E-TV

Ever since I took my very old and tiny television apart last month I have been out of the loop. I like being out of the loop for the most part since I don’t care if Brittney shaves her head or if Lindsey is in rehab or who Paris showed her skivvies to. I get occasional doses of news from Washingtonpost.com or OrlandoSentinel.com and that keeps me up to date on local, national, and international events. However, one news story completely bypassed my radar.

Since I deconstructed the box of moving colors down to a box of circuitry, which I fried with the hair dryer just for fun, I have been catching my favorite shows on the internet. I am too lazy to install and deal with bittorrent programs so I have stuck to legal viewing avenues like the Weeds blog on blogspot and the shows made available on network sites.

Last week, after watching the latest Family Guy on Tuesday instead of Sunday on the Fox website, I found myself chatting on the phone with my younger brother. He is an aspiring writer and he was jazzed up about the writers’ strike. Uh-oh, sounds like I might have missed something important. If you haven’t read/heard/seen anything about the writers’ strike then click here for the Washington Post’s take on the story.

I’m not going to lie. I am used to being part of the problem when it comes to regulating e-commerce and the flow of intellectual information. I used Napster back in 2000 when the RIAA was working towards alienating music consumers everywhere. I used Kazaa before I realized that most of the files available were corrupt and virus infected and I have settled for just not buying music over subscribing to pay services. But if you but the CD, oh won’t you please burn me a copy? The only time I buy CDs now is when I’ve paid good money (at least Pearl Jam tried to stop TicketMaster from ripping us off at the gates) to go to a show and the band/group is selling their merchandise directly to the crowd. It makes me happy to cut out the middle person. I really don’t have an ethical problem with any of this. If you can’t figure out how to use the internet to make money then you are a dinosaur and we all know what happened to them. Artists are now using forums like MySpace to disseminate their music and band/group information.

But my take on this situation with the television writers and the evil corporations that are exploiting them should be pretty apparent from the way I worded this sentence. However, that didn’t stop me from watching the Simpsons before writing this (it’s research!). Watching the Simps (we are tight like that) on the internet has only two drawbacks to watching on television. One, they don’t load the program on the site until one to two days after the first airing of the show, and two, the screen is small. Very small, like 5 by 5 inches small. There was a three, the buffering wasn’t very good last week, but they have since addressed that. But, on the upside, I only had to watch about fifteen seconds of commercials throughout the entire episode. This in and of itself is indicative of how “new media” is rapidly evolving. The week that I talked to my brother I endured about two minutes of commercials, which was actually the same stupid thirty second Papa Johns commercial played four times. This week, the Toyota Yaris sponsored the program with four commercials that were four seconds long. Once again it was the same commercial every time, but it wasn’t nearly as annoying as the long drawn out Papa Johns commercials or even the stupid yet well funded commercials I used to be assailed with as a television watcher.

Fox isn’t the only network making their programming available online. I caught up with 30Rock on NBC.com and Grey’s Anatomy on ABC.com and…well I don’t really watch anything else but there is certainly more out there.

So am I part of the problem or am I a consumer that is creating a demand which is allowing the broadcasting companies to exploit their staff because of a very old labor issue, contract negotiation? I suppose that I’m just happy that for once my digital consumption is in alignment with what is legal (if you want to give me guff about my former career as a MP3 pirate I will be happy to send you a quasi-legal brief I wrote with a dissenting opinion concerning how copy write law has been interpreted by the courts).

Anyways, I am not above blatantly soliciting reader opinions, so PLEASE comment and let me/us know what you think about this writers’ strike and the state of E-TV.

Socially bookmarking my way to fun

What with all the coverage that social networking has been getting in the media, social bookmarking hasn’t gotten a fair shake at the limelight. Social bookmarking is somewhat like adding a website to your list of favorites; except your list of favorites can become very long and unmanageable. To mediate this you can create a system of folders and organize your favorites according to groupings that make sense to you. What always happened to me is that the groupings I created made perfect sense, unless I need to find a site three months later and I can’t remember if the website for that hotel in Killington is in the Snow folder, the Travel folder, or the I Wish folder.

