Topic 8

Exercise 8.1
Morning Coastal day
I generally do exercise in the mornings, before busy commuters head to work and before I am awake enough to talk myself out of my nice warm bed. I am lucky I live in a beautiful coastal area so where ever I roam, the view of the beach, ocean, cliffs and expensive house are all around me. I live in a hilly area so when going up hill, I try to comfort myself with the thought of cruising down hill at the crest. As I walk through the windy neighbourhood streets, I greet some running friends and a couple walking their dog. They were heading down to the lagoon where dogs can be unleashed and free to run around and poo, yuk! Dog owners are supposed to cleanup after their dogs but its common to see the foot print of a previous unlucky walker in dog remains.
I make my way past the lagoon to see a dog barking at a pelican from behind a fence. The dog then jumped the fence and chased the pelican across the lagoon with the owner calling for him. The dog was very persistent and as the lagoon got deeper the dog began to swim after the pelican and bark at the same time. The owner jumped in the nearest canoe and paddled after his pet which was now 100m away. The pelicans were surprised when the swimming dog caught up with them and flew away as it barked again. By now the frantic owner was herding his pet to the shore. The dog seemed proud of its efforts and as it walked out the of the water, it shook it self dry, wetting the owner who swore and trotted back home.
Exercise 8.2
So many applications so little time!
In my computer experience, I have discovered that no one is an expert at all the applications out there, so I will need to be patient and content at understanding the ones that I encounter in my work place. I have also seen that people are happy to share information and ask for help in the use of these application so I shouldn’t feel too alone about learning IT .
As an educator using the computer new technologies, will this make me available 24hrs a day to my students?
My teaching hours are 8.30am to 3pm so when will I have time to answer forum questions and mark online submissions of assignments?At the moment, questions are answered in the class and most marking is done in the afternoons or weekends. I may need to set forum times and look into collaborative marking (Web 2.0 tools) involving the whole class to management time more effectively.
What marking guidelines will I use?
Class work and Assignments submitted using these new technologies will incorporate a variety of media, images, video and references. Clear instructions/templates for students on what to incorporate into work submitted to will avoid unnecessary and miss leading information. New more specific marking guidelines will need to be developed to help students stay focused on the task at hand.
Exercise 8.3
Data movement between Twitter and Facebook
Allows users to keep up to date with the latest movement/thoughts of friends
http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2007/Semantic_Web.asp
What is the Semantic Web?

Where Web 2.0 is focused on people and communicating by social interaction using simple applications, the Semantic Web is focused on machines. A computer alone can not find, search and aggregate information with out a human operator. The Semantic Web is a project that aims to change that by presenting Web page data in such a way that it is understood by computers, enabling machines to do the searching, aggregating and combining of the Web's information — without a human operator. This is done by RDF(Resource Description Framework) which turns a web page into meta data that computer can use. RDF details information such as a site's sitemap, the dates of when updates were made, keywords that search engines look for and the Web page's intellectual property rights.
Semantic Web technologies are used in research and life sciences where researchers collect data on different medicines and illnesses that have multiple names in different parts of the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(software)
FOAF (Friend of a friend) is similar to the Semantic Web in that it is focused on the machine to describe persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects using RDF and OWL (Web Ontology Language). Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.
Exercise 8.4
http://www.whatisrss.com/
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RSS.html
http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid26_gci498311,00.html
Syndication is the reuse of material such as new feeds across the web and aggregation is summarising online material for reuse.
Rss (Really Simple Syndication) allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in such as music charts, news feeds, discussion forums and events listings. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter.
RSS can be combined with Digg it. Social bookmarking of articles, images and videos re submitted to Digg it and to keep track of updated articles use the Swarm and Stack tools.
b) Delicious is effective for work groups to access their favourite sites on any computer. This is a convenient way to share sites because data can be transferred and accessed in any location. The user has to create a delicious account then the user tags sites of interest which is like copying the websites address and storing it at delicious. To access the website again on another computer, the user opens up their delicious account (similar to favourites on computers) and clicks on the site.

c) http://www.go2web20.net/about/
Is a directory of web2.0 applications in the one place which makes navigation through the web easier instead of searching for them individually. This site also ensures searches on working web2.0 sites only to avoid wasting time. Currently in my workplace of education, schools are exploring web2.0 application for classroom use to be prepared of the government issue laptops that will be distributed in NSW schools. The tools used so far are story bird for creating stories and masher which makes videos by combining music and photos. The end products can be shared privately or publically. Very good for group work.
d) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgg_(software)
Elgg is a free open source social networking platform. It offers blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing features. Everything can be shared among users with access controls and everything can be cataloged by tags as well. Edspaces is part of the Elgg community which is the largest social networking site for educational purposes, my workplace. All of the users content can be tagged to create their own personal learning network.