Week 11

Lecture;
In todays lecture we learnt how to organize the received knowledge, sometimes we have far too much information which is often irelevant and not required, so we must have good methods of how to sort through this. We went over the different options and why they are necessary.

Dictionary Definitions

Data - facts or figures to be processed; evidence, records, statistics, etc. from which conclusions can be inferred; information

Knowledge - An awareness of factual information. Includes actual knowledge (positive or definite), personal knowledge (based on one’s own observation), and constructive knowledge (based on other circumstances).

Information - something told; news; intelligence; word

Wisdom - the quality of being wise; power of judging rightly and following the soundest course of action, based on knowledge, experience, understanding, etc.; good judgment; sagacity

My definitions;

Data - data is information that is real and proven, it is information you can relie on. Data can include things such as statistics, records, facts, figures and evidence. Things that are genuine and not made up.

Knowledge - Knowledge can be either personal, contractual or actual. They are all from different sources but usually knowledge should be genuine like data.

Information - Information is something you can learn, find or hear from a person or own instinct.

Wisdom - Wisdom is how wise a person is or can be. Or the wisdom of a certain source or thing.

Week 10

Lecture;
In today's lecture we went over; Information management, sometimes with lack of management, we are given information about using computer processing power to manage information, we can receive vast quantities of information it's how we sort through this and gain constructive information. Organising skills, using text, documents, images, web pages, bookmark, presentations, assignments, citations and references.


Activities;
The Pros & Cons of Using Atoms & Bits
The author goes on about the future use of bit and atoms saying how a digital world is an inevitable future. Pros of Atoms & Bits is that it gives you the ability to download products you purchase from the Internet, also goes on how atoms are not caught in customs so how we would be free to gain access to anything without consequence this in some retrospective is a bad thing, we would have access to anything we want in seconds. Cons of Atoms & Bits the ability to take anything we want without the threat of consequences. The ideas expressed by the author are fantastic and sound some what unbelievable but are the really what we would want in as our future.

Week 9

Lecture;
In today's lecture we discussed Email.
Email has passed the telephone as the preferred means of communication, Email works effectively as it is free, its ubiquitous, its asynchronous, you can infact communicate with people all over the world day and night. The Internet - Email, Skype and MSN have taken over Phone conversations. They are much cheaper and more efficient.

Week 8

Lecture;
Oral presentations are not the most popular of types to perform in front of numerous people. Usually a university study would much prefer to write some other form of assessment up like an essay, report or portfolio and then submit to a teacher. But fact is, we have to do them. So for those people who are more keen on the written assessments and for others who need improvement, here are some tips for your presentation.
Apart from discussion on your topic you should always include: compelling data, support your data with proof, visual evidence or facts, emotional connection - so show your audience you are passionate about this and back your facts up, if not the audience will loose all connection with your presentation, generate energy - using more levels, moving around and even pointing or facial expressions, more proof that supports your facts and arguments.
As written assessments normally format, you should also use the structure of, Introduction, Body paragraph and Conclusion. This will help you keep everything in order too because if not it's not very easy to follow for the audience. Never read off your PowerPoint, you should always have memorised parts so you can allow yourself to make eye contact with your audience 50% of the time.
Covering all these steps will assure you a well prepared PowerPoint/electronic presentation, But except for all this you should also prepare palm cards (optional), practise your speech, pace your talking, preparation with technical items.

Week 7

Lecture;
End note is an excellent source of referencing. It is a program which allows quick and reliable referencing, citations and bibliographies.
End note can be used in two different ways, you can use it as a standalone program, to reference for a research project or integrated into Microsoft word, to help organise your bibliography for a written assignment.
End note is set out with different windows allowing you do to numerous items at a time, it records them all and organises how you should use them depending on the sort of documentation it's for. It is a fairly easy program to use and you can add it to your Microsoft word doc lists, it's also available on vista and from there you have many different options of which reference you wish to conduct. You should use end note because it is a reliable and common program for referencing.


Activities;

Week 6

Lecture;
Evaluation and authentication are the two key steps to finding decent information off the Internet. To find a reliable site there are other things you must take into account. For example, the type of site, .com (commercial), .org(organisation), .fghrewkhf(random letters will normally be spam). An organisation website will normally have bias information because they are trying to support one side of something, that's what organisations are about. So you should never rely on these sites when you want both opinions. 90% of the time they will only speak of one side.

You should also look for an Author or Editor. Usually at the bottom of the web page there will be a full name with the editor or author of some sort, some sites may not have one mentioned but if so it's best advised to then run that name into a search engine and find some background info on that person, so you can be certain they are a professional or academic and not a bias person.

