Ha! Yeah, no.
It's 12:24am Wednesday morning and I have just spent the evening catching up on some really great blogs from fellow students and reading a few posts on WebCT. Oh, and I got to finish off a post which I started a couple of days ago.
It's nearly mid week of Week Six! It may have been on Mick's side, but time definitely does not seem to be on mine :/
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Module 3 - Copyright
First of all let me get this out of the way. I used the OUA and Curtin logos on my HTML page. In hindsight, and after a fair bit of research and reading of both the Curtin Copyright Policy and Proceedure and the Curtin Logo Use Proceedure, I have come to the conclusion that I have indeed breached Copyright.
Bugger.
Copyright and Intellectual Property is such a complex and touchy subject. There are so many differing points of view held by so many different people with so many different things at stake, it's hard to find a middle ground, or so it seems with the debate that is constantly going on.
I found it interesting to read the Copyright Website and Curtin's own excellent Copyright at Curtin page. Both gave a good balanced view of what Copyright is and how it is applied with some good guidelines and practical scenarios. A little further reading on the sites also gave me some interesting information about Fair Use, particularly around study which will be very useful indeed. Though all this reading material was good, I was a disappointed the course material didn't contain any reference to Creative Commons as a Copyright instrument.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation which publish the Creative Commons License. Originally inspired by the GNU GPL, this license works in tandem with traditional Copyright, the difference is with Creative Commons you have much greater flexibility. In that you can change your Copyright from All Rights Reserved to Some Rights Reserved and the like.
In my mind Creative Commons is the way of the future when it comes to online Copyright, or Copyright of any nature for that matter. I feel that initiatives such as this, and the Open Source software culture, will eventually change the way people look at Copyright and IP in general.
Bugger.
Copyright and Intellectual Property is such a complex and touchy subject. There are so many differing points of view held by so many different people with so many different things at stake, it's hard to find a middle ground, or so it seems with the debate that is constantly going on.
I found it interesting to read the Copyright Website and Curtin's own excellent Copyright at Curtin page. Both gave a good balanced view of what Copyright is and how it is applied with some good guidelines and practical scenarios. A little further reading on the sites also gave me some interesting information about Fair Use, particularly around study which will be very useful indeed. Though all this reading material was good, I was a disappointed the course material didn't contain any reference to Creative Commons as a Copyright instrument.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation which publish the Creative Commons License. Originally inspired by the GNU GPL, this license works in tandem with traditional Copyright, the difference is with Creative Commons you have much greater flexibility. In that you can change your Copyright from All Rights Reserved to Some Rights Reserved and the like.
In my mind Creative Commons is the way of the future when it comes to online Copyright, or Copyright of any nature for that matter. I feel that initiatives such as this, and the Open Source software culture, will eventually change the way people look at Copyright and IP in general.
Module 3 - WWW Standards
This current module regarding WWW Standards and usability has thrown up some very interesting reading courtesy of Jakob Nielsen and ultimately raised a few more questions for me.
As tasked, I read through through a large chunk of the related material on Nielsen's website Useit.com and also went trawling through the other recommended readings at Dennis Jerz's site and a good piece at Web Style Guide. While there were a few discrepancies between sites, all concurred on what could be described as the principals for writing on the web. I found that these principles could be broken down into the following points.
* Write scanable text - Use highlighted keywords, bulleted text and meaningful sub-headings.
* Reduce the word count - Reduce the overall words used in your writing.
* One idea per paragraph - Keep your paragraphs simple.
* Use simple langauge - Avoid marketese, write for a broad audience.
* Utilise an inverted pyramid writing style - Conclusion first and then expand from there.
I found Nielsen to come for the internet marketers angle. While I believe his theories and studies still hold some weight, his approach is to that of the conversion of readers and visitors to your site into sales of your product. The question which I feel this raises is: Are these approaches applicable to Web 2.0 social internet, blogs or opinion pieces? Does all web content need to be broken down and made scanable to be successful? If so, I think the web would be a much duller place to visit. Fellow Net11 student Kieth makes some interesting further observations about this point in his own blog.
So yes there are times where having the information scanable is pertinent, and I have taken away some very good tips on making my own writing more readable for the net. Yet still I find that if I have found an interesting and well written piece, it will engage me regardless of if it's chunked down with bullet lists and concise headings. The net is a constant and changing place. Making it more usable is not a bad thing, but at the sake of content, opinion, thought, interaction. That's not the internet I want to experience.
What about you, what kind of internet do you want to experience?
As tasked, I read through through a large chunk of the related material on Nielsen's website Useit.com and also went trawling through the other recommended readings at Dennis Jerz's site and a good piece at Web Style Guide. While there were a few discrepancies between sites, all concurred on what could be described as the principals for writing on the web. I found that these principles could be broken down into the following points.
