Week Four

Week Four

Lecture

Weeks fours lecture describes the ever changing process of communicating between individuals and groups. Over the last few decades there have been dramatic changes in the communication area, especially now with IT communication. Communication between people can take place at anytime, even if participants are not in physical contact. There are four main types of communication used in society:

• Synchronous
• Asynchronous
• Place Dependant
• Place Dependant

You can communicate with people through many different programs such as:

• Microsoft outlook
• MSN
• Myspace
• Mobile phones

Not only has the advances in IT benefited communication between people but it has also helped students gain more information on subjects and it could be said that it has made studying easier. This is because you can search anything you want on search engines such as Google and Yahoo literally at the click of a finger or mouse.

Workshop

A podcasts is a digital media file that is distributed over the internet which can be played on computers and other portable media players. Radio stations for example use podcasts so that listeners can go back and listen to previous episodes. The advances in technology have allowed university students to podcast their lectures. This has created many benefits for students. Students can pay more attention to analyzing the material being presented in lectures as they don’t have to worry about scribbling down notes as they will be able to re listen to what was said in the lecture. Also students who are sick or have other commitments can easily download the lectures so they don’t fall behind. However even though there are many positives to podcasting it should not be available for students to use instead of going to lectures. This is because you won't necessarily pick up on main points as you cant pick up on the body language which often provides more information than words. Also podcast limit interaction between people which is not healthy. This is because life is all about interactions with one another and if people rely on podcasts rather than human interaction than this simple everyday task of human interaction can suffer. That is why podcasts should not take over but should merely give added assistance for students at university.


Week fours workshop task provides an insight into actually seeing the advances in IT communication. The task is to search a topic in the groups category in www.google.com I personally chose gardening groups in Australia and the amount of groups online was quite amazing. No matter what you are into there are groups online which have the same interests as you, for example there are groups online which talk about politics and world issues and there are groups who talk about ants. The group I visited who were interested in Australian gardens seemed to be very helpful with other peoples queries about their gardens. They all seemed to want to help solve peoples gardening problem from their own experience.

The image below is of the gardening groups online message board.



Readings

As internet communication is becoming more and more popular it is useful to know how to effectively communicate over the internet. Emails in particular can be confusing to the reader as for most people it is difficult to explain something only in writing. The readings in week four give information on how to effectively communicate via emails. A good email will:

• Have an appropriate subject title
• Will avoid sarcasm
• Will have correct grammar and punctuation
• Will get straight to the point
• Will give a response time
• And will be clear in what needs to be responded to

The extra readings, http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page6175.cfm and http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page4815.cfm, found on blackboard will provide information on how to construct a well written email.