A summary "comma" to this blog

My Blog: http://en2848pauly.blogspot.com/

Sample post: http://en2848pauly.blogspot.com/2011/01/data-or-information-sorting-or-piling.html

Throughout this semester, the course "Language and Digital Media" gives me a lot of space to think twice about my using habits on Internet, and let me criticize myself about this. Through different blog spots on particular topics, I tried to analyze my digital life in different aspects, looking to the trends in the society.

For the sample post above, it is based on my personal experience on managing different digital DATA and information. It seems a very little topic, but I consider it as a fundamental concept on digital literacy. This topic helps me to have a deep reflection on my management, and clear my mistaken view on using files. The concept of DATA and INFORMATION is important for it will lower the working efficiency if messed up, and we will be exhausted on managing these DATA of building relations.

For this semester, it is good to let me have a motivation to use blogging tool again. Beforehand I had ceased using Facebook Note or Xanga weblog to write one or two words about myself. Thanks for this course, I can use a new angle to show what I have learnt, express my view on a specific topic and try to give a reflection. The most important is, I can interact with other classmates and have a good time discussing the topics.

Getting an academic weblog built can give a platform for people to express their ideas and think twice. Through this blog, I can spend some time to think more about myself, about the society, and about the world. Thank you for all our classmates and our nice professors for giving us a great lecture and a great help.

For this blog, I would like to mark a "comma" to label my learning stage. Yes, it does not come to an end. Maybe some day, I will have more new topics posting on this weblog.


Commented blogs:
http://joycema-ma.blogspot.com/2011/03/blog-post.html?showComment=1303191172787#c8300571366472866332
http://joycema-ma.blogspot.com/2011/02/using-txt-talk-is-kind-of.html#comments
http://en2848maggie.blogspot.com/2011/03/games.html#comments
http://julia0406.blogspot.com/2011/02/session-4-more-than-words.html#comments
http://en2848joanna.blogspot.com/2011/02/good-bad-and-ugly.html#comments
http://en2848kay.blogspot.com/2011/03/who-are-they.html#comment-form

Digital Media at workplace? Experience in a tutorial school

It is a storyboard locating in a big tutoring education group I am working, let's inspire how it communicates.

A tutorial school has 16 centres and over 150 class assistants. Every assistant has their preferences of serving centres in particular dates, locations and times. Managers collect their schedule every month, and allocate their weekly serving schedules every Thursday.

For the latest events, updated schedules, released guidelines, the managers communicated to the assistants by e-mail. In some days, they may send text messages to mobile phones as a reminder.

It sounds convenient for the communication between the employees and managers. How about inter-communication between employees? On the contrary, the group doesn't encourage much communication through phones or internets. Most of the time, they should stay in their place on duty, or asking for help by face to face and verbal communication. Managers reminds the employees not to use any mechanical products in the classrooms, as a protection of the privacy of the class materials; and told the employees to avoid the students using them in class.

For instance, the managers have somehow classical view on communications. For distant communication like managers and class assistants, they encourage much on digital media; for the employees, they preferred to use face to face communication, and communicate unless problems aroused.

Our names are CyBones, Cyber Lazybones

Technology Era is coming. After the industrial revolution, we relied more on machines, technologies and even computers. We are all addicts on text messages, smartphones, social networks etc. Technologies are sometimes as an extension of our certain abilities, i.e. new affordances, but it can let us lost the primary abilities too. For the origin of technology, we invent to alter a better life, bringing an improvement of human being. For the past few years, it seems that we are being reversely controlled by technologies.

For any new items, we can justify if it can change our life, resolving the existing problems. For example, mobile phones allow us to communicate with others almost instantly, instead of a delayed communication of letters or telegraphs. Computers helped us to do more tasks that may be time consuming in paper based history. These technologies actually do the good for us.

However, when this technology developed to be too powerful, that it has been beyond our need in actual life, it will become a tool that discharging our lazy mind, because of the deep reliance on a particular item. Yet we use mobile phones everyday for communication. But what do we use phones for? Text messages, cameras, music players, web browsers etc. Those functions has come beyond our origin of verbal communicating with others. Phones are no longer our tools for contact, but a tool for recreation. We have an extension of our speech through phones, but it gradually restrainted our ability for face-to-face communication.