Social bookmaking has enabled me to fare better at managing my site of interest. I use Del.icio.us although there are lots of sites out there; Blue Dot, Simpy, and FURL just to name a few. Since I am a Del.icio.us user I will use that site to discuss social bookmarking.

Once you register I suggest installing the small and unobtrusive application that puts a del.icio.us button in your browser. Now, let’s say that you find a website that you want to come back to. You click your delicious button and tag the site. The tag is essentially a key word or a series of key words that will group this site with other sites that you have tagged with the same word or words.

My friends are going to the snowboarding world cup in Quebec in March of 2008 and want me to come. I tell them I am going to look into it; after all there are a lot of factors to weigh here. So I start by cruising over to the U.S. Snowboarding Team website and navigate to the events page. The exact date is posted here and since I don’t want to forget, I tag this as “snowboarding world cup.” The world cup will be held in Stoneham so next I go to the Stoneham resort page because while I’m okay with being a spectator, I’m still going to want to thrash while I’m out there, so I need to know what runs the public will have access to during the competition and how much lift tickets are. I tag this page “snowboarding world cup Stoneham.” And as I continue my research for airfare, vehicle rentals, lodging, maps, locations of grocery stores (because if you have been to a resort town you know you can’t eat there for less than $25 a day), and all sorts of other information. Each page gets tagged “snowboarding world cup” and then another keyword.

A different set of friends is encouraging me to visit them in British Columbia this winter and get some serious crazyness on at Whistler. So I do a lot of the same sort of research: airfare, lift tickets, and mountain maps being the big three priorities for me here. These all get tagged “Whistler 2008” and some other descriptive keyword. The different airfare options get tagged “Whistler 2008 air” for example.

Even though the trips both involve the same subject matter; snowboarding, travel, and fun fun fun, since I have given them distinctive tags, I can easily keep the information separate and extremely easy to access.

What I have described above is just one step up from the antiquated favorites system. What really sets social bookmarking apart is the social aspect. I can click on any of the key words I have selected and a new page will load; this one displaying all the other pages that del.icio.us users have tagged using the same keyword. All of the sudden I realize that the hotel I was looking at was cheap, but someone else found a hotel in Stoneham that is packaged with lift tickets, which is almost always a better deal. Plus I find a great site that provides a behind the scenes look at what the world cup will entail and what sponsors will be there, it even speculates on what freebies will be given away. Yay free Spy goggles!

Both these sites came from the same user so I click on the user’s name and a new page loads with a list of all the pages that this user has tagged. This user has tagged different snow resorts all across North America and has links to somewhat esoteric pages where some resourceful shredder has layed out good runs over a topographic maps for different national forests. This equates to free back country snowboarding, which also means no lifts = lots of hiking. But the page has a link that lists back country outfitters in close proximity to the forests that rent snowshoes and snowmobiles.

This is the good stuff! This is also information it would have taken me forever, if ever, to find just doing random searches on Google. Every niche and interest is represented, and just like snowflakes no person tags the same pages. So get other there little snowflake and find whatever information you need to enhance your life.

If that extremely optimistic paragraph didn’t convince you, check out del.icio.us’ own blog at http://blog.delicious.com/ which has a video that illustrates the wonderfulness of social bookmarking.

Covering Your Assets (CYA)

Want a virus or some malicious spyware? Hang out on Myspace and do some random clicking or open up your friend’s bulletins. Or execute some random Google searches and play the six degrees from their homepage game. I was doing some innocuous research the other day on Orlando nightclubs when a very official looking Microsoft page opened and informed me that my computer had been infected with a virus. I looked up to the address bar and the address seemed legit; a miscorsoft.com extension. The page looked very Microsoft-esque. I clicked the download button and within seconds Avast popped up with a message; something about: did I really want to download the Trojan virus I had just selected or did I want Avast to keep my computer from crashing and me from losing my mind? I chose sanity.

Avast is my computer Superman, saving me when my foolish typing and clicking fingers find malicious information online. The Avast package is a lot like Norton Antivirus, except it is free and it works. Well, it is free for your home, noncommercial use. If you have a network or an office you need to protect then there is a variety of corporate paid packages you should consider, else, get the free home version here http://www.avast.com/.

