The semester is almost done, which is a great relief! I've finished my classes, and now have only assignments to do. One I handed in on Tuesday, and now there is just one left, due on Monday. All that's left for that one is a bit of editing. It's been a tough semester, a pretty boring one, so I'm glad to be nearly done!
I'm sick of talking about what I've been studying, so instead I'm going to talk about podcasts. I love podcasts! I listen to them quite a bit. It all started with Serial, which I think happened to a lot of people. From there, I found a whole lot of podcasts to subscribe to. I listen to a couple of history podcasts, Hardcore History and Emperors of Rome. This American Life is also terrific. But I've chosen a couple of podcasts and episodes that have relevance to what I'm studying to highlight here.
Note to Self is a podcast about technology and "finding balance in the digital age." One episode that I found really interesting was on Turnitin, which is the software used to find plagiarism in student's work. They use it at RMIT, and it's pretty amazing technology. Here's the direct link to that episode: judging your originality in a cut and paste world
Another podcast that I listen to a lot is Radiolab. It's a show about science and technology, and sounds incredibly boring, but it isn't, it's really good. I picked one episode that has more relevance to digital stuff; called darkode, it's about hackers holding your computer for ransom and also about the website, part of the dark web, where hackers can share information and code.
Reply All is all about the internet, and has a funny segment called "yes yes no", where the hosts explain to the producer of the show what some meme or topical internet thing means. I've been finding that I understand a lot more of what they talk about now, which is kind of amazing.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Thursday, 22 October 2015
Monday, 5 October 2015
Droning On
I can't even tell you how sick I'm getting of talking about drones, studying drones, reading about drones. Everyone around me is fairly over it too, I think. Currently I'm trying to figure out the justification behind the drone Makerspace, but I'm struggling to find authoritative pieces. Everyone says that they're good for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) learning, but where's the evidence? It's annoying. I think it's because Makerspaces are a fairly new concept, and personal drones are a new technology, that there hasn't been any definite research on the project.
After I've finished that section, I then have to develop the stakeholder matrix, which is basically describing the users and businesses and community groups and government organisations that have an interest in the project, and then deciding how often they'll be updated on the progress of the Makerspace. That part of it isn't very difficult, it's really just forcing myself to do it. However, I have decided that I really, really don't want to be a Project Manager after the work we've done this semester.
Anyway, here's another drone video, this time an eagle vs. a drone:
After I've finished that section, I then have to develop the stakeholder matrix, which is basically describing the users and businesses and community groups and government organisations that have an interest in the project, and then deciding how often they'll be updated on the progress of the Makerspace. That part of it isn't very difficult, it's really just forcing myself to do it. However, I have decided that I really, really don't want to be a Project Manager after the work we've done this semester.
Anyway, here's another drone video, this time an eagle vs. a drone:
Thursday, 20 August 2015
Drone Attack!
The name of the project that we're working on in class is never going to be Drone Attack! unfortunately, even though that was one of the first names that I came up with and can now not get it out of my head. We're going to call it something much more dull, like DroneSpace or Drone 101. There was a suggestion of Drone for Drones, owing to the target audience who are early school leavers and unemployed youths.
The project is coming along fairly well, we've been defining the project a bit more in depth now, and have a fairly clear idea of what we would like the project to be. It will be twice a week, for two hours per session, a drop in area where people can come in and learn how to build drones. It will be a three-week cycle, meaning that it will probably take about three weeks to build the drone, learn all of the safety and privacy information, do the programming, and then flying. However, due to the target audience of the project, we aren't having specific sessions and classes, and an attitude that attendance is mandatory. Early school leavers will not be interested in going to a library and be lectured at, and they probably won't turn up all the time either. There will be an instructor in the room at all times, but users will be able to work at their own pace. The idea of a MakerSpace is to encourage people to work creatively and imaginatively with technology that they may not have used before, and so we have decided that it isn't necessary to have too much structure in the sessions.
After we have finalised the project itself, we then have to work out the budget. I have volunteered to do this (with someone else, of course, because I'm not great at maths and I need a supervisor), really as a way to get out of having to do the class presentation. It was that or the marketing side of things, which I have no idea about at all. So I'm going to have to start pricing things, beginning with drones and staffing costs, because they're going to be the major expenditures.
