Week 13

30/5/08

Week 12 Social and Ethical Issues

Lecture 23/5/08

In this lecture, the problems with computers and connecting to the world wide web are identified and explained. Issues that can occur with connecting to the Internet and using or supplying information include:

• plagiarism
• privacy invasion and
• identity theft.

These can be a major hassle for big company's because important information and company details could get into the wrong hands. Throughout the lecture we were also told ways in which we could protect ourselves against these problems.

We can protect ourselves from these problems by:

• Referencing our work to avoid plagiarism.
• Using secure webpages and not supplying information to unfriendly sites (this will prevent you from getting viruses and enabling people to see your details).
• Don't give your personal details to sites you do not trust and not opening emails when you do not know who they are from. This will prevent anyone getting your personal details and using them to get into accounts on the web (for example bank details).

Tutorial

Task One: Collect five information sheets that are relevant to an undergraduate and record your findings.

1. Databases, compilations, tables and forms.

This information sheet informs the reader about copyright against tables of information, indexes and forms, directories, anthologies, short stories, essays, poetry and databases. The information sheet tells us about how copyright works within a company (if an employee creates a compilation the employer owns it), copyright for a compilation lasts 50 years from the end of the year that the compilation was first published, performed or broadcasted. There are also common questions which are answered about creating compilations.

2. Educational institutions: introduction to copyright

Within this information sheet it informs us what copyright protects in Australia. Some of the examples it gives includes:

• written materials (books, articles, essays etc.)
• computer programs
• sound recordings (Cd's, cassettes etc.)
• published editions

It also provides information on penalties when copyright has been breached and provides answers for common questions.

3. Internet: copying and downloading

This information sheet is for people who want to copy or download information off the Internet. It informs us on what is protected by copyright and how you obtain copyright protection. It also tells you how you might infringe copyright. This can come about in many different ways, however if you make sure you have permission to copy another persons work, you are then protecting yourself from legal action.

4. Libraries: introduction to copyright

Copyright in libraries protects:

• Literary works - Journal articles, novels, poems, song lyrics, letters and reports
• Artistic works - Paintings, drawings, cartoons and graphic arts
• Musical works
• Dramatic works - Dance, plays and screenplays
• Cinetography films
• Sound recordings and
• Broadcasts

The copyright notice is not necessary for protection in Australia. It notifies people that the work is protected and who is claiming rights to the work. It lasts for 70 years from creator's death or from first publish date.

5. Websites: creating and publishing on the Internet

The copyright for websites are basically the same as the copyright for libraries, but has some extras. These include:

• Computer programs
• Compilations and
• Sound recordings

A website as a whole is not protected by copyright, however the component parts can have protection and may be owned by different people. When there is a situation where someone is paid to create a website, there should be an agreement which points out important issues such as who owns copyright elements of the completed website etc.

Task Two: What you need to know about music and the web.

• Downloading music off the web means that musicians and composers don't get paid for their works.
• New technology avenues are opening up for musicians. These include digital downloads, mobile phone ringtones and on-demand streaming. These avenues help prevent "illegal" downloading off the Internet.
• Rights that are exploited when music is downloaded or steamed onto the Internet include reproduction and communication to the public.
• Use of music which has copyright restrictions need the appropriate permission or clearances.

Reading Summary

Eff's Top 12 Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy

1. Do not reveal personal information inadvertently - configure you webpages so that you do not 'shed' you detail, including email, without even knowing it. You can do this through 'setup', 'options' or 'preferences' on you browsers settings.
2. Turn on cookie notices in your web browser - cookies are information that web sites store on your computer and (for example) remembers you email for when you next visit the site.
3. Keep you email on the down low - this will prevent spammers finding your email address and sending you UBE.
4. Don't reveal your personal details to just met friends or strangers - This will prevent identity theft.
5. Realize you maybe monitored at work - If you are going to check personal sites such as banking sites or email, it is best to keep that until you get home. With monitoring systems in workplaces, it is easier to get your details for these accounts then clicking your fingers.
6. Beware of sites that offer rewards or prizes in exchange for your details - This will just be marketing scams which collect your details so that they can be sold to other marketers out there and widen the range of spam that you will receive.
7. Do not reply to spammers for any reason - This provides them with the knowledge that the mail is being read by a real person and you will be on more mailing lists within no time at all.
8. Be conscious of web security - Do not give out highly personal information such as credit card details unless you know that the site that you are using is secure or encrypted.
9. Be conscious of home computer security - If you have DLS, broadband or any other connection to the Internet 24/7, make sure that you turn off you computer because wireless has less protection then the normal dial-up connection.
10. Examine privacy policies - Checking these policies enables you to no what will happen with you details once you enter them into a website.
11. Remember you are the one that give out the details. Beware!
12. Use encryption - There is more then spammers, nosy bosses etc. There are more harmful threats such as government surveillance, industrial espionage and identity theft. To prevent these from harming you, use encryption.