According to the website Avast was developed in the Czech Republic in 1991 and remains a Czech product, with the home office in Prague. This wonderful product didn’t pop up on my radar until last year when CNET released their 2006 report on the best 20 freeware products available on the net. My Norton subscription has just expired, right after my computer crashed, and I wasn’t inclined to renew a subscription to a service that hadn’t protected me the first time around.

Avast is easy to use. The interface is simple and it updates and scans automatically. In the last year Avast has kept my system fully operational. Since the great crash of 2006 I have a lot of paranoia. My laptop is already two years old so it may kick the bucket at any time. Keeping this in mind I try to be safety conscious. I invested in an external drive with 60 gigs of storage space. Every month I back up all the files I would never want to lose. Documents, music, and photos are the big three. And since my computer begins to run very slowly when I use it to store more than 20 albums at a time, I keep almost all my music on the external drive. Since the external hard drive is a USB device I can easily access and use the stored files, almost as if they were on my laptop’s hard drive. When I am working on term papers or presentations, I store the drafts after I have worked on them. The lesson here is back up your files. Computers can be replaced. The term paper that you have due tomorrow is going to ruin your mental stability if your computer goes down and you lose your files.

My paranoia extends beyond backing up my files into having an entire cadre of anti-virus software, all of it freeware. Ad-Aware remains a great tool for cleaning out cookies and miscellaneous junk that websites like to litter in my temp files. Ad-Aware also has paid components, but you can get the basic program for free here: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/.
That’s all for this week, happy computing.

If you have a favorite web application or gadget, email me at cbatson@mail.ucf.edu or leave a message!

(I'm working on incorporating images into the weekly blogs...this week I was thwarted by an internal problem with Blogger. Next week I promise some visuals!)

Myspace management

The alternative title I was considering is: “Don’t be that girl.” It could just as easily read: “Don’t be that guy.” What girl/guy am I talking about? The one that has risqué pictures that look like photos you would send in if you were trying to audition for an adult movie…and I don’t mean the rated R kind. Don’t be that person who is obviously intoxicated in every photo you have posted. And for crying out loud, don’t post pictures of yourself or others doing something illegal. If you were lucky enough to get away with it the first time don’t push your luck by advertising your criminality to the whole wide world.

There are other dos and don’ts for social networking sites. Always be safety conscious; don’t post your address and phone number unless you like the thrill you get when a twice convicted, violent rapist knocks on your door with a bouquet of roofies and duct-tape.

Why the academic concern with Myspace and social networking sites in general? One, you are probably in college because eventually you would like a job, a well paying one preferably. Professional industry is increasingly screening candidates’ online personas as part of the application process. Just as you wouldn’t put an email address of istealthings@gmail.com on your resume you don’t want your employer to write you off based on the information you disseminate about yourself online.

Even if your employer glosses over the picture of you on the toilet that you have posted in your pictures, your co-workers may not be so forgiving. All your potential co-workers are not seventy year old technophobes that scorn and shun social networking sites. You could find yourself on the receiving end of the office scuttlebutt wondering why you keep getting passed over for promotion after promotion while the pencil neck in the cubicle next to you is already the regional manager.

All this worrying about the future may seem unnecessary. After all, you have a few more years in school, and once you get out then you will clean up your online act. If you aren’t worried about your reputation now ask yourself a few simple questions. Would my family be ashamed of the persona I have created online? Am I contributing to improving the reputation of my university, Greek organization, or community? As more and more people join the social networking movement, more and more people have access to your information and make judgments not only about you, but about the communities that you belong to.

There are a few ways that you can maintain a risqué online persona if your attitude towards persona management is on the blasé end of the spectrum. The easiest is setting your profile to private. Next, be aware that there are lots of people out there that want your information so they can take something from you. They may want to post comments about a gift card on your page. All you have to do is fill out six forms, enroll for three services, and provide them with your social security number, and you will receive a $200 gift certificate. Meanwhile, you have just jeopardized your credit rating and financial security. In the long run that is a big trade off. Ten years from now if you can’t get financing to buy a home or car that $200 gift certificate is not going to seem like such a good deal. Plus, when employers, co-workers, and others see that you fall for these scams they make inferences about your common sense. They think, “if this person is willing to risk their own security, can they be trusted to not to risk our organization’s security?” This is especially a concern because of the virus riddled state of many social networking sites. Hackers and bored yet computer savvy people the world over are building Myspace sites designed with no other purpose than to disseminate malignant code.