* Write scanable text - Use highlighted keywords, bulleted text and meaningful sub-headings.
* Reduce the word count - Reduce the overall words used in your writing.
* One idea per paragraph - Keep your paragraphs simple.
* Use simple langauge - Avoid marketese, write for a broad audience.
* Utilise an inverted pyramid writing style - Conclusion first and then expand from there.
I found Nielsen to come for the internet marketers angle. While I believe his theories and studies still hold some weight, his approach is to that of the conversion of readers and visitors to your site into sales of your product. The question which I feel this raises is: Are these approaches applicable to Web 2.0 social internet, blogs or opinion pieces? Does all web content need to be broken down and made scanable to be successful? If so, I think the web would be a much duller place to visit. Fellow Net11 student Kieth makes some interesting further observations about this point in his own blog.
So yes there are times where having the information scanable is pertinent, and I have taken away some very good tips on making my own writing more readable for the net. Yet still I find that if I have found an interesting and well written piece, it will engage me regardless of if it's chunked down with bullet lists and concise headings. The net is a constant and changing place. Making it more usable is not a bad thing, but at the sake of content, opinion, thought, interaction. That's not the internet I want to experience.
What about you, what kind of internet do you want to experience?
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Module 2 - ICQ Group Chat
Tonight I completed a group chat with a number of fellow Net11 students using ICQ. It was a great chat and I found it interesting catching up with a number of students at once in a real-time environment. We were able to further learn about one another and how we are traveling with our study while discussing a few concepts which have recently come up.
A Small Downside
The one thing with large chat groups is the madness trying to keep up with the different conversations, one student described it as being in a room full of people all trying to talk at once. If one is not a proficient touch typist, keeping up with various side conversations can be trying. If you are like me you loose track while taking your eyes away from the screen to tap out your reply.
All up this was a great task which I feel yielded great results for all involved. I believe this may well become a regular session each week as the the unit continues (Tess has set up a Net11 ICQ group to help facilitate this). If so this will offer us a further avenue to share thoughts and ideas as we progress.
A Small Downside
The one thing with large chat groups is the madness trying to keep up with the different conversations, one student described it as being in a room full of people all trying to talk at once. If one is not a proficient touch typist, keeping up with various side conversations can be trying. If you are like me you loose track while taking your eyes away from the screen to tap out your reply.
All up this was a great task which I feel yielded great results for all involved. I believe this may well become a regular session each week as the the unit continues (Tess has set up a Net11 ICQ group to help facilitate this). If so this will offer us a further avenue to share thoughts and ideas as we progress.
Module 3 - HTML Task
For me this was a fun task. I love HTML! :)
I have been dealing with HTML for many years now and I just really love building things with HTML. I wouldn't say I am completely proficient with HTML and I'm definitely no coding pro but the sense of achievement I get from building a page is very real. In fact one of the reasons I decided to return to study was to get a qualification and better organise my knowledge in a more formal manner.
When I first started dabbling with the internet and HTML, tables and images was the way to build a page and all the presentation was done in HTML. Over the years though this has changed, and HTML has become the simple building block for information on the web, the framework of the page if you will.
Now we have separation of structure and presentation through the use of HTML for structure and CSS for presentation. Hopefully as more and more developers embrace this and other web standards, hopefully we will have less browser cross compatibility issues as outlined in fellow Net11 student Brown Boy's blog entry: Module 3 - HTML and Standards.
Of course knowing these underlying frameworks is not needed for successful communication if you plan to use a cookie cutter blog sewrvice such as Blogger. Though if you plan to run your own software or customise your blog by sprucing up your current template, then it is essential that you build an understanding of these coding langauges.
I have been dealing with HTML for many years now and I just really love building things with HTML. I wouldn't say I am completely proficient with HTML and I'm definitely no coding pro but the sense of achievement I get from building a page is very real. In fact one of the reasons I decided to return to study was to get a qualification and better organise my knowledge in a more formal manner.When I first started dabbling with the internet and HTML, tables and images was the way to build a page and all the presentation was done in HTML. Over the years though this has changed, and HTML has become the simple building block for information on the web, the framework of the page if you will.
Now we have separation of structure and presentation through the use of HTML for structure and CSS for presentation. Hopefully as more and more developers embrace this and other web standards, hopefully we will have less browser cross compatibility issues as outlined in fellow Net11 student Brown Boy's blog entry: Module 3 - HTML and Standards.
Of course knowing these underlying frameworks is not needed for successful communication if you plan to use a cookie cutter blog sewrvice such as Blogger. Though if you plan to run your own software or customise your blog by sprucing up your current template, then it is essential that you build an understanding of these coding langauges.
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