I just have to admit that the Microsoft Office applications are a HUGE assistance. In comparison with Microsoft word and other applications on the computers, for example notepad, it is so much more time efficient and easy. Microsoft Word has the spell check, thesaurus, dictionary, word count and more, while Microsoft Excel can produce graphs quickly and professionally as well.
This week’s exercise was to construct several activities on each application and see how it was useful. Well I can agree I didn’t know how to mail merge letters on Word and how to use Macros on Excel, however the reality is these extra feature are irrelevance and not useful for career. Yes, the software itself, is extremely useful to me in terms of typing reports and assignments just not the additional features we where required to investigate.
I did have some problems completing them as I was a little confused and couldn’t relate as I will probably never use a Marco again. It tasks weren’t difficult but I just found it tricky continuously cross check the instructions from the internet with what I was doing on the excel spreadsheet. Overall I have been using Microsoft office applications for years and will continue to do so.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Notes
Did you know there is a difference between the internet and web??? This is an interesting phenomenon as I have always thought it was the same thing and has the same meaning. Well I have learnt to think of the internet as a collection of computers because every website on the internet is just a collection of files... For example html, a document, images, sounds, etc. Thought this information might be useful for the further understanding of the computer for all those clueless people out there like me. This was presented in week six lecture.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Evaluating Wikipedia
Today we will continue to challenge the reliability of the renowned source identified as Wikipedia. To achieve this I will be researching two Wikipedia articles about unrelated topics, which I am familiar with, and analyse its accuracy to the information provided. The following articles I have decided to investigate are my favourite musical artist, Gwen Stefani (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwen_Stefani), and my favourite television show, Will and Grace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_and_grace).
After reading the two articles I found them to be quite accurate and descriptive. It may be that these article topics which I choose to look up where not extreme contents that have particular different views and are straight forward facts, but I found the sources to be quite informative and analytical correct. The articles showed chronological order of events and covered all the basic facts that you’d require to understand who ‘Gwen Stefani’ was and what ‘Will and Grace' is about.
In regard to the guidelines Wikipedia has placed, once again the articles were portrayed according to the recommended procedures and it constructed by the grouping technique and is built in a professional manner. In particular, I noticed how the article was up to date with Gwen’s current pregnancy of her second child showing that the piece had been update regularly to include present information. The information was organised in a fair and balanced manner and did not create a sense of bias side to a particular argument. The only wrong things I could find in the articles were some unsuitable and irrelevant information provided and the presentation of the information to be overloading. The writing quality of each subsection of the articles in grammatical and structural qualities is terrible. In most paragraphs, they lack any cohesion and trail off with facts without conclusion. Entire sections are composed of orphan sentences, and style and clarity is ignored.
If I had to make any changes to the article it would be to present it in an essay style cohesive flow between with subsection grouping of information e.g. from music career, non-musical projects, personal life and public image. Apart from the fact that I love Wikipedia as a resource and do agree it can contain unreliable data in some instances; however in this investigation on my chosen topics I found it to be accurate. In conjunction to the production of unreliable date it is cited directly from the Wikipedia research page: "It is in the nature of an ever-changing work like Wikipedia that, while some articles are of the highest quality of scholarship, others are admittedly complete rubbish".
From this course, I have now learnt to not trust everything I read on the internet, not just Wikipedia, and tend to question ALL my web resources.
After reading the two articles I found them to be quite accurate and descriptive. It may be that these article topics which I choose to look up where not extreme contents that have particular different views and are straight forward facts, but I found the sources to be quite informative and analytical correct. The articles showed chronological order of events and covered all the basic facts that you’d require to understand who ‘Gwen Stefani’ was and what ‘Will and Grace' is about.
In regard to the guidelines Wikipedia has placed, once again the articles were portrayed according to the recommended procedures and it constructed by the grouping technique and is built in a professional manner. In particular, I noticed how the article was up to date with Gwen’s current pregnancy of her second child showing that the piece had been update regularly to include present information. The information was organised in a fair and balanced manner and did not create a sense of bias side to a particular argument. The only wrong things I could find in the articles were some unsuitable and irrelevant information provided and the presentation of the information to be overloading. The writing quality of each subsection of the articles in grammatical and structural qualities is terrible. In most paragraphs, they lack any cohesion and trail off with facts without conclusion. Entire sections are composed of orphan sentences, and style and clarity is ignored.
If I had to make any changes to the article it would be to present it in an essay style cohesive flow between with subsection grouping of information e.g. from music career, non-musical projects, personal life and public image. Apart from the fact that I love Wikipedia as a resource and do agree it can contain unreliable data in some instances; however in this investigation on my chosen topics I found it to be accurate. In conjunction to the production of unreliable date it is cited directly from the Wikipedia research page: "It is in the nature of an ever-changing work like Wikipedia that, while some articles are of the highest quality of scholarship, others are admittedly complete rubbish".
From this course, I have now learnt to not trust everything I read on the internet, not just Wikipedia, and tend to question ALL my web resources.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Brace yourself as this paper is a difficult one to gasp your head around. Who ever said the previous tutorials for New Communication Technology were too easy is going to be the persecuted… Just joking. But seriously.
