YouTube lessons for life:

When I first went to web media the first thing I noticed was a difference in teaching style to what we are usually served here at Wintec. Stephen seemed to know his stuff and with all the crazy new stuff we had to learn he used videos to help us get the hang of it. It’s amazing what a useful teaching tool YouTube can become. When he wanted to point out the usefulness of things such as bookmarking and how to use the GoldWave program he showed us simple instructional “videos in plain English” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU). And they’re all free! There’s heaps of them too, for just about every internet tool you can imagine. So, as long as you can use YouTube (I’m sure there’s instructions for that), your set! So when Stephens zippy explanations haven’t quite stuck, go to YouTube for a refresher. This has opened up a whole new can of worms really. What other things can YouTube teach us? Is there free instructional videos that could help with all our classes. I know we all use a video or two to plump up those pesky presentations. So I did some research into the matter. I looked up some videos that could help me in a few areas, how to make a decent PowerPoint presentation for starters. To be honest, it was quite difficult to separate the silly stuff and deluded ‘experts’ from the rest. But after a bit of tough, journalistic research I managed to find a few useful things such as “How NOT to use PowerPoint” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cagxPlVqrtM&feature=related). I also found some really bad ones that were basically impossible to sit through (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2R0TFLXhQE if you dare!). In conclusion, YouTube’s worth having a look at for lessons, just so long as you have more willpower than I and don’t get distracted by videos totally unrelated to this topic. Ahem. Back to my first point though - Tutors, do not make your lesson entirely out of YouTube videos. Make sure give us something the internet can’t…whatever that may be.

Moodle = Good Idea

So far this term I have found the Web Media class to be very overwhelming. It feels as though I have had several years of learning crammed into my head at once. For someone who’s hopeless with computers as me you will be thankful for Moodle. As I dazedly leave class thinking what the?! I rest assured that although I have no idea what just happened in the past four hours I can go and use trusty Moodle later on to sort out what the heck I’m meant to be doing. For those of us who miss the first hour of class more often than not (whose bright idea was it to start our classes at 8am when we have grown accustomed to 9am starts for the past year and a half!) this is especially useful. Moodle is not just great for classes but I also get handy tips on how to avoid getting clamped (again) and how to get a computer at lunchtimes. But the best thing of all is that I can access it from any computer. And you know how we get many bits of paper at the start of term telling us exactly when and where all our assignments are due? Yeah that's not very useful when it’s in a scrumpled heap somewhere by the end of the week. Well never fear, if you’ve got a good tutor all this info will be easily accessible from Moodle. Plus we’re saving trees. Well guys, stay on top of your game and use Moodle.

E-zine Extravaganza!

E-Zine

What is a hobby? This was the dilemma the class stumbled upon when trying to think of a theme for our e-zine. Some argued it was anything that interested you and occupied your leisure time. Others said it was a craft where you worked towards a goal (preferably in a shed?). Web definitions varied and it was all just too broad to use for our e-zine. We needed to narrow the search down. Hamilton has a bad rep for being a “hole”. I want our e-zine to try and change this perception. Is our general aim to try and make life more exciting for us Hamiltonians, by providing, encouraging or inspiring ourselves to do fun, out-there things? Well that was my hopes anyway. Will knitting achieve these goals? I think not. Should we be restricted to hobbies that only take place in sheds? Does the Hamilton public really want to hear about hobbies that don’t revolve around sports or arts? Maybe Hamilton just isn’t ready for the exciting times we have in store for them!!! We had a looksey at existing sites of this nature that focus on Hamilton and there was nothing too exciting. There is definitely a niche we just need to sort our audience and angle. The main issue we’ve been having is that the Hamilton audience is so diverse. Where do we restrict our hobbies to? Do we need to reduce our audience to Hamilton youth/students/teenagers/old folk? Should it just be Hamilton city, the Waikato, North Island or the whole of New Zealand that can access these hobbies? We’ve been through many class debates trying to sort out the answers to these questions. Many of us have had our precious ideas brutally trampled on as part of the refining process for the greater good. What also needed to be defined was what information exactly we would be providing on these hobbies. Would we do how-to guides, reviews, profiles, road tests? Hopefully it will turn out to be a mixture. Sounds like a lot when you remember we only have a few more weeks to do it all! Add to that the pressure of trying to make it timeless so our e-zine won’t date with months. Arrrgh! Thank goodness it will be a team effort as I would have been totally overwhelmed long ago!

Facebook Vs. Bebo

Word on the street lately is that the main difference between Bebo and Facebook is that Bebo is for tacky kids and Facebook is for sophisticated grown-ups. Hmm, I use Bebo. So I’ve since decided to get amongst it and create a Facebook. Does it live up to the hype? Well that’s what I intend to find out. The first bump in the road is that I am having trouble getting onto Facebook at Wintec (even though I should be allowed onto it) so I’ve had to source it via alternative methods. Setting up my Facebook account was rather difficult, although admittedly I am very computer illiterate. When using Facebook I felt as if my every move was being blocked. You had to put in verification codes at every turn, even when simply trying to add a friend. In fact, as a whole, Facebook seemed a lot more security conscious than its other counterparts. You can only view profiles once you are friends, so you have to figure out who somebody is by their name, picture and their friends. If you are concerned about stalkers, then Facebook is the site for you. It’s also very good if you want to find friends quickly and easily. Just type in their full name and a decent list appears for you. So everyone who has 13,201 Bebo friends and 2,369,896 page views, this probably isn’t the site for you. Now I know many Bebo pages look tacky and are so bright and flashy that they cause seizures, I still think its cool that you can customise you page however you like. In an attempt to be classy and sophisticated Facebook has pared back the colour and customisation, but as a result it looks bland and boring. I have come to the conclusion that what Facebook is really trying to avoid is becoming yet another popularity contest social networking site. Facebook is likely to have sat back and watched the demise of sites like Myspace and vowed never to become like that. I think their simple, realistic approach is aimed to be useful and long-lasting. So after road-testing both sites I have decided that if you want to paste up thousands of party pic's, meet lots of ‘new friends’, get comments like “cxc” and “hott” and talk to complete randoms, be able to stalk everyone and in turn have them stalk you, then stick to your Bebo. If you want to stay in touch with overseas friends, catch up with old school mates and still keep your life private from prying eyes, then give Facebook a whirl.

Private? Not so much...

The more I learn in our Web Media class, the more apprehensive I become about using my Bebo page. It’s amazing what personal information can be made public via the internet. It seems that every tool we learn to use in class, while being useful to our studies, has the flipside of being a stalkers dream. We learn how to have the comments a person has left somewhere fed directly to our computer along with photos, news and topics. Obviously there are systems in place to try and protect this information being accessed by any old one but it’s amazing how many out there don’t seem to care how and what they are letting float freely about the world wide web. Especially on Flickr, with the amount of amazing photos that people are letting randoms have full access to. If they’re not careful they could end up with their snaps on a billboard, no credit due to them. 15-year old Alison Chang from Dallas found this out the hard way when she appeared in Adelaide on a Virgin mobile billboard, innocently posing for a photo from a church carwash. Her youth Pastor, Justin Wong, had uploaded the photo to Flickr with a Creative Commons licensed. This mean’t the photo could be used by anyone as long as he was credited. Virgin had done this with Wong’s Flickr address at the bottom of the ad, so was in no way breaching copyright. Easy, huh?