Anyway, here's a real drone attack:
Hilarious! I think that we should put that in our marketing campaign.
The project is coming along fairly well, we've been defining the project a bit more in depth now, and have a fairly clear idea of what we would like the project to be. It will be twice a week, for two hours per session, a drop in area where people can come in and learn how to build drones. It will be a three-week cycle, meaning that it will probably take about three weeks to build the drone, learn all of the safety and privacy information, do the programming, and then flying. However, due to the target audience of the project, we aren't having specific sessions and classes, and an attitude that attendance is mandatory. Early school leavers will not be interested in going to a library and be lectured at, and they probably won't turn up all the time either. There will be an instructor in the room at all times, but users will be able to work at their own pace. The idea of a MakerSpace is to encourage people to work creatively and imaginatively with technology that they may not have used before, and so we have decided that it isn't necessary to have too much structure in the sessions.
After we have finalised the project itself, we then have to work out the budget. I have volunteered to do this (with someone else, of course, because I'm not great at maths and I need a supervisor), really as a way to get out of having to do the class presentation. It was that or the marketing side of things, which I have no idea about at all. So I'm going to have to start pricing things, beginning with drones and staffing costs, because they're going to be the major expenditures.
Anyway, here's a real drone attack:
Hilarious! I think that we should put that in our marketing campaign.
Thursday, 6 August 2015
Semester Two
So the new semester has begun, and I'm doing two subjects (although at RMIT they're called "courses" - it's all very confusing), Information Project Management and Digital Curation. Digital Curation is fairly straightforward; it's looking at how digital information can be stored, how it should be maintained, and we're also looking at issues such as obsolescence. Hopefully it's going to be quite interesting.
My other subject, Information Project Management, is going to be a bit more complicated. We have a semester-long assignment, where we have to design a MakerSpace for the council area of Brimbank in Melbourne, and then write a tender to apply for grant money, costing the whole scheme as we go. It's going to be a lot of stuff that I'm not used to, especially they costing part of it (I've always been fairly terrible at Maths).
A MakerSpace is a community area, often in a library but it can be anywhere else, that is targeted towards the idea of 'making' things, often using equipment that is too expensive for personal ownership. The MakerSpace can be used for various things, like electronics, craft, technology. The aim of the MakerSpace is to encourage learning and creativity, and it can have other advantages, like community assimilation and skill development. It's quite a trendy idea at the moment.
Our groups current idea is to have a drone building MakerSpace, targeted to teenage and just out of school age youth type people. Apparently there are kits that you can buy so that you can build your own, and so the plan is to have group work, making simple drones that you can fly around. Originally our ideas were very wispy, like a craft workshop, or a cooking centre, but with this plan, we can make a quite specific response to the assignment.
Some links to MakerSpaces information:
My other subject, Information Project Management, is going to be a bit more complicated. We have a semester-long assignment, where we have to design a MakerSpace for the council area of Brimbank in Melbourne, and then write a tender to apply for grant money, costing the whole scheme as we go. It's going to be a lot of stuff that I'm not used to, especially they costing part of it (I've always been fairly terrible at Maths).
A MakerSpace is a community area, often in a library but it can be anywhere else, that is targeted towards the idea of 'making' things, often using equipment that is too expensive for personal ownership. The MakerSpace can be used for various things, like electronics, craft, technology. The aim of the MakerSpace is to encourage learning and creativity, and it can have other advantages, like community assimilation and skill development. It's quite a trendy idea at the moment.
Our groups current idea is to have a drone building MakerSpace, targeted to teenage and just out of school age youth type people. Apparently there are kits that you can buy so that you can build your own, and so the plan is to have group work, making simple drones that you can fly around. Originally our ideas were very wispy, like a craft workshop, or a cooking centre, but with this plan, we can make a quite specific response to the assignment.
Some links to MakerSpaces information:
Thursday, 7 May 2015
Maria's Sweet Treats
In class for the last couple of weeks, we have been putting what we have learnt about HTML into practice, to create our own websites. We had to make our own website, for a company called Maria's Sweet Treats, a cake store that supplies mini desserts for parties and other events. It was interesting, but very hard to do. HTML is very rule-oriented, and very fiddly, and if you don't close one of your brackets, you're totally screwed. It's very time consuming and detailed.