Walter Benjamin’s paper titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” contains many influential ideas that has shaped cultural and media theories for years. It was produced in the effort to describe a theory of art that would be useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art. This can be applied to today’s contemporary digital media which compose of mass media like posters, magazines with photography, radio and cinema. Benjamin referred to this aspect of mechanical reproduction as liberating. He argued that techniques of reproduction utilized in photography and film have a liberating potential because of their ‘destructive, cathartic… liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation.’ This refers to the current portrayal of contemporary digital media and ridicules the progressing revolutionize of art. Art has changed from a time when it was only produced by artists who were skilled professionals in their class. It is now subdivided between anyone that owns a computer and can create things digitally through music, images and video. In an age of digital manipulation it comes as no surprise that we question the authenticity of these of art. Benjamin considers the idea of an artwork having an ‘aura’. He used the word ‘aura’ to refer to the sense of awe and reverence one presumably experienced in the presence of unique works of art. Through this term, he uses it to describe a sense of profound appreciation for something that can only be triggered by a true and original piece of art and that anything reproduced or altered mechanically loses this sense of authenticity and therefore holds no true ‘aura’. For example a photo; it loses all artistic value because it is merely an image reproduced by a machine and loses the requirement of skill from the artist and is basically just a creation of technology rather than human talent. So therefore from a photographic negative that can make any number of prints, it makes so sense to ask for the ‘authentic’ print.
Digital photographic reproduction is a different case. To digitize something is essentially to de-materialise it, to reduce it to an entirely quantifiable binary string. The art is quantified and can be reproduced or viewed. This has the same kind of revolutionary impact on art that photography has. Another implication, in digital technology, is that it is essentially open to exposure in the sense that anyone can possibly alter it and redistribute it. The idea of ownership has modernized, and Benjamin’s idea of ‘authenticity’ is once again annihilated completely. So does digital art have an ‘aura’? According to Benjamin, this aura inheres no in the object itself but rather in external attributes such as its known line of ownership, its restricted exhibition, its publicized authenticity, or its cultural value. ‘Aura’ is therefore a suggestion of art’s traditional association with primitive and feudal structures of power. Consequently, with the arrival of mechanical reproduction the experience of art is freed from place structure and instead brought under the control of a mass audience, leading to a shattering of the ‘aura’.
"For the first time in world history," Benjamin wrote, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual." Benjamin argued that the withering of the aura was a more complicated historical development, an ambiguous force that also had the potential for democratizing both access to cultural objects and a critical attitude toward them. "Instead of being based on ritual, [art] begins to be based on another practice - politics."
Walter Benjamin’s paper titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” contains many influential ideas that has shaped cultural and media theories for years. It was produced in the effort to describe a theory of art that would be useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art. This can be applied to today’s contemporary digital media which compose of mass media like posters, magazines with photography, radio and cinema. Benjamin referred to this aspect of mechanical reproduction as liberating. He argued that techniques of reproduction utilized in photography and film have a liberating potential because of their ‘destructive, cathartic… liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation.’ This refers to the current portrayal of contemporary digital media and ridicules the progressing revolutionize of art. Art has changed from a time when it was only produced by artists who were skilled professionals in their class. It is now subdivided between anyone that owns a computer and can create things digitally through music, images and video. In an age of digital manipulation it comes as no surprise that we question the authenticity of these of art. Benjamin considers the idea of an artwork having an ‘aura’. He used the word ‘aura’ to refer to the sense of awe and reverence one presumably experienced in the presence of unique works of art. Through this term, he uses it to describe a sense of profound appreciation for something that can only be triggered by a true and original piece of art and that anything reproduced or altered mechanically loses this sense of authenticity and therefore holds no true ‘aura’. For example a photo; it loses all artistic value because it is merely an image reproduced by a machine and loses the requirement of skill from the artist and is basically just a creation of technology rather than human talent. So therefore from a photographic negative that can make any number of prints, it makes so sense to ask for the ‘authentic’ print.
Digital photographic reproduction is a different case. To digitize something is essentially to de-materialise it, to reduce it to an entirely quantifiable binary string. The art is quantified and can be reproduced or viewed. This has the same kind of revolutionary impact on art that photography has. Another implication, in digital technology, is that it is essentially open to exposure in the sense that anyone can possibly alter it and redistribute it. The idea of ownership has modernized, and Benjamin’s idea of ‘authenticity’ is once again annihilated completely. So does digital art have an ‘aura’? According to Benjamin, this aura inheres no in the object itself but rather in external attributes such as its known line of ownership, its restricted exhibition, its publicized authenticity, or its cultural value. ‘Aura’ is therefore a suggestion of art’s traditional association with primitive and feudal structures of power. Consequently, with the arrival of mechanical reproduction the experience of art is freed from place structure and instead brought under the control of a mass audience, leading to a shattering of the ‘aura’.
"For the first time in world history," Benjamin wrote, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual." Benjamin argued that the withering of the aura was a more complicated historical development, an ambiguous force that also had the potential for democratizing both access to cultural objects and a critical attitude toward them. "Instead of being based on ritual, [art] begins to be based on another practice - politics."
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