Wednesday, April 22, 2009

www and blogs

Just spent the day reading Module 3 - a heap of information which is all slightly familiar but which I needed to delve further into using the links to fully become aware of the topic.
Got just a little side tracked - Loved "The book of sand" and had to complete the puzzle.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

chat task: icq

Wow, just had my first chat on icq! Was quite good. I set up yesterday with a list of icq numbers from the discussion board. Janice was online tonight and I had a conversation with her. At first it seemed a bit disjointed compared to a phone conversation, but after a while I realised that you have to allow a bit of time for response and its ok if there is no immediate conversation or feedback. I can see it feel a little bit like email whereby when you send something you dont know if it will be read immediately.
I can image if there were many people in the conversation it the flow could become even more disjointed and confusing.

A conversation without reliance upon voice tone and visual expression means that it could be easy to misinterpret what is being said. I tended to type question after question and reading back what I said made me sound like I was interrogating poor Janice!
Anyway she was a champ and helped me with my many questions about the functions of icq.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Email: Newsgroups, Lists

Thanks to the discussion board I was able to subscribe to an email list involving our study group, so I am looking forward to receiving email and checking out posts once I am "accepted" into the group.
I am already on an email list for work - retailers in the same industry as myself ask for and send information regarding current industry issues, topic and problems.
The list is connected to a yahoo group. I have tried to post to the group a couple of weeks ago but cannot remember my password or log in code. You need to provide an email address to get your password - the email address from when you first signed up. I can't remember mine so I have given up.
Passwords and signing up for many different groups creates a lot of problem in my everyday life. I try to stick to a few different passwords so I can guess what they may be if i forget but with the different requirements - 8 or 10 digits, alpha numeric and a certain length, combination of numeric, upper and lower case, it is getting harder and harder to remember. I dont want to record the passwords on my laptop so I resort to my memory and my phone for a couple of critical ones.

After lots of reading and contemplating newsgroups I have decided not to do any further work with this task. I went to usenet and clicked on a couple of sites then had all this WIN, WIN , WIN sort of messages appear in about 10 windows.... I hope I havent caught anything!!!!
It took me ages to close all the windows as they jump around the screen.

I found the link to how stuff works to be helpful to explain the different types of email communications.

MODULE 2 Email

Getting up to date with my blog posts after a week of playing catch up!
Email Tasks:
Information about the sender and the path a message took can be obtained from the header infomation in the email, and if you look in View , Options, Internet Headers: when the message is open in Microsoft Outlook.
There is a lot of data in the internet headers you don't see when you use the program. I suppose this is a good thing as most people would find just sorting through their emails on a regular basis is reading enough!

The cc, bcc and reply all functions on email are a fantastic tool to allow you to pass along information to other people in the information chain who need to know about the communication you are sending. Reply all is great because you dont have to individual address your reply email to those who already part of the email "conversation.
Reply all can be a bit cumbersome if used lazily. I have instances where a question is asked and everyone replies to all " Thanks for that". This type of communication causes un-needed clutter in the inbox.

Email Attachments can be very useful - fantastic to send documents and files quickly. If I'm not sure of the software the receiver will have I will send a .pdf file for a document or spreadsheet etc. maybe a .jpg file if it is a picture or .rtf if its a straight text document. These documents are easy to send size wise as well - as a pdf is usually smaller than a publisher file, and a .jpg can be resized for the senders purpose or to keep your picture secure. eg: if you dont want your picture reproduced for posters you can just send a thumbnail size .jpg to give the reader an idea of the picture but they could not steal your image and reproduce it because the quality would be too poor.

Email filters and rules are a godsend if you have lots of emails coming into you inbox. I sort supplier files and incoming regular correspondence using message rules. Supplier files get automatically forwarded to others, then deleted. Certain contacts get filed into their own files for dealing with later as they are not urgent.
I have two types of filters - one is before mail gets to my inbox and is filtered by my ISPs bigpond and tpg. Then I have CA scan emails as they come in with suspicious ones going to a seperated file for review, then approval or deletion.

My folders in my email program at home are organised into various categories of my life - family & friends, community work, work, studies, health & fitness, computer information, home management. Then I have subfolders for some folders eg: study has NET11 and SSK12. Community work has progress association, tafe mentoring etc.
The most important folder is the TO DO folder file. This is the one that has urgent, don't forget to do this stuff soon items in it!



I found the tutorial via link to University of Ohio quite basic - but informative for the absolute beginner. I wonder why this university would us a University of Ohio tutorial? Surely with all the academics in this field curtin would have a basic document explaining the same as this?

Friday, April 10, 2009

Week 6

Well its nearly the end of week 6 in NET11 unit and I am very behind. I am doing two subjects this semester. This one, and a Murdoch uni humanities / social science introductory unit. I thought both units would take about 10 hours per week each. The Murdoch unit involves a lot of reading, listening to lectures and set exercise tasks. I have already had 2 deadlines for assessment tasks in week 2 and two deadlines for week 5. I have been spending around 15 hours per week on the Murdoch unit. Consequently I have not devoted nearly enough time to the NET11 unit. I am really interested in this unit and wish I didn't have so much pressure on me to devote time to my other unit.
I feel it is very easy to let this unit 'take a back seat' when there are no work requirements due unit week ten. I am aware that you need to be self-motivated but it is easy to let this unit slide when the other unit and work and family all need attention as well.
This week just gone I have been on holidays with my family camping so have done nothing online at all.
Busy day at work tomorrow then it is going to be a fresh start for this unit - 2 - 4 hours per day until I catch up.
Happy and safe easter to everyone :)