the remains of a student's mind…

Experimenting and testing out some of the blog skills that we need to have mastered. I have some downpat that are used throughout my entire blog so far.
Update on where my skills are:
Adding a page – recently tested it, seems pretty simple.
Text Widget – just had a go with a rarr rarr piece of text on the side of my page. Seems a bit ambigious.
Internal Links – I best try that out now: Here is a previous blog entry on HTML

External Links – easy, just scroll down my blog and you will see a dozen.
Blog Archiving (categories & tags) – Well this post is tagged as ‘blog’ ‘html’ and ’skills’ and categorizes as ‘tutorial’.
Network Badges (delicious) – ah wat?
Adding Links – done
Link categories – must do.
Image Embeds – mastered.

For writers of any sort regular writing is the most important thing. Just writing a little piece, a small paragraph or two, keeps a writer in shape, in practice, and develops further skills and quicker thinking. Blogs offer the perfect space and opportunity for this. It is a place of minimal judgement and pressures on the writer to be technically correct in their writing; it offers a place that one can explore their own thoughts casually, note them down in a post, come back to them at a future date and even edit and update these posts. It is a much more informal, relaxed and personal space despite being located in the public realm. Not only does it give one practice and room to develop their writing and ideas but it also allows for the expansion of thought via linking and efficient referencing to other previous concepts that people may have written about in the past. How convenient.

Blogs are amazing with their linkage to more and more information and references. There is no traditional text quite like the blog thanks to Hypertext. There is one type of text that I do think comes the closest to what hypertexts and blogs offer. Hypertexts offer multiple endings and even optional beginnings, not to mention destroy the whole traditional concept of the frames of a text. The closet ‘traditional’ text that even comes remotely similar to this concept is the old ‘choose your own adventure’ novels. These novels were fairly so called ‘interactive’ although that seems rather primitive when you contrast it to hypertexts. What I appreciate most about hypertexts and blogs is that if you come across something in the writing that looks interesting and has more depth to it than is explored in the actual piece thats currently displayed on your screen chances are it will be a hyperlink and you can simply click on this curiosity to discover more. Traditional texts now seem limiting in this way. If i was reading a book and came across a reference and wanted to know more but it didn’t have those extra notes in the end pages, I would have to go look it up or ask around! This seems like an outrageous effort to go to just to gain a fuller understanding of the author’s meaning. What is more than likely to happen is that I’d just keep reading on and simply forget about the idea and just accept a partial understanding of what I am reading. This barely seems satisfactory now, but reflecting back before hypertexts and blogs existed in my life, I feel amazingly spoiled with knowledge. The access to such a limitless flow of knowledge seems mind boggling….

This is a blog that I randomly came across that i actually find fairly interesting and relevant. It discusses a lot about social media in relation to the science of communication. The blog is kept by a freelance science writer, editor and ‘general science communication nerd’ Hayley.

Also check this clip out of a robot doing some folding. Imagine the potential of such creations, and the complex networked systems that make this thing run and respond to commands. It remind me again of the evolution of the web and Google. The discussion that we were having in one of the tutes that potentially in the future Google will have all of our answers and become much more interactive, also possibly predict our questions. Things that we would ask our parents for we would just ask google. This advancement is already noticeable in our behaviours when we come across an unknown word and instead going to the bookshelf and sifting through a chunky dictionary (in book form) we now simply type in Google the word under scrutiny, and then the power of that one click of the mouse causes a bombardment of options to appear and all the information we ever dreamed of to appear. What if in the future, we have machines that teach us instead. They are vaguely human shape and may then even be able to imitate our moves and teach us things like how to tie our shoelaces which tends to be a skill that one has to be shown rather than explained in terms of words. The idea of such communication via networks and machinery is phenomenal, who knows where these developments will lead.

Learning about the semantic web 3.0, the new upgrade, where every question one has could be answered thanks to some search engine like Google. The people we look up to like our parents or teachers who we traditionally see as having all the answers and wisdom and the best advice will definitely consequentially be at least slightly dishonoured, and will lose some of their power of wisdom.

Also thinking about the comparisons of twitter, a microblog, to this blog a full blog where I have room to explore my ideas to the furtherest extent that I like. Micro blogs only involve about 140 words or characters would be more like just a quick update, or a one sentence of thought; it suffices the shortest of attention spans. This shortening of attention span is one point to consider in the future, it may develop problematic habits and also may further cause our language to change….I intend to use this space to explore my thoughts to a further extent rather than just a quick update of my progression.