The date is a very important matter in web searching, sometimes you could be reading an article and think it was a great source but then find somewhere on the page it was last edited in 1995, that would be no good if it was a subject that's changed over that time. So you must always identify the date and time the site was last edited or proofed.

If the site contains a Sponsor that is another excellent source of finding the authenticity of a site. If you find a sponsor you should immediately search them and determine whether they have a good reputation and are they reputable? This will also allow you to find out how reliable the site information will be.

Activities;
The Site http://www.ithaca.edu/library/training/think.html evaluates how to use the Internet. The first strategy explains why the web was originally created and how it is used today. It suggests you should make sure you are using the appropriate site and that the Internet is the best way of getting the information you’re looking for.

The second strategy suggests that you should be skeptical of what you read on the Internet. Don’t necessarily trust what is written and always look for other sites to check that the source is credible.

The third strategy talks about finding out whether an author of a source is credible. It explains how to search for an author on a site such as explaining things like truncating the URL to find out who created the site.

The fourth is to see who put their money into the site, who set it up, who sponsored it and what it is talking about. Since money talks, you have to make sure it is not biased and make sure it has documentation such as citations or a link. If there isn’t you should probably not use the site for research.

Fifthly, make sure the website has good grammar and spelling, has good facts and sources and check when it was last revised. Don’t always pay attention to the graphics; it may just be a gimmick to look pretty.

Finally it suggests you make sure the website is a website rather than a magazine or article, as the site says “distinguish web pages from pages found on the Web.”It also suggests the criteria of authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, coverage and value.

Week 5

Lecture;
Week fives lecture was on search engines. We discussed what a search engine is (a web-based program that gives you links to other sites relating to your search) and we also went through the different search engines used today. Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and AllTheWeb are the most commonly used yet there are many many more, some you might never have heard of. There are different sorts of search engines, some are created to only specify in one certain area of information. For example there is: SearchEdu.com, which is specifically for university sites, and specific branded search engines like MSN search which is from Microsoft. We also viewed some statistics from the U.S. search engine rankings in September 2007 and Google, a predicted was on top of them all with 57% followed by Yahoo on 23.7% then Microsoft, Ask and AOL all with low percentages. From this lecture i learnt that Google is definitely the top search engine throughout the world.


Activities;
Tips for using search engines

1. Use keywords
2. Refine your search (be more detailed)
3. Relevancy (keep your search relevant)
4. Try using indexes

Week 4

Lecture;
Lecture four, Using the WWW, World Wide Web, discussed the differences between the Net and the Web. The Web, used for accessing information which is on the Internet is what allows us to search through computers without having to know about computers and cables. Whereas the Net is a networking infrastructure - a massive network of networks.


Readings;
Reading one, A brief history on the Internet, was based on the Origins of the Internet. The birth of the Internet was first set in motion with a series of memo's written by J.C.R Licklider of MIT in 1962. His memo's, which envisioned a "Galactic Network" involved a globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could access data and programs. Two major steps towards computer networking followed this: the faster and more effective idea of communicating using packets rather than circuits, and the aim to get the computers within the network to talk together. In late 1966 a DARPA conference saw network enthusiasts come together with similar development ideas that set computer networking into drive (namingly the 'plan for the ARPANET' paper). After development the overall structure and specifications for ARPANET were refined and in 1968, host computers were connected together in the initial ARPANET. From there the system blossomed as computers were added quickly during the following years, and protocols and software was made functional. In 1972 the ARPANET made its first public demonstration and since then has grown immensely into what is now know as the Internet.

I couldn't access reading two.

Week 3

Lecture;
The focus of this lecture was on Online Libraries and Online databases. Online Libraries include online journals, electronic books, artworks, musical and text repositories, whilst online databases involved E-mail directories, maps and atlases, news and media, government statistics, portals and people searches. While there are these subtle differences, Online libraries and databases are very similar: they are both an extremely useful and accessible source of information, they can be either available free or by subscription and they are both browsable, searchable, usually up to date, and available 24/7.

Readings;
In the first reading, Finding what you want on the web, Technology analyst Bill Thompson explains how he believes without Google, web searching would be very difficult. Thompson compares Google with other major web search engines like AllTheWeb, Teoma, MSN Search and Yahoo, and still finds Google is the most effective and efficient. Yahoo which is most likely the next down the line usually takes you to Google search results anyway.

The second reading, Bare Bones Lesson 7: basic search tips, basically goes through different strategies to make sure your search is as precise as possible. I found all of the tips very effective and am a frequent user of almost all of them. Although i was not aware that lower and upper case wording can affect your search too. So this reading became very useful for me.