Week 11 - Building Knowledge

Lecture 16/5/08

Today lecture was about the process from data forming into information and then gradually becoming knowledge. The topics that we covered include:

1. The relationship between data, information and knowledge and how the process works between the three of these.
2. The characteristics of data, information and knowledge.
3. The importance of each of these for a person to know.
4. How they work together in a business context and
5. How with the process, understanding and connectedness can extend to wisdom.
   

Tutorial

Five organisations that collect information from their clients and why?

Australian Marine Conservation Society (http://www.amcs.org.au/)

• They collect their clients details because it means that they can send out information to inform people on issues and conservation problems around Australia.

eBay (http://www.ebay.com.au/)

• eBay collects personal details to that they can organise the transferal of money and goods between clients.

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com.au/)

• Facebook is a social site which collects information from clients so that you can meet and talk to other people around that world.

Myspace (http://www.myspace.com/)

• This site is very similar to Facebook except it has more privacy.

Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/)

• This site enables you to make a blog for everyone to see. The information it collects includes email and make up a password so that you can log into and update your blog.

Definitions

Data: is a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn.

Information: is the result of processing, manipulating and organizing data in a way that adds to the knowledge of the receiver.

Knowledge: is information that is generally known.

Wisdom: is the ability, developed through experience, insight and reflection, to provide truth and provide good judgement.

Understanding the relationship between data, information and knowledge.

Understanding the relationship between data, information and knowledge can be very important to a university student and assist their studies. By understanding that data, once making a connection to other forms of data, becomes information because of connections made between them, it then brings the facts to come together and makes it information. Then once building the connections between data and becoming a collection of information, that collection becomes knowledge due to memorizing it. This means that you can build up your knowledge on a topic you are researching and can be helpful to you because you now no the relationship on how to build your knowledge up and will then help you be able to give much more depth into your topic for assignments and possibly create new knowledge.

Reading Summary

Data, information, knowledge and wisdom

Data = symbols

It only exists within itself and has no more significance, no matter what form it is in.

Information = data that are processed to be useful

Information gives answerer's to who, what, where and when questions and has been given meaning through connection.

Knowledge = application of data and information

Knowledge is an appropriate collection of information. When you have memorized something, you have created knowledge.

Wisdom = evaluated understanding

Wisdom contains data, information and knowledge. It gives us understanding of a topic where there had been no understanding before.

Week 10 - Information Management

Lecture 09/05/08

As we all know, information management is important when we are overloaded with documents and assignments. It is therefore important for university students to keep everything orderly and ensure that they will not lose any key information.

Ways in which to keep your desktop orderly is to:

• First create main files for you units. This first step helps you to distinguish where your information needs to go.


• Secondly create sub files within the main files. These sub files could have unit assignment names where you will organise your assignment information and documents.

After doing just these two steps, your desktop will already begin to look more organised and you will now know where your essential unit information is and makes it easier to locate when you need it in a hurry.

Then once you have done this two steps with your unit essentials, try it with other documents, photos and music files and see the difference of an organised computer from when it was not.

Tutorial


Task 1: Organising favourites




Task 2: Negroponte's being digital


The ideas in Negroponte's bits and atoms was interesting. In finding out what bits and atoms were and example of each of them, proved to be quite informative. Even upon finding out that the information on the webpage was published 13 years ago, it still proves to be quite relevant, due to the face that not much has changed in the way that bits and atoms are still the same and have not changed one bit.

Atoms are newspapers, magazines and books.

Pros:

• Exists in space - we can see it
• Easy to protect
• Difficult to change
• Difficult to copy

Cons:

• Bulky
• Costly
• Difficult to edit
• Difficult to distribute

Bits include all types of electronic content.

Pros:

• Very flexible - easy to move, change and edit
• Very cheap
• Easy to mass produce

Cons:

• No privacy - content is easy to copy
• Easy to edit

Reading summary

Jamie MacKenzie's online essay





The thing about the Internet is that it is everywhere. This is now also including schools (whether it be primary or high school) around the world. However there is no proof that having the Internet in schools is assisting in learning. This is because when using the Internet, children in school are not using them for educational purposes, which identifies the problem to begin with. It is not helping children in schools to read or write. It is not helping them learn mathematics or improving problem solving skills. The only way that the Internet will assist in helping children learn is when they are using their thinking skills to determine whether the information is credible or not, in which they will have to train their own minds to evaluate the information and choose for themselves whether the information is good or not. To prepare students for the future or wired schools we need to train them in every aspect, so that what they come up with in right and they can distinguish between good and bad information. To do this they will have to learn in the topic as below.

