An RMIT media student reflecting and blogging on her experiences at uni, on making and learning.

6 activities that I should do each week for my self-assessment.

*Write at least three blog entries per week, on lectures, tutorials, and my thoughts on networking
*Review HTML codes/language at home to familiarise myself with it.
*Reflect on things learnt in course, and make connections to outside the course.
*Attend all lectures and labs and take notes.
*Remain up-to-date with all work and hand things in on time
and finally
*Collaborate with others for group assignment.

Today, a train at Southern Cross Station caught itself on some kind of cable, causing some kind of power outage.

Trains between Flinders Street and Southern Cross were stopped. As were many other lines.

Train network crippled, commuters in panic, traffic on roads at standstill.

I was late for uni.

The problem was fixed in about an hour, but it was too late of course, the damage was done. Many trains were cancelled, services up to an hour late and people even more so. And all because of one station.
This easily takes me back to what was said in yesterdays lecture, about the Allies efforts to stop the German war machine. The allies would target the ball bearing plants to try and stop the Germans. Target one thing, and the entire network falls apart.
That happened today.
Of course, I now know that networks doesn’t refer only to the web and internet, but to society, strategy and warfare networks and transport networks. There are also different ways of looking at networks. They can be centralised, de-centralised, or distributed. Now, Southern Cross wasn’t distributed, because otherwise nothing else would be affected. It wasn’t centralised because, take out the centre (Southern Cross) and everything works. The closest must be de-centralised, because while alot of services were affected, some still ran (unfortunately, mine wasn’t one of them). So from this, we see an epic example of how a network can fail, or, more aptly, an example of a type of networks vulnerabilities. It’s also slightly worrying, to see how badly a break in the network can affect people. There was utter confusion. Not just the trains were affected but also the roads. They were completely congested with traffic. So one network affects another. The train network stuffs up the network of roads.

Let us hope this doesn’t happen again any time soon.

First ever post!

I’ve decided to first write about what I think I’ll expect from Networked Media and what I hope to achieve. After perusing the course guide, I’m expecting this course to involve learning about internet based media, networks and learning some simple html. Hopefully by the end I’ll be able to have turned my currently plain blog into something visually interesting.

I wasn’t able to attend Networked Media the first week, unfortunately for me, but from now I will try to update my blog at least three times a week. I’ll try and blog lectures (possibly tutes), things learnt in tutes, alot of reflection on things learnt, honing html skills learnt etc. Oh, and readings. I’m currently reading the Mortensen and Walker reading ‘Blogging thoughts’.

I didn’t blog during todays lecture (the second for the semester) but I found it an engaging overview of the history of networks, their evolution as it were. When I hear ‘network’ I think of the internet, automatically, but I know now meaning of the term changed in its social/historical context, from Paul Baran’s distributed communications network, to the massive network of the internet today.

I think that will be all for my first blog. Hopefully I will do so again during or after tomorrow’s tutorial.