1st week; INTRO. 2nd Week; IS EMAIL DEAD?

My name is April. I’m in my first year of university doing bachelor of communication. My long term goal is to become a graphic designer.

I’m interested in advertising and design. My dream job is to work in a fashion magazine designing the layout (Art Director). I love the colour pink; I tend to be drawn to anything pink. I want to travel one day, going to places like Italy, Rome, Paris and London.

First weeks lecture and tute was an introduction into the course. We did an overview of our course outline and the learning@griffith site. We also watched a short film on the new computer game that is becoming increasingly popular – second life. This film discussed opportunities within the game, such as owning your own business and actually making money of it. However, how much can you own a property or business in a cyber space when the company who created it have the power to control the game?

New Communication Technologies, week 2 consisted of discussion surrounding ‘Is email dead?’ within this discussion topics were brought up such as spam email. It was discovered that within our lecture class not everybody receives spam emails and this brought about the question ‘why do some people receive it and others don’t?’ reason for this could be that some people’s email isn’t seen through the internet as much. For example; lecturer Stephen Stockwell receives large amounts of spam each day, and his email is advertised on the Griffith website, therefore making it easier for spam to find his email.

In the lecture of week 2 the class reviewed the survey results that all we students filled out in the first week. The results showed interesting statistics. A question that was spoken about was ‘does technology make our lives easier?’ the largest percentage voted for more. However, as students pointed out that technology can make our lives easier with internet and organisers but at the same time it can make us dependent on technology which could be a negative problem.

Blogging was also discussed in the lecture. The class discussed the concern of journalism and if blogging is accepted as journalism. Another concern was how reliable the information on a blog is.

The reading “The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber Dissidents” contained content that discussed blogging and what it is, as well as examples and tips on creating a better, more safe blog.

Week 2 tutorial task was to set up and create my own blog. Discussion surrounded all the problems that people in our class were having. I learnt that on the computers at Griffith campus I have my own space in which I can save documents. We were told that every time we do something on our computer we should save a backup into this folder.