Week 1 - Introduction

I set up this ePortfolio blog during our first eLab on Friday 23rd January.

At first, I had trouble accessing the domain as it said 'You do not have access to this server'. Bleary eyed, as it was just after 9AM, I somehow managed to fix the problem and set up my blog.

Week 2 arrived and I attempted to access blogger.com and again, I did not have access to the server. This time I had very little patience and gave up after a few attempts of logging in.

It is now Week 3, and I am in the process of back tracking and writing the contents of Week 1, but this time I was more patient, and figured out how to access this 'server' after all.

How did I find out? Not by chance like last time. I googled it.

Which led me to think, what if back in the day somebody had a persistent problem like I had and was never able to find out the solution?

We are blessed to have a plethora of information to help you solve or attempt to solve real world problems in the internet. Newer generations will take this for granted on the basis they never had to go through life without it, but I' m sure our parents and grandparents are that little bit more appreciative of the change.

There is an argument that the internet has caused a decline in human interaction & practical solving but we'll save that for another day.

I learnt in lecture 1 how the internet has evolved over the years. From the static web sites of Web 1.0, to the social spaces and network gatekeeping of Web 2.0, to the semanticly processed Web 3.0.

Out of 7.2 billion of a population, 2.5 billion of them are internet users. What surprised me the most is that well over half of those internet users, 1.8 billion, are social media users which really encapsulates the major role social media plays in society today.

Every one in five minutes spent on a mobile phone in the US is spent on Facebook. 757 million people worldwide log in to Facebook every day. Without a doubt Facebook is the social media kingpin dominating the web.

An interesting term I learnt was a 'Wiki'. Before the lecture I only knew a wiki existed in the form of Wikipedia but I was wrong. A wiki is a shared body of knowledge that grows as users interact with it & contribute to it, or in our context an online tool used by students to collaborate on group work.