Huan got us to download Kompozer, which is a free application that helps you write your own code. While it was great when we were making tables and headers, when I started trying to do more complicated coding, often it would not recognise it or just disappear the code that I'd typed in. I attempted to use background images within a table with text over the top (impressive, I know), but Kompozer would not let me resize the background images to fill the cells. I tried and I tried, and sweated over it for a couple of days, until I just had to let it go and move on with my life. I think that if I was going to do coding on a regular basis, I would probably purchase a more sophisticated application, like UltraEdit or Sublime Text. They're not terribly expensive, Sublime Text is $70, but I don't really need it.
Anyway, here is my website: Maria's Sweet Treats. Check out that sweet fixed position navigation bar! That one took me ages. Hopefully it's all working: when I first loaded it onto the server I realised that I'd saved my images onto my computer and then used a link for the image from there, but I needed to use the image link instead. So I fixed it, loaded it again, took another look. Then I needed to fix a link. So I fixed it, loaded it, looked again. Designing a website is incredibly time consuming and really detailed. One of the customers at the cafe that I work at was telling me that he's recently hired a company to build him a website, and it's going to cost him over four thousand dollars. Originally I thought that this amount was ridiculous! However, after going through the stress of trying to get this website to work, I've changed my mind, and decided that they totally deserve that money.
Update: I don't know why the home button on the home page isn't working. It works just fine on my mobile's browser. I suppose it's kind of redundant anyway, it only refreshes the page, but it's annoying that it doesn't work. I think I'm just going to have to accept that it doesn't work, and leave it alone, and move on to other homework. Like figuring out how the cloud works.
Huan got us to download Kompozer, which is a free application that helps you write your own code. While it was great when we were making tables and headers, when I started trying to do more complicated coding, often it would not recognise it or just disappear the code that I'd typed in. I attempted to use background images within a table with text over the top (impressive, I know), but Kompozer would not let me resize the background images to fill the cells. I tried and I tried, and sweated over it for a couple of days, until I just had to let it go and move on with my life. I think that if I was going to do coding on a regular basis, I would probably purchase a more sophisticated application, like UltraEdit or Sublime Text. They're not terribly expensive, Sublime Text is $70, but I don't really need it.
Anyway, here is my website: Maria's Sweet Treats. Check out that sweet fixed position navigation bar! That one took me ages. Hopefully it's all working: when I first loaded it onto the server I realised that I'd saved my images onto my computer and then used a link for the image from there, but I needed to use the image link instead. So I fixed it, loaded it again, took another look. Then I needed to fix a link. So I fixed it, loaded it, looked again. Designing a website is incredibly time consuming and really detailed. One of the customers at the cafe that I work at was telling me that he's recently hired a company to build him a website, and it's going to cost him over four thousand dollars. Originally I thought that this amount was ridiculous! However, after going through the stress of trying to get this website to work, I've changed my mind, and decided that they totally deserve that money.
Update: I don't know why the home button on the home page isn't working. It works just fine on my mobile's browser. I suppose it's kind of redundant anyway, it only refreshes the page, but it's annoying that it doesn't work. I think I'm just going to have to accept that it doesn't work, and leave it alone, and move on to other homework. Like figuring out how the cloud works.
Saturday, 11 April 2015
Bookmarking Sites
After playing around with Delicious for a couple of days, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a big fan. I find the site itself quite unattractive, and the constant ads very annoying. The name itself is a bit of a turn-off as well! I found a list, by social media examiner, which has good examples of how to use Delicious to its best capabilities. Number three, company sharing, seems to be a great way to use Delicious, but at the moment it's not something that I need because I'm not working in a company that needs to do that. I do like being able to see other people's lists, however. Here's a good one that belongs to a librarian at RMIT: https://delicious.com/infomanlibrarian. There are lots of interesting websites bookmarked here.