No doubt computer helped us to do much "Mission Impossible" tasks, and also the possibles. But our abiltiy of writing had been handicapped by using too much keyboards. We now do not consider computer as a tool, but more relying on it as part of our body. Are we controlling computer commands, or the technology giving commands to us?

Science fictions always indicated human being overtaken by machines, because of the reliance. But I believe that our mind are superior than the mindless machines. We should rethink our role in this technology age, and know how to handle computers as our assistants, but not our "Masters"

Everyone Facebook Addicted

I joined Facebook in late 2007, for over two years. Till now I always spend over two hours each day on Facebook. Although I haven't got smartphones to keep on status, I refreshed time to time on my computer, just for updates in the homepage.

In my first year using Facebook, what I know about it is only "add friends", "write posts" or "posting photos", just like what I do in MSN or blogging. Gradually I found my old friends and even primary classmates in Facebook, and I began addicted in this social network site. I played different games like online quiz, happy farm or psychology tests; I tagged photos and leave comments among my friends; I join my friends' event or organising gathering through facebook etc.

Some people may have a lot of friends, that may have a number of FB accounts because others are full. One of my company's star tutor claimed he has 4 accounts of full 5000 friends i.e. 20000 friends. Some of my classmates began to ask me "Why only 234 friends, you have not expose enough."

I haven't got a analysis on my friends list, till I met Friend Wheel apps. Kindly it helps me to group my friends and form a simple graph of the connections.

For the upper half are my friends in the same secondary school, and the lower one are ones of meeting in this four years of university life.

For honest, this is an alarm to me. I don't add friends that I don't know. The wheel reveals my life encircled by WahYanites (secondary life) and CityU buddies. Both of them are strong bonding groups and having a limitation to my future life. For the lower half, it is not stronger than the upper one; but I can find it become strengthening and the area will be totally filled with colours if no other action is taken.








My classmates are somehow right. My approach to meet FB friends have a room of improvement. Maybe I can create more weak ties to different groups, in addition to just two large strong groups. The first priority to this approach is the action in reality. Let's ACT NOW!!!!

A Fast Era, An Abbreviated World

Some of you may learned Pitman's shorthand

before, and know what the symbols above mean.

However we are not studying cryptography, and I cannot find much relation about abbreviated language.

Starting from the invention of telegraphy in 1830s, telecommunication boomed. Much information is received by each telegrapher in a single day, and the information tend to focus on instant and accuracy. Speedwriting in abbreviated alphabets could help them manage bundle of information and increase the speed.
Perhaps, the abbreviated language is a cradle of the future SMS or netspeak language style.

For the new era of 21st century, we can get information everywhere, free of charge.
For most platforms that receive information in almost synchronicly, people tend to send more, and send fast.
SMS and IM language relates to this objective, based on the quickness of abbreviation, and the laziness of people typing full forms.

Education sectors and parents may worry about the effect of abbreviated language, of ruining the proficiency of students. For english, we always see acronyms of different phrases like btw, tmr, ttyl, cu; for chinese we notice lot of homophonic characters, like lor, ar, gum, just like martian language. Although Rodney Jones' study noted that there are no direct relation between proficiency and netspeak usage, I find some negative faces in other nation.

In Japan, most of their language are composed by Chinese characters

"kanji" or Japanese syllabic characters "Hiragana" and "Katakana". As Chinese characters have a lot of writing strokes, for long decades some of them will use more hiragana to communicate with others, i.e. memorizing the sound only. However, there are lot of rhyme words in Japanese vocabulary, it may risk a confusion of using entirely syllabic characters. And recently, a news reported a large proportion of students didn't know how to write the related Chinese characters, knowing only the pronunciation and the hiragana style of a particular word.