Activities;
Global warming article;

10 useful search tips:

• Advanced search - When on ProQuest the search was set on basic but if you look at the tabs at the top of the page you can select 'Advanced' which is a different form of doing your search which will narrow your results.
• Library home - When on the ECU library home there are certain headings, you can find what you want under the red 'Find' heading. That's where i clicked the Journal Articles link.
• Journal Articles - Under the blue heading 'I want to find journal articles using library databases... ' you can narrow your search once more by clicking a databases search link. You do this depending on what information or key words you have to further your search.
• Data resources by subject - I clicked on the 'find by subject' which took me to this data resources page where i can now chose a relevant subject according to my search.
• Online databases for Environmental Managment - I chose Environmental Management on the page before because that was the most relevant to my topic. That took me to this online databases page where i can now chose a database with either full text or not full text to further my search
• Proquest science journals - the online database i chose for Environmental management took me to the ProQuest. ProQuest is a great database because it has many tabs at the top of the site that can also narrow your search once more. Like Advanced search, Basic search, Topics and Publications.
• Quick catalogue search - Quick catalogue search was on the ECU library home page and it was a window where i could type in any key search i desired and simply hit a 'go' button.
• Learning assistance - On the ECU library home page there is a yellow heading under the blue 'Find' heading where you can click on specific links that are like quick steps to other searches. for example i found the forth one down - Academic tips sheet very relevant and efficient.
• News update - On the ECU Library home page there is also a red heading which has 'News Update' which has more broad and specific links to further your searching.
• ECU library catalogue - can offer you great catalogues with a quick keyword search window and 'Go'.

Week 2

Lecture;
Today's lecture on Application skills was simply covering the common PC applications like; Filing, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Acrobat reader, Outlook and more. These are the more common PC tasks in the windows system, and i frequently use all of these so this was all very familiar to me. We did also go through some Browser statistics which did surprise me as i was unaware of the some of the applications in the list itself. Although as i thought, Internet Explorer was on the top of the list.

Readings;
The first reading, Using Microsoft Word for APA tasks, was clarifying the tasks from the Word doc activity. It covered how to do Headings and footers, typeface, line spacing, margins and alignment, alphabetizing, dot leaders for the contents and much more. The reading was highly significant in it's part to the completion of the activity.

The second reading, Graphic File formats briefly discussed the different types of file formats that an image can come in. Some include; Bitmap, CompuServ and JPEG. The differences between these file formats meant that images would range in size, quality and compatibility.

Tutorial;
I found this weeks tutorial activities with Microsoft Word and Excel in Vista very useful. Even though i have Vista on my home laptop i do not use Excel or Microsoft Word regularly so i wasn't aware of some of the new settings vista had applied to them. I new about the tabs and drop down menus and how they worked but only thoroughly on Internet Explorer, which is mainly all i use. Also some of the activities within Excel and Word that we had to perform were completely new to me, i was unaware that there were all these shortcuts to Word, like how to make the Contents dotting apply itself and the headings and numbering. I always used to do these manually. Also with Excel i was unaware of much more. Even when i had Windows XP i was not a frequent user of Excel so everything with the Excel activities was very new to me. I was really surprised with how little you physically have to do as i learnt that Excel does all the hard work for you, the mathematical details, numbering, headings, columns and more. I found Excel a very efficient and fast program.


Activities;

Week 1

Lecture;

In Lecture one on Accessing Knowledge, we mainly went through an outline of the course. We were given some of the basic requirements of the University Preparation Course and expectations of a student at university. We also went through the regulations and systems used in lectures and tute's.

Readings;

Computers as we know them, in a shop or factory are named by their brand, ie: Toshiba, Dell, Compaq, HP and many more. But actually the parts that put the computer together inside are made by many other factories and brands that are not known by the consumer. Along side the hardware aspects of computers, their are the important software components. Programming languages such as Java and C#, just two of the numerous languages in the computing industry, are examples of popular choices for a computer programs run time environment. For a user with no computer involved expertise, there is to be no difference between a TV screen and computer monitor and the only difference between TV and HDTV is the "high definition" part. Whatever that may mean...

An average computer user wouldn't even think that the very content of the screen they are looking at, such as the buttons, icons, windows, arrows, and scroll bars, is actually called something: the Graphic User Interface. From records to Cd's, VHS to DVD and TV to HDTV, technology and fields in computing are continually evolving. Probably the biggest name in technology and computing is Microsoft, who produces the world's most popular operating system and more. Along with their triumph has also some bumps, such as the Microsoft Antirust Case, a suit against the Department of Justice, and the issue between Microsoft and Java, which involvement between the two corporations where stopped due to legal controversy.


Activities;