If you still aren’t convinced, you may be surprised at how easy it is to access your information without meaning too. If I were to Google your name and the name of your high school there is a very good chance your Myspace profile will be one of the first returns that Google provides. Keep that in mind when you are trashing your professors online using their full names. When you spew bile about someone in a public forum, don’t be surprised if it gets back to them.

Now that Facebook has expanded their services to anyone with a job and three fingers with which they can type with, it is just as vulnerable to exploitation and data mining as Myspace. Don’t be fooled.

Wikipedia and digital exploration

Did you know that UCF is home to the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy? I was just frolicking through Wikipedia, browsing and creatively editing the information provided about UCF, when my click happiness brought me to the FIEA page. This is a UCF sponsored program that helps students develop their expertise video game designers, programmers, designers, and artists.

Self disclosure time: it makes me really happy when I get to overtly play video/computer games at work. How very exciting then that Wikipedia links to four different computer games developed by FIEA cohorts. However, with every silver lining there is a fateful flaw and I discovered that it would take an hour to download the file. My attention span doesn’t allow for waiting an hour so I continued clicking on my merry way.

While my fingers manipulate the digital opportunities, in the back of my mind I am trying to develop a presentation for one of my classes. The topic: glocalization. Thirteen key strokes later and I am reading the Wikipedia page on “glocalization.” The definition offered agrees with the academic definitions that I have read and two of my in-class readings are cited, so with growing confidence my eyes roam down the page to the notes and external links sections. So I immediately copy all the text from Wikipedia and paste it into my paper. There, I am finished. NOT! (Gratuitous 80s verbiage).

For one, that would be plagiarism, which is a great way to assassinate your academic and ethical credibility. Secondly, Wikipedia is a good sounding board but it is a lousy final authority. The information on Wikipedia only serves to verify that my synthesis of my research (using academic articles and texts) is on target. Third, the scope of the Wikipedia information doesn’t even begin to address the dimensions of the glocalization project I am putting together.

I’ve been slogging through some Roland Robertson, his nearly unreadable book has drained precious hours from my life, so I click the hotlink to his Wikipedia page, hoping against the odds that I will find some clarification. Thwarted again, the information provided here is incomplete and fragmented.

Now, so far, none of the information I have come across has been inaccurate. Well, you may be petulantly pouting, why then is Wikipedia not a good source? Beyond the incomplete, fragmented, contradictory, and occasionally flaming information available on Wikipedia – it is also just plain lazy. Research at the collegiate level is supposed to reflect at least an inkling of original thought. And I hate to break it to you, but original thought only comes after original research. Regurgitating lines of inquiry that you have ‘discovered’ on Wikipedia doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance of approaching original research. The second question that is possibly bouncing through your cranium is, how can I do original research? I’m not going to write a book I just need information for my project.

Original research means finding the obvious sources and developing an original line of inquiry. For example, glocalization is my topic, but I want to study glocalization through the paradigm of texts and technology. By combining my research on glocalization and texts and technology I have developed a unique line of inquiry, but one that still needs to be refined. I caught an article in the Orlando Sentinel last week about the race to build a children’s hospital in Orlando and I begin to wonder how this could be integrated into my interest in glocalization, texts, and technology. All of the sudden I have an original line of research to pursue. I’m not the first one to use these sources or to consider these ideas, but I am the first one that I know of to utilize them in this combination.

So remember, using Wikipedia in your academic papers is a lot like taking a set of clothes on a hanger out to the movies as your date. You can do it, but it would work out a lot better if that set of clothes was filled out with something more substantial.

Computer monkeying yours,

Grad Student Christine

cbatson@mail.ucf.edu

RefWorks - bringing me one step closer to never having to leave the couch!