For the study of effect of netspeaking to the language proficiency, I think the previous studies may not be accurate for the early stage of computer popularity and the netspeaking age. It still needs a washing of time, about 20 years to investigate the long term result of this information era.

Data or Information? Sorting or piling?

Just have my room tidied up and cleared out a great pile of cassette tapes. In my age studying interpretation, I wondered to study translation and interpretation again in future time, so I kept all of them. But finally such piles of "data" are still disposed.

Yes, they're only "DATA". Almost all of them are not sorted properly, just a mixture of my work; and the relationship between my memory and the content in the tapes have been disappeared. They, are no longer "INFORMATION" I need, nor I can apply them to my study and work now.

For the past 5 years I always get the definition of DATA and INFORMATION messed up. My "Mount of Information" grows up in these just 3 years. For the young time, all the data I received is retrieved by myself. For example, recording live radio programme and having them edited.

As seen in this list of MP3 files, I have piles of raw MP3 (named by date and time) that are not edited yet; and another pile of edited MP3, recording some of my favourite radio programme (named by station, programme name and date). But when will the raw MP3 data be edited, and given an identity or relationship to the sound clip? I don't know. I have no time.

 

Yeah. Rodney has the same action with me, just don't know how to sort out the information and data. Me too. I used to put different kinds of files on a single area like the Desktop. See? Plain text notes, powerpoint, word files, also zipped files, all are located on the Desktop.

But how when your files get piles? Simple, just transfer to My Documents / _ \. When I backup the data, I always do one time of sorting first, for burning into DVDs (so out-of-date physical product isn't it?) For the ones cannot be sorted, they are put in a folder call "Floated DATA".

 

Tagging can be a good idea for sorting, just ease more effort for searching. I like to search everything: DATA, INFORMATION, etc. But the intelligence of some search sites needs improvement. For searching some video clips in Youtube, I always get a great pile of irrelevent results. For instance, I can only try to search by sorting in upload dates. Some engines are actually awesome, like Wikipedia and google, I just type one word and they just like a worm in my body, show me what I want. GOOGLE ROCKS!!!!!

 

Yeah it is true for a good sorting system and tagging technique,

it can help for searching in the ocean of information.

I previously sort my music files in different folders.

But I found it is meaningless. For the less amount of files,

after sorting, I got only 2 to 3 files in each folder.

It sucks my time that I need more time to open more folders to access.

Although the "Information Mount" growed up rapidly, I still need not a big hand. But actually I have to manage a new way to organise my "DATA" to necessary "INFORMATION". The traditional sorting function in Windows can help, but not long.

However, KNOWLEDGE can be no longer be applied, and the INFORMATION themselves can also no longer having relations. Then where should the DATA go? Well, just burn into DVDs, and LET IT OUT~~




How do you organise your data / information?

My Digital Life

Hi this is Pauly.

Since my home introduced a computer at 1998, I entered the new era in the after decade.
Over this decade, the digital world boomed much faster than I expected.
However, my digital footprint always slower than people running after the new.

When the IT fever was splashed over in 1999, I started to use internet before the end of 20th Century.

When the city entered to the broadband transferring, I was still using 56Kbps modem till 2005.

When people taking millions of photos using DCs, I was still using a second-hand camera.
When people going mad with iPhone and iPad, I still using Nokia 5130 for low quality photo and MP3

Not running after the new, but I get addict to the internet, looping in different platforms like MSN, Facebook, Twitter. Each day I spend about four to five hours in internet, surfing aroung various forums, chatrooms, weblogs. Although the number of websites is not so much, I surf them in a cycle, this forum, that chatroom, those blog, forum again, blog again, chatroom......and looping around.

As the generation X a lot of information booming around us, and the world tends to multi-modal. You can get news animation from Apple Action News, visiting latest music video from Youtube, replaying yesterday's drama from Tudou etc......

Although I am not going so deep in this digital world, the change in the reality actually raised different questions about the relationship between human and technology, also for the identity.

Throughout this course "Language in digital media", I can understand myself again, from surviving in this digital era to the new literacy of learning online discourse.

Looking forward to the future topics!!