There are lots of other bookmarking sites around, I like the google one for it's simplicity, and diigo seems very good as well. There's a video that diigo made to show how it can be used, I've embedded it here:
I like the highlighting and sticky note features of this site, I think that it would be very helpful for study.
A problem that has come up lately for me has been the sheer amount of passwords I've had to create for all of these sites that I'm joining. I might have to get a password manager just to keep track of them all! And what should my passwords be? At the moment, I'm making them randomly, choosing numbers and letters in no particular order, but is there a better way? John Oliver had an interview with Edward Snowden about passwords: margaretthatcheris100%sexy is a great one!
There are lots of other bookmarking sites around, I like the google one for it's simplicity, and diigo seems very good as well. There's a video that diigo made to show how it can be used, I've embedded it here:
I like the highlighting and sticky note features of this site, I think that it would be very helpful for study.
A problem that has come up lately for me has been the sheer amount of passwords I've had to create for all of these sites that I'm joining. I might have to get a password manager just to keep track of them all! And what should my passwords be? At the moment, I'm making them randomly, choosing numbers and letters in no particular order, but is there a better way? John Oliver had an interview with Edward Snowden about passwords: margaretthatcheris100%sexy is a great one!
Monday, 30 March 2015
Now that I've been using Twitter for a couple of weeks, I'm ready to concede that it does have some good points. I follow ABC news, and I've found that it's a good source for news and other information. I don't have a television, or really listen to the radio, so unless I read a newspaper or go online I can often miss important things. So that's one good thing.
I'm also following Marshall Breeding, who's a bit of a big-time guy in the world of Digital Information Management. I actually discovered him for Information Discovery, but some of the articles that he posts onto his Twitter account are quite relevant to this course. He also has a website which is full of interesting information. Judy O'Connell, who I've mentioned on here before, is also on Twitter, and she posts some good links for Information Management.
My favourite Twitter account, however, is louis as art. I'm not at all a One Direction fan, and I'm not even sure if it's pronounced the French way or not, but some industrial person has taken the time to find artworks that are evocative of photographs of Louis from One Direction. And some of them are brilliant. Here's a few examples:
I also just taught myself how to embed tweets! Took me a little while, but after last weeks class in HTML, I didn't panic, I followed the instructions, and did it myself! It really is amazing what I'm learning here.
I'm also following Marshall Breeding, who's a bit of a big-time guy in the world of Digital Information Management. I actually discovered him for Information Discovery, but some of the articles that he posts onto his Twitter account are quite relevant to this course. He also has a website which is full of interesting information. Judy O'Connell, who I've mentioned on here before, is also on Twitter, and she posts some good links for Information Management.
My favourite Twitter account, however, is louis as art. I'm not at all a One Direction fan, and I'm not even sure if it's pronounced the French way or not, but some industrial person has taken the time to find artworks that are evocative of photographs of Louis from One Direction. And some of them are brilliant. Here's a few examples:
sunrise // chris hobel pic.twitter.com/g4Kjv4AMBB
— louis as art (@artlikelouis) March 19, 2015
(one more first day of spring post)
abstract knives // unknown pic.twitter.com/ZkjFlugYKL
— louis as art (@artlikelouis) March 20, 2015
pink shadows // ellen ys - #KCA #Vote1DUК pic.twitter.com/0qxaCAwTnu
— louis as art (@artlikelouis) March 28, 2015
I also just taught myself how to embed tweets! Took me a little while, but after last weeks class in HTML, I didn't panic, I followed the instructions, and did it myself! It really is amazing what I'm learning here.
Tuesday, 24 March 2015
HTML and my poor confused brain
This week was an introduction to HTML, and I've found it to be quite difficult so far. I think my computer has been the problem, it just refused to recognise the link that I attached to the page.
Here's a screenshot of my (Mac) TextEdit attempt:
And this is my (Windows) Notepad version:
Exactly the same text, exactly the same link, exactly the same! However, when I tried to open the link from TextEdit, my computer would tell me that the URL could not be found. Multiple attempts later, there was no change. So I copied and pasted a link that Huan gave me, and that worked, but there was no reason for it to. I still wanted to be able to do it myself, so I used myDesktop, opened a Windows application, and went through the process again, with the right result this time. There has to be something wrong with TextEdit, because I didn't do anything differently, just used a different application. So from now on I'll be using Windows for any HTMLing that I do in class.