Last week I gushed about Google, and I will gush about Google again, but this week let’s take an academic approach and scratch the surface of one of the web based resources offered by UCF’s library.

Top 3 Reasons why I love the UCF Libraries Homepage:

1) I don’t have to leave home to search the catalogue and databases, manage my sources, or use inter-library loan (ILL).
2) I can wear my pajama bottoms, hot pink cut-off, reminiscent of the 1980s t-shirt, and drink my own coffee while executing the above actions.
3) I don’t have to leave home.

How to start using library resources from home: Sign in for off-campus access

RefWorks
Creating a works cited or bibliography page is not exciting. Often, I leave it as the last, neglected part of my paper. The part that I scramble to finish 40 minutes before the paper is due. Well, the old me did that anyways. The new and improved data management me uses RefWorks for my citation management needs.

RefWorks is your one stop resource for keeping track of the works you have cited. You can manually input your sources, working your way down a form that asks you to supply the author, title, publication, and etc. information. Or, when you do a search in the library catalogue or through the SFX journal search, you will notice a button that gives you the option of exporting the source to RefWorks. Click on that and you are halfway to being done with your works cited page. Once you have inputted or imported the sources you want to use, simply click the “Bibliography” button. Select your output style. This can be a little confusing because there are so many style choices, but I find that MLA 6th ed. – no casing style works the best for my needs. Once you have made this decision, click the “Create Bibliography” button and bammo: you have your bibliography. It was painless!

Granted, it takes about 30 minutes to get familiar with the program, so if you are doing the last minute paper scramble, give yourself about an hour to get your first RefWorks generated works cited list together.

How do you access RefWorks you wonder, scratching your chin and gazing thoughtfully at your monitor? Quite simple really friend; from the library homepage:

http://www.library.ucf.edu/

you click “Cite a Source?” under the “How Do I?” menu. When the new page loads, scroll down and click on the “Citation Software” link. Once there, you have the option of running four different software packages. This week we focused on RefWorks although feel free to sample the other software packages and report back to grad student Christine.

That’s all for this week! Do you have questions, comments, or concerns about RefWorks? Let me know! Do you have a beloved web application that makes your life easier, better, and more digitally in-demand? Let me know!

I know I said I was going to talk about Wikipedia this week - but it got back burnered by my affection for RefWorks. Stay tuned for next week's post on Wikipedia and its torrid affair with academia.

-Salud
Christine

Welcome to What IF Web

What if you were working in an office at UCF whose mission was to help students learn to integrate the digital and the academic? Then you would be me, grad student Christine and you would be working at the Office of Information Fluency. That said:

What if this was a running blog on my adventures with Google, Pandora, Del.ic.ious, Wikis, anti broken computer free-ware and all that other fun stuff out there? What if people read it? Leave me comments with useful information or fun tips, your feedback matters!

Google:

Google runs my desktop. Not literally because I don’t use the “desktop search” function anymore, not because it wasn’t good, but because it doesn’t fill a need I didn’t know I had. Not like Google Earth. I plot my runs each night, using the “ruler-path” function; getting rough approximations on a street by street level. No more driving to determine my running distance. Mapquesting is so 3 years ago, last stop Las Vegas and the great computer reformatting; I am a total Google Earth convert! I am drinking the kool-aid.

Google Earth brings out everyone’s inner cartographer. I just touch the outer fringes on what the platform can do, but I am getting more literate as I remain enthralled by the constantly updating program. The other day I found that Google lets me plot my photos (which I manage with Picasa) on Google, uploaded to some Google server if I want to go public. Or I can link my photos to Wikipedia if I want to leave a geographic description.

http://www.earth.google.com/

Google can also be great for research. Google Scholar helps me look up books, articles, and various other academic papers. Some books are partially available as e-books and the meta-search often turns up the full article. If you are on campus, or have logged into the library from home, then many articles will display a SFX link: that will take you to the article through our library’s database subscriptions.

http://www.scholar.google.com/

Do you use any Google products? Write me and tell me about how Google runs your computing experience.

Next week – Wikipedia: Why I have feelings for you but you just aren’t reputable enough to be on my works cited page.

-Salud
Christine
(cbatson@mail.ucf.edu)