Friday, December 11, 2009
Week 14 Muddiest Point
Who is responsible for the upkeep of cloud computing? Does an institution bring in outside tech support to deal with problems that patrons have accessing digital contents within the cloud? Also, with technological upgrades, could the cloud lose some, if not all of its digital contents?
Week 14 Reading Notes
Gruman's article on cloud computing cleared up a number of questions I had regarding what cloud computing is. It alleviated my skepticism about cloud computing's usefulness. Prior to reading the article I felt that remote file storage, while solving some problems, created new problems with storing digital information. Thanks to the article I now see that cloud computing gives new space saving opportunities for libraries and other institutions. I see it helping out businesses and schools as well. With the future of cloud computing the sky's the limit (pun intended).
The video, while not visually stunning, was very informative and explained cloud computing in easy to understand terms. It really drove home the importance of interconnectivity and communication with cloud computing. The flexibility cloud computing brings to the information sciences appears very valuable. This further promotes collaboration The question this leaves me wondering though is how one performs upkeep and maintenance on the cloud computing software. In spite of this, the remote accessiblity of cloud computing looks very convenient and I see it driving the future of computing and information technology.
Frey's article described the future of the library in an effective manner. It showed that as libraries keep up with changing technologies, they remain relevant and essential to society at large. I feel that this once more emphasizes the importance of library science as a field of continuing education where individuals involved with it must keep reading up on new information technologies and how people use digital media to satiate their needs. To meet the demand for information libraries must stay on top of technology, especially with digital media. The not that libraries will transition from a center of information to a center of culture shows that they can remain relevant in the future, just with a different means. I agree that if they keep the experience of patrons enjoyable, stay on top of new technologies, embrace their communities, and experiment with new options that aid patron creativity the library has a bright future. That said, it will take the work of not just the librarians in charge but the entire community it serves to establish a scholarly and informative atmosphere for years to come.
The video, while not visually stunning, was very informative and explained cloud computing in easy to understand terms. It really drove home the importance of interconnectivity and communication with cloud computing. The flexibility cloud computing brings to the information sciences appears very valuable. This further promotes collaboration The question this leaves me wondering though is how one performs upkeep and maintenance on the cloud computing software. In spite of this, the remote accessiblity of cloud computing looks very convenient and I see it driving the future of computing and information technology.
Frey's article described the future of the library in an effective manner. It showed that as libraries keep up with changing technologies, they remain relevant and essential to society at large. I feel that this once more emphasizes the importance of library science as a field of continuing education where individuals involved with it must keep reading up on new information technologies and how people use digital media to satiate their needs. To meet the demand for information libraries must stay on top of technology, especially with digital media. The not that libraries will transition from a center of information to a center of culture shows that they can remain relevant in the future, just with a different means. I agree that if they keep the experience of patrons enjoyable, stay on top of new technologies, embrace their communities, and experiment with new options that aid patron creativity the library has a bright future. That said, it will take the work of not just the librarians in charge but the entire community it serves to establish a scholarly and informative atmosphere for years to come.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Week 12 Reading Notes
Prior to reading Blossom's article I never thought much about social media. It is interesting that collaborative projects via the World Wide Web aid in learning and human progress. Hopefully I can find a way to become part of this movement and receive feedback for any work I produce. The fact that I could use my Facebook account as a means to promote learning or research is fascinating and something I may look into doing in the future. As for the remark about using blogs to turn a profit, I nor any of my friends who post blogs do that. I still am unsure of how to look into gaining a profit from a blog though I'm sure more about this will be revealed as people keep collaborating on the World Wide Web.
Allan's article shows the roles wikis could play in an academic environment. As an undergraduate I took a course on the history of Central Asia in which one of the collective learning projects we could do was create and manage a Wikipedia page that focused on some aspect of Central Asian history. This is a good way to promote the spread of discussion toward any academic topic. The only problem I see is dealing with the people who may troll the entries and change them to whatever they want. If the entries are restricted only to scholars, though, then they are not serving their purpose. It will be interesting to see the direction collaborative learning and research via wikis goes over the next few years.
