Task 23 - Summary

Well, I kind of rushed through the tasks simply because there are several important things happening at the same time at work. I could have postponed this again but thinking there would never be a time when I have the luxurious of just concentrating on this program alone. So I went ahead and did it.

Having said the above, it is no doubt an interesting experience. A few technologies I had never used beforem. By playing with them I could see the potential usage both from personal and work point of view.

Some people are worried that these "social networking" technologies make people less likely "talking" to each other face to face, their communication skills in terms of dealing with people face to face at work as well as outside work may even deteriorate. But I think these technologies are not really replacing face to face social networking, they are like other technologies that they provide people with more choices. These choices make it possible to suit different communication styles from different people. We need to learn these technologies in order to understand and communicate with those customers who use the technologies. In my opinion it is not very professional to turn away our customers simply because we don't know the technologies.

On the topic of self-directed learning, I like doing things this way. I like to be in control and pace my time and pace. I am doing another course in a similar way and I think I enjoy it too.

Forgot to mention that the thing that I think most useful to me was Google Maps. I am really bad working out my route to a new place, now with the help of Google Maps it is really easy.

All in all, this is a good program, it would be good if it offers refresher course sometime down the track or even a short up-date session.

Task 20 - Podcast

First of all, the links provided in the task page were all broken, I had to go to Yahoo page and searched for 'podcast' to get some directories.

Here is the RSS feed link for Asia lecture series

Task 16 - Adding an entry to a wiki

This time the experience wasn't good at all. I followed the instruction, but first of all the search didn't present the search result described in the task, I tried going through pages of pages of results and the last few pages took forever to load.

I will try another time to finish the task!

Task 15 - Wiki

The biggest advantage of Wiki I feel is people have the sense of ownership. If the member of the wiki can take control of what goes in there, they will make an effort to keep it live and up-to-date and promote it to the target readers.

Also the technology is not hard to learn to use, it usually takes a few trial and error then you are pretty much on the go.

I think it is a good communication tool for the clients that one works close with or for an organisation with a clear purpose. Also it is important to make it searchable.

Task 14 - Technorati

Another new thing that I didn't know. I should slow down a bit - all these new discoveries made me feel "overloaded". At least at the moment I can't see any immediate use for most of them.

Technorati is by far the most confusing site. I can't find what those symbols on the right hand mean. When I did suggested exercise search, I only found one blog site in search Blog posts, didn't find anything when searching (well really browsing) in tags and in the Blog Directory. I need more time, which I don't think I have, to learn this one.

Task 13 - Delicious

I have heard of this site but haven't really explored. Again an interesting concept behind it. Like other social networking tools, this one also aims at helping people to organise and manage information in the information overload (sounds like a very old expression now) age.

Would be a relatively effective way to find useful and interesting websites.

I searched EndNote and found:

CiteULike: A free online service to organise your academic papers - an free Endnote like online software

bibconvert - ShaRef bibliography conversion service - again a free online reference tool for easy conversion of the references format.

Also the second on the list was Zotero, UQ EndNote page was on the first page too. Not sure how it lists the result obviously not by popularity.

Google Analytic is a new thing I didn't know before, looks interesting. It can analyse statistically how a webpage is accessed, especially for those commercial advertising pages.

Task 12 - LibriVox

The interesting about this site is people can simply volunteer to record books in not just English but other languages as well, I thought I might contribute to the site by recording a book in Chinese when I have time, maybe after I retire.

The choices are quite limited, I tried to find out how many recorded books there are but to no avail. Mabye I looked in wrong places.