Other than this frustration, I think I'll be okay at HTML. It seems to be reasonably straightforward, and has a lot of rules, so as long as I follow them I should be okay. I can always give myself a break and edit a Trove page when I get too annoyed with it.
Here's a screenshot of my (Mac) TextEdit attempt:
And this is my (Windows) Notepad version:
Exactly the same text, exactly the same link, exactly the same! However, when I tried to open the link from TextEdit, my computer would tell me that the URL could not be found. Multiple attempts later, there was no change. So I copied and pasted a link that Huan gave me, and that worked, but there was no reason for it to. I still wanted to be able to do it myself, so I used myDesktop, opened a Windows application, and went through the process again, with the right result this time. There has to be something wrong with TextEdit, because I didn't do anything differently, just used a different application. So from now on I'll be using Windows for any HTMLing that I do in class.
Other than this frustration, I think I'll be okay at HTML. It seems to be reasonably straightforward, and has a lot of rules, so as long as I follow them I should be okay. I can always give myself a break and edit a Trove page when I get too annoyed with it.
Thursday, 12 March 2015
Week Two
The collective horror over the invasiveness of Twitter was an interesting thing to behold this week. It does appear that Big Brother is watching us, and is using our own blithe disregard of privacy to do it. After reading up on it a bit, the issues are worse than I had realised. Cookies I knew about, and didn't much like, but I didn't realise that applications on your phones (Siri for example) can listen to your conversations, gmail can read your emails, and cars can tell insurance companies about your driving habits. It's frightening, really. Mother Jones has an interesting article about it, read it here
Thursday, 5 March 2015
So welcome to my blog! This is a first for me, so it's probably going to change quite a bit as I get better at using eblogger.
About me - my name is Nerida, I'm in first semester of MIM, and I currently work as a barista in a cafe. It's a good place to work, and I do enjoy it, but it doesn't tax my brain. I'm ready to do something different, and I think that I would enjoy library work. Something that doesn't cover my clothes and shoes in coffee would be good as well.
My dad is a librarian, currently working as the head librarian at Divine Word University in Papua New Guinea. When I was growing up though, he was the chief medical librarian at Bendigo Base Hospital. So on my days off from school, or when I managed to persuade him that I was way too sick to go to school (I was a terrible liar, and did this a lot), I would go with him to his work, and spend my day shelving books, wandering around, and looking at disgusting diseases in medical books. So for me, libraries are fun places!
I'm not very technologically able when it comes to the internet; I can do very basic things, but I'm hoping to learn more, and to become more skilled than I am. I really skim the surface of Web 2.0, so I think that some of what I'm hoping to achieve through this course is the ability to use the internet more adeptly, and to develop my skill set when it comes to social media and interaction. Understanding how html works is also going to be interesting, I'm quite looking forward to the course, but at the same time I'm a bit nervous because I obviously have a lot to learn.
About me - my name is Nerida, I'm in first semester of MIM, and I currently work as a barista in a cafe. It's a good place to work, and I do enjoy it, but it doesn't tax my brain. I'm ready to do something different, and I think that I would enjoy library work. Something that doesn't cover my clothes and shoes in coffee would be good as well.
My dad is a librarian, currently working as the head librarian at Divine Word University in Papua New Guinea. When I was growing up though, he was the chief medical librarian at Bendigo Base Hospital. So on my days off from school, or when I managed to persuade him that I was way too sick to go to school (I was a terrible liar, and did this a lot), I would go with him to his work, and spend my day shelving books, wandering around, and looking at disgusting diseases in medical books. So for me, libraries are fun places!
I'm not very technologically able when it comes to the internet; I can do very basic things, but I'm hoping to learn more, and to become more skilled than I am. I really skim the surface of Web 2.0, so I think that some of what I'm hoping to achieve through this course is the ability to use the internet more adeptly, and to develop my skill set when it comes to social media and interaction. Understanding how html works is also going to be interesting, I'm quite looking forward to the course, but at the same time I'm a bit nervous because I obviously have a lot to learn.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)