Week 9 - Communication

Lecture 2/5/08

There is a wide range of technology in the world today which help us communicate between friends, family, businesses, university student and tutors etc. Some of the most common technologies used to communicate today include:

• Mobiles
• Email
• MSN (Instant messaging)
• Public websites (Myspace and Facebook)
• Telephones and
• The Internet

These are used in a variety of contexts (informal and formal) which change from person to person, depending on their occupation and their relationship that you have with someone.

Tutorial

Task 1: Searching groups on Google

The group that I searched on Google was Scuba and groups that came up include:

• rec.scuba
• it.hobby.scuba
• rec.scuba.locations etc.

Task 2: Messages posted on the topic:

• All of the bulletin board messages for these topics do not relate to scuba diving what so ever. These messages appear to be complete nonsense and not even worth looking at, especially when you are trying to look for a professional group that provides data about scuba diving.

Task 3: Potential benefits of podcasts for university students.

Podcasts are very useful when it comes to something like a radio show that you have missed and really would like to listen to, you can just go to the website and download it. This sort of method can become very handy for university students because you manipulate this idea to be lectures instead of radio shows and make them available on the university website. This could be good for many university students because if you miss a lecture because you are sick you can go and download a copy of the lecture and not miss out on any information. It could also be very handy when there is only a small class, students that live far away or even students studying online, because instead of coming to lectures, they could also download a podcast of the lecture and therefore not miss anything important.

Reading Summary

The problem with spam

Email spam, known as Unsolicited Bulk Email (or UBE), is a unique form of advertising. It is when an advertiser sends adverts through email to as many people as they can find. This type of advertising has no cost to the sender and could have a great impact on the reader, which would then lead them to buy a product or service which is being advertised. This may be a good thing for the sender because it may potential bring customers, however this can also be a bad thing for the receiver. Many people that have email and receive spam by the bulk, can get quite annoyed. When they email users receive many spam emails a day, they start to get frustrated and try to block them out. But with the ever changing nature of the advertising stunts, it gets trickier to block them out and with every unit that is put into place to stop UBE, there is a way around it which means there is no way to stop it. The only way to stop this annoying spam from getting into out email boxes, is to try to ban the sale of tools, which are programed for spamming.

Week 8 - Presentation Strategies

Lecture 25/4/08

Giving an oral presentation, is a very daunting concept. However in today's lecture, we were shown how to give a bad presentation in a video, which helped us identify what we should not do in our up coming presentations.

Things that we should not do in our presentation include:

• Talking in monotone - you should use emotion in presentation


• Do not put too much information into the PowerPoint


• Do not use distracting colours in your PowerPoint


• Do not talk to fast


• Do not use lots of animations in your PowerPoint - this can be distracting


• Don't be too vague with the topic you are presenting


• Do not turn up without looking the part - make sure your self image (the way you are dressed) and keep your body language positive


• Do not use PowerPoint as your sole means of delivery


• Do not use sounds and inappropriate pictures


• Do not stare at the ground when you are presenting

Tutorial

Top five strategies to give a great presentation

1. Earn trust. An audience needs to trust a speaker to learn.
2. Use visual aids so the audience doesn't get distracted by other things.
3. Repeat important information so the audience remembers it.
4. Be enthusiastic and use emotion to hold attention.
5. Don't forget your manners. If you are in a formal situation when presenting, you need to keep your speech formal and the way you are referring to the audience.
   

Slide presentation

Week 7 - Endnote Libraries

Lecture 18/4/08

Endnote is a program that we can use to reference any work that is not our own our for assignments. It automatically does a bibliography once you have entered all the other information for in-text, citing and quoting within a document. It can also either be a standalone program or integrated with MS Word.

Tutorial

Week 6 - Evaluation and Authentication

Lecture 11/4/08

Today's lecture was on evaluating and authenticating web information. We were told that with a lot of the information that is on the Internet, it can be misleading, untrustworthy and not updated. We were also informed that any content that is put on the Internet does not need proof reading, peer reviewing, qualifications are not needed and that basically anyone with a computer can publish information onto the Internet. When looking for reliable information on the web there are certain criteria that you should look out for. This includes:

• An author - if there is no author, be cautious with the information you are using from this particular site, it may not be accurate. However if there is an author, do some background check to make sure they are qualified to report of the topic you are getting the information on.
• The date - check to see if the information is up to date. If it is not, the information could now be wrong.
• Spelling mistakes - if there are, it may mean that the information is not credible.
• Whether information biased - if the information is highly negative or positive towards a topic, the information you are reading may be deceiving.
• Depth - if the information is vague, the author may not really no what they are talking about and therefore the information may not be credible.

Tutorial

Task 1: Describe the strategies for evaluating information found on websites.

