Participation – Week 1
I forgot to do my participation blog entry for week 1 – so here it is!!
Participation is all about my personal assessment and the grade that I will give myself in week 12. Its about me recognising what I need to do to learn as much as i can in Networked Media. This participation task is designed to get me to start becoming responsible and self-directed as a student in preparation for becoming a media and communication professional.
We did this assessment last semester in Editing Media Texts and for me, it was quite daunting. Before last semester I had never done anything like that in school or anywhere else. Its unusual to self-assess yourself and actually get marked for doing it. While I was extremely nervous for it last semester, in the end it worked out fine. It’s a really interesting and productive way to learn about yourself and it really helped me realise what i needed to improve on.
I think the participation task is all about self-assessment where I track my own progress and keep an eye on how I am going throughout the course. I think all of this includes the readings, blog entries and obviously the assignments. It will be very hard to complete the participation blog entry if I haven’t been up to date with everything the course requires me to do. If I haven’t done enough blog entries or if i haven’t done all the readings it will be very clear that I haven’t participated in the course to the best of my abilities.
I think this method of assessment is used in this course because it is what the media world is all about. Its about self-reflection and self-criticism. If someone in the media field doesn’t track their progress, there is no way s/he will be successful. I believe its a very open industry where self-criticism is embraced
TREE OF LIFE!
I was so blown away my Terrence Malick’s new film, “The Tree of Life” that i wanted to find any way i could to turn it into a blog that relates to the course…I really struggled to do so!! What I did thing of though was something remotely to do with hypertext and hyperlinks. In a way it is some sort of a version of a hypertext essay in that so much is going on and the cuts occur so rapidly that it is almost like someone (or Malick) is pressing from link to another in order to create shots, sequences, scenes and eventually the final movie. Each shot is like a beautiful photograph and the cuts occur so suddenly as if going from one link to another…
The actual poster (displayed above) is also in a way a form of a hypertext essay through images. There are at least 50 squares with different shots and images from the movie and each one leads on to the next. It is almost like the movie in one poster in that the actual film does exactly what the poster portrays… different cuts and transitions of photographs and sequences. It is, in my eyes anyway, a hypertext essay through images…
You may think its pretty far fetched, and maybe it is…but this film has stuck with me so much it forced me to create a connection between it and networked Media.
‘Catfish’ – Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Catfish is a documentary, made in 2010, involving a man being filmed by his friends as he builds a romantic relationship with a girl and a bond with her ‘family’ on Facebook.
I’m so happy because I didn’t really know what sort of stuff to write in my blog which is not part of the course content but relates to the course UNTIL i stumbled across ‘Catfish’!!!
I just watched this movie last night and realised i could write about it on my blog!! I thought i could do this as it has lots to do with networking and it was very relevant to the lecture we had with Nate. What really struck me about the film is how anyone can easily create a network. The girl in the film totally made up an entire life that was fake. She added Nev Schulman, who the story revolves around and pretended to be someone she wasn’t. She built an entire false family – complete with Mother and Father and two daughters, one of which had a romantic relationship over the internet and the phone. She created hundreds of false accounts and added herself in order to make herself seem like a real person. She merely downloaded a random person’s entire photo collection and claimed it as her own. She would write, post and comment on all her photos with all her other accounts. As Nate pointed out in his lecture, it is so easy for anyone to use the internet and do all sorts of things with it. It is accessible for anyone do whatever like – including identity theft.
What also occurred to me is how a random person in Michigan added a random person in New york which lead to an entire film being made. This also demonstrates the power of the internet and how everyone is connected all over the world through a huge network, and in this case facebook…
I just find it so fascinating that it is so easy to create an entire network of people…especially fake!!!!! It just shows how far the internet has come from Paul Baran’s original idea of distributed communications. The film has really stuck with me and it has made me think about the internet in an entirely different way. It makes me realise how many different ways the internet can be used, including making an entire false network of people. Now i realise how useful Nate’s lecture was and how it relates to all sorts of things in regards to networked media.
Anyway, I’ll stop babbling along and end it here…BUT…
It was an incredible experience watching the film, especially because I had no idea what it was going to be about and I feel it was a couple of hours well spent!!
Annotated Bibliography
It is not an essay. Its like ur taking something and researching around it. We are being asked to look at that extract and research where it came from and what the author is trying to say…In a way we have to de-construct the extract. In doing that we would be referring to the main text and where it came from.
Here is a great, exact definition!!!
http://www.lc.unsw.edu.au/onlib/annotated_bib.html
What I need to write in here!
WHAT DO I NEED TO WRITE ABOUT IN THIS THING!?!
Experiment with voice and texture – One may be formal, informal, creative or one may be personal etc. Change it up !!!
I should also have some blogs with photos, videos, music etc…ANYTHING!!!!!
Quality – Must engage with the course content beyond what was actually done!!! i can’t just simply write what I heard in the lecture….
In terms of attributing something – I need to give the website, author etc.
Lecture 2 – Guest Speaker Nate
Today we had a guest speaker, Nathaniel Tkacz, who looked at the concept of networks in relation to the history and development of the Internet. He spoke about the ways of writing, publishing, designing (and thinking). He focused a lot about “Survival” communication and Paul Baran who came up with the idea of distributed communications which became the internet much later on. Paul Baran’s main idea was the ‘Packet Switching Network’ which is distributed as opposed to centralised. This meant that netwroks were now very much focused on being redundancy, survivability, flexibility, non-hierarchical and digital.
After speaking about Paul Baran he moved on to the email which started in 1971/72 and is considered to be the very first ‘killer app’. Nate spoke about all the benefits of the internet like how it was virtually instantaneous, like a phone and did not rely on the receiver presence unlike a lette rin the post. One of his main points was that packets of information can get lost, but messages will arrive and be reassembled eventually. He spoke about the flexibility of email and how it can follow multiple paths simultaneously and can re-route if the network is down. One of the main reasons email took off is because of how simple it was to use and how minimal expertise was required to use it.
I thought the lecture was really interesting as for the first time I fully understood what the course is going to be like and what i have to look forward to. I though he was a great speaker and I now know a lot more on the topic of networks as shown above….
Lab 1
Lecture was a little frustrating as it took some time for the blogs to get up and start running. I finally got it to work at the very last second which felt really great! It felt like I did something very productive and that it was my first step to learning about Networked media.
Looking ahead to the course really excited me. The content looks interesting and different to anything i’ve ever done!!
Networked Media – Very First Entry!!!!
Very exciting start to semester 2!!! So far, Networked Media has been much more than i ever imagined. I didn’t think it would appeal to me but so far the course has gripped me and kept me intrigued. I like the idea of keeping a constant blog where i can say what ever i want, when i want. I want to use the blog for entries on the lectures, a blog entry on the labs – something I learnt or fixed and a personal entry like something I watched on TV, radio or on the web that relates to the course…
So all in all I am PUMPED for this semester and hopefully everything goes to plan!!