The idea of social tagging looks like an excellent one for people doing research. If people look up one source online, they can see several complimentary sources tagged to the one they looked up. More than just promoting sharing, library patrons now have the ability to see similar sources to the ones they looked up, thus strengthening whatever research they did. Arch also acknowledges the problem that spam tagging presents to those doing research and potential methods to deal with people TROLLing the wiki entry. I thought that her explanation of what when problems arise makes social tagging a key element of scholarly research in the digital world.
The video of Jimmy Wales' presentation shows how active Wikipedia is and how different it is from traditional encyclopedias. While Wikipedia is free for everyone to use people can easily change the information presented in an entry to whatever they want it to say regardless of the facts. It was good to see Wales acknowledge the weaknesses Wikipedia has and how to circumvent them in addition to the benefits Wikipedia gives the scholarly community. I also liked the explanation of how Wikipedia leads to communitity involvement and how peers, whether scholars or not, play a role in moderating entries and keeping them at least quasi-accurate. I had no idea that the changes to entries could be tracked so well. While I wouldn't use Wikipedia for scholarly research I would turn to it if I had a generalized question about a topic. Wales' explanation for future use of Wikipedia as a collaborative means of scholarship sounds like it holds more academic potential than experts claim, though it will take much further development and collaboration to make it a reality.
Allan's article shows the roles wikis could play in an academic environment. As an undergraduate I took a course on the history of Central Asia in which one of the collective learning projects we could do was create and manage a Wikipedia page that focused on some aspect of Central Asian history. This is a good way to promote the spread of discussion toward any academic topic. The only problem I see is dealing with the people who may troll the entries and change them to whatever they want. If the entries are restricted only to scholars, though, then they are not serving their purpose. It will be interesting to see the direction collaborative learning and research via wikis goes over the next few years.
The idea of social tagging looks like an excellent one for people doing research. If people look up one source online, they can see several complimentary sources tagged to the one they looked up. More than just promoting sharing, library patrons now have the ability to see similar sources to the ones they looked up, thus strengthening whatever research they did. Arch also acknowledges the problem that spam tagging presents to those doing research and potential methods to deal with people TROLLing the wiki entry. I thought that her explanation of what when problems arise makes social tagging a key element of scholarly research in the digital world.
The video of Jimmy Wales' presentation shows how active Wikipedia is and how different it is from traditional encyclopedias. While Wikipedia is free for everyone to use people can easily change the information presented in an entry to whatever they want it to say regardless of the facts. It was good to see Wales acknowledge the weaknesses Wikipedia has and how to circumvent them in addition to the benefits Wikipedia gives the scholarly community. I also liked the explanation of how Wikipedia leads to communitity involvement and how peers, whether scholars or not, play a role in moderating entries and keeping them at least quasi-accurate. I had no idea that the changes to entries could be tracked so well. While I wouldn't use Wikipedia for scholarly research I would turn to it if I had a generalized question about a topic. Wales' explanation for future use of Wikipedia as a collaborative means of scholarship sounds like it holds more academic potential than experts claim, though it will take much further development and collaboration to make it a reality.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Week 11 Muddiest Point
Given that I completed assignment 6, I have no muddiest point to elaborate on.
Here it is: Assignment 6 - My website
Working on this assignment gave me a new appreciation for the websites people do. Publishing one is a lot of work and given how convoluted the whole process is, making an appealing website is quite a challenge. On an additional note, the embedding code I posted for my Youtube work didn't embed properly but the hyperlinks in the code still work so you can click on them to see the three Youtube videos I was involved with.
http://www.pitt.edu/~afc16/Site/Welcome.html
http://www.pitt.edu/~afc16/Site/Welcome.html
Friday, November 13, 2009
Week 10 Muddiest Point
I read up about the different kinds of markup languages one can use to design a Web page; there are a lot more of them than I previously expected. Is there anything that makes HTML stand out from the other markup languages that results in it being the one most commonly used to design websites?
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