1.To evaluate information found on the web you need to ask yourself certain questions which can point out obvious flaws on webpages and in the information. The first question you need to ask yourself is if the site addresses the topic you are looking for. This will help you choose if the site right for you and the topic that you are researching.

2.The second question you need to ask yourself is if the content on the webpage is accurate. To find out if the content is more or less accurate, you need to do some research on the author to see if they have the right credentials to report on the topic you after. By finding whether they have the right credentials for the field, you can then assume that either they have had experience or not enough experience for the topic you are writing on.

3.The third step in this process is to determine what the main purpose of the site is. Is it there to persuade you to a side of the topic (negative or positive), to inform you on the topic or is it just there to sell you something? By determining this, you are determining the motive behind the website and this can tell you whether the site information can or cannot be trusted.

4.And finally does the page have good spelling, grammar or deadlinks? This is another question you may ask yourself when considering the sites content. This will also help in the evaluating process because bad spelling and grammar can mean that the author is not educated and therefore make the site an untrustworthy source. Also deadlinks may mean that the site is old and/or the site is not yet complete.

Task 2: Reliving the Sixties: A web site evaluation assignment

American Cultural History: 1960 - 1969

Is this site a good source for the information?

This site has a lot of different information regarding the sixties. The information ranges from art to education, sports and historical events. If there were students who were looking for this particular information from the sixties era, I would say that this is a good site to get reliable information from. This is also because it is published by a library which proves to be trustworthy.

Who are the authors and who is responsible for the site? What is their expertise? What is their bias?

The author and who is responsible for the site are:

• Peggy Whitley - Designer
• Susan Goodwin - Writer

The bias of this sites information is fairly neutral. There are no points in which there are very negative or very positive points on the topic. This leads me to believe that the authors created this page purely to inform readers of the topic.

What is the sites purpose or point of view?

To give information to the public about the sixties and to people who are researching on this topic for (for example) an assignment.

Was this page designed for the web or was it a journal article (etc.)?

I think that the information on this page might have started off as a journal or in articles, because it is made up of all different parts of the sixties, and then made into a webpage so that it is easier to get to the information all at once.

Sixties Project

Was this site a good source for the information?

I found that this site did not have much information about the sixties and is mostly made up of discussions and sponsored links.

Do you have good reason to believe that the information on this site is accurate? Are the facts documented?

If I were searching a topic on the sixties i would look at the first page and think that it was an unworthy site to gather information from.

Who are the authors and who is responsible for the site? What is their expertise?

The designer of this page is New Word Order. The link provided for this designer led to a webpage which had many sponsored links to other pages on it.

What is the sites purpose or point of view?

In regards to the information on this website, I would say that this site does not really have a purpose but to start discussions.

Week 5 - Using Search Engines

Lecture 4/4/08

When using a search engine, there are three categories that you can search. These are:

1. The free, visible web - this category is made up of public webpages which can be found through search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
2. The free, invisible web - the webpages in this category have free information to the public, however, you need to go directly to these pages to get the information.
3. Paid databases over the web - this category consists of official information such as scholarly journals and newspapers that can be accessed through libraries.
4. We were also taught that there are two types of search tools. Search engines and directories. Search engines include sites such as Google and Yahoo, which enables you to find the sort of information you need, however it finds too many sites that you can look through and it is easy to become overwhelmed. Directories have hand picked sites by editors and only has correct information.

Tutorial

List four strategies that will help structure a good search.

Strategy 1: Google might be the biggest search engine, with 3.3 billion webpages, but using search engines that ask their owners of sites to pay to be indexed, have fewer pages. However, these pages might be more worthwhile to look at because the information might be more accurate.

Strategy 2: When your searching particular information such as a quote in a search engine, you need to make sure that you are using specific punctuation such as quotation marks to enclose the quote. This will prevent you from receiving unrelated links through search engines such as Google.

Strategy 3: Using a search engine can be trouble some, especially when you do not use the key terms for the topic you are after. To get exactly the information you need, you should us as less a word you can in your search and use only key words that will lead you to your topic. For example, if you needed to find 'what causes global warming?', you wouldn't enter that into the Google search, you need to just cut down to the basic 'global warming' and go from there.

Strategy 4: Use the Boolean search technique AND, OR and NOT to help you find information. AND will ensure that you get both of the words that you are searching in a document. OR will get one of either of the words you are searching in a document and Not will search one word and cut out the other.

Internet quiz

Reading Summary

Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisations service is important for small business websites. To start off with, they check the website which identifies problems that needs to be fixed, such as problems that prevent search engine spider robots finding the site, help correct the site if they are lacking descriptive text and fix navigation problems. They collect keywords (including misspellings) that a person might use when searching your website in a search engine and provide regular reporting and keep checking in so that you are informed of the sites progress and popularity.