NET12 Assignment 2 – What Do We Think Of The Web We Weave. This essay talks about the key assumptions driving current views of the ‘Net
NET12 Assignment 3 – The Internet can teach us about the relationshop between society and technology – I talk about it here in specific relation to the economic and business aspects of that relationship.
I’ve decided that I will post a PDF copy of my essay submitted for assignment 1 in REA11.
The topic of the essay is Objectivity is Impossible. I don’t know what
mark I got for it yet, but should know within a couple days. For now, it is password
protected, but that may change in the future. Either way, it will remain secured against
printing, copy-pasting and modification. I don’t want to breach any sort of collaboration
or plagiarism rule with OLA, so if this is an issue, someone please let
me know. Click the PDF icon if you have the password.
UPDATE 2003-09-11: Removed password for PDF access.
Well, I am finally posting my assignments from NET23 here, I just haven’t gotten around to it until now. See below for a short intro and click the icons to download the secured PDF versions of the assignments I submitted.
Assignment One was supposed to be a research proposal for a topic relating to Internet governance. I chose to do mine on Cyber-Interception Capabilities: Legislation For Today and Beyond
Assignment Two was a fleshed out, ‘completed’ version of the research which was proposed in assignment one. This was quite interesting, there was a lot to read about current legislation etc, the main problem being that most of it was legalese and heavily masked what it was really saying, so it was pretty slow reading.
Here’s the assignment that I thought I might have totally messed up — but apparently I didn’t 🙂
Assignment One was to write something like a Project Plan for an e-business migration project, in my case for a share-trading company. I focussed on a company that was going to implement and extend an online service offered by E*Trade Australia to provide its clients with online trading and information services.
NET26 was a heavy assessment unit, with 4 assessments along the way, and one large final essay to round it all up. The assignments were relatively interesting, but since just about everything we did was for an assignment, it didn’t leave a lot of time for discussing things on the boards, so that part of the class was pretty quiet. Here they are in all their glory 🙂
Assignment One was about using online focus groups as a reasearch method and we had to propose to a ficticious client that we wanted to use this method to conduct some research for them.
Assignment Two was to create guidelines for an online survey, but I got a little carried away and created a prototype HTML survey for them as well, using all the usability and accessability ideas I was trying to include.
Assignment Three was a simple analysis of web log data (web traffic, not blogs :P). Some people apparently found this quite difficult, but since it’s part of the business, I didn’t have too many problems.
Assignment Four had me talking about ethnographic research, which I found quite interesting, especially in an Internet-setting, because it’s sometimes hard to know when you are a part of an online culture, and when you’re just there at the same time as one… if you know what I mean.
Assignment Five was the final essay and was really an all-in look at the way that the Internet is affecting research, both in the ways that it’s conducted, and the things available to be researched. We had to focus on the previous 4 topics that we had covered, so it was a bit of a compilation assignment.
Well, this unit (EBS11) is proving that online study can indeed be ‘isolated’, ‘lonely’ and ‘non-social’. In the 9 or 10 weeks that this study period has been going on, I think one other student has posted to the discussion list in the ‘online classroom’, and none replied to a group email that I sent out to my classmates.
It’s an interesting change from the other units that I’ve done (offered through Curtin), which have all had a pretty heavy online presence in discussion boards/forums. I think in this case it’s actually a matter of the discussion boards of the LMS that RMIT is using (SERF) being really poorly designed, so people try to avoid using them.
Whatever the reason, I’ll be glad to get back into Curtin units and have a little bit more contact with other people studying the unit with me 🙂
Well, things aren’t going too badly with DreamHost, I’m sorting out all my domains and CGI, databases, PHP etc and things are looking good. When I get dentedreality.com.au across, then I will know things are good 🙂
UPDATE: Things are looking very good – .com.au is transferred properly and appears to have propagated pretty much everywhere, judging by the traffic on my old account. I’ll leave it there for a couple days longer and make sure I’ve migrated everything properly, then close my account at phpwebhosting.com.
Well, I think I’ve finally outgrown phpwebhosting.com as my host, so I’ve started the process of setting up my new account with DreamHost.com.
The reasons that I have decided on DreamHost are along these lines:
UNIX Servers (personal requirement)
SSH/Shell Access (crucial)
.htaccess Editing (crucial)
CGI/PHP (crucial)
Ability to host multiple domains/subdomains (can only have 1 domain on phpwebhosting)
IMAP Mail server – good benefit, since I am switching to web-based mail
Good price – for me to host 10 domains there (6 properly + 4 mirroring) is $14.95 per month
Good reputation – checked around and only heard good things. The usual criticism of their support, but hopefully I won’t be using it much, so it won’t matter 🙂
FTP – I can add users who will have FTP access to certain areas on my servers, which will be good for sharing some space with friends
crontabs – can edit them and set them when I want
So please bear with me over the next few days as things might get a little messy on this site (and related ones) while I am moving things around between this host and my new one.
You may or may not have noticed, but the posting times on this blog have changed recently, because I installed the excellent blosxomtimezone plugin, written by Raffi Krikorian.
It was wonderfully easy to configure, all I had to do was put in my own timezone, and it works out all times for posts based on the timezone of the server, in relation to mine.
I am posting this from webpad Personal Edition 3.0, which I am trialling in raw beta mode on my server at the moment (minus blogging functionality until I decide what to do about that).
Development is progressing well, and at this stage, I hope to release at least an official beta within a few weeks, pending more rigorous file and security tests, as well as some browser compatibility tests.
