal blog. It seems wrong to separate the two and I’d prefer not to, but I have to. I’ll link my other blogs in my blogroll later today.

I hope to use this blog in particular to my fullest advantage for learning. Not just learning the things we cover in Networked Media, but also things that I want to learn for myself. I’ll use it in the ways that we discussed in the workshop and as Adrian Miles discusses in the reading for this week.

My other concern with this is that I keep forgetting that it is public. I feel as if I’m writing to myself and so I’m writing as if I am. I forget that there is an audience, even if it’s an audience of one they don’t want to read something that sounds like my journal.

Or perhaps that’s just my style of writing?

It’s 1am, I’ll find out tomorrow.

Networked Media and I

This post should really be titled, “The Internet and I”. It has been a long ride; the Internet and I were both born in 1993, we grew up together.

The first encounter that I can remember between the Internet and I was when I was very small. We had a huge, chunky desktop computer sitting on the floor in a vacant room in our house and I would use it to play Pong. Then Mum said that we had a new-fangled thing and we dialed up and connected to the Internet.

It was extremely limited at the time. I can’t even remember what I accessed. Back then you consumed content from the Internet, you didn’t create it. It was too boring for me.

The next encounter that I recall was the exhilarating website, Neopets. It was also my first experience with social media. And this was where my obsession with the internet began. I was hooked from www dot.

Then there was, Myspace, a brief and embarrassing stint with Bebo and Wikipedia. Then I realized that I could actually learn something from the internet. I discovered blogs and followed link after link, saving pretty picture after picture through the shallow surfaces of the Internet.

And of course, there was the invention of Facebook. It changed everything, and developed at around the same time that the smart phone changed everything. Now everyone has a Facebook profile, I use it to keep in touch with my friends in India who can’t afford a phone.

The Internet is the future. It can’t be denied. But what exactly it will look like in the future no one can know. It, like me, has grown and changed and learned so much in the past 20 years of its life. I’m looking forward to the lessons in Network Media that might help me to keep up, I don’t want this magical and complicated thing called the Internet to out grow me.