NET11 Curtin orientation

Unit outline from OUA website:

This unit will help you to develop your skills and understanding of the internet to a more advanced level, mainly through practical exercises, but also through a parallel investigation of the concepts which underpin the way the internet functions as an information and communication system. The unit includes consideration of email, chat, newsgroup and other communications, blogging, websites, file sharing and information management.

Very enthused with this course after logging on for the first time yesterday and ‘meeting’ some of the other students. The unit is conducted entirely online so, unlike my previous unit I have not felt swamped with a lot of printed reading material. Everything is online, seems to be well organised and easy to navigate.

To begin, there was a brief orientation tutorial which was quite good because it didn’t go into too much depth but explained nearly everything I wanted to know, such as turnaround for email responses from tutor (72 hours) and expectations for the minimum amount of time required for this unit (10 hours per week). There was a short survey before and after the tutorial asking similar questions, so it was interesting to see how my responses changed. After the tutorial I felt a lot more comfortable with commencing my first unit with this university.

I logged into OASIS to set my password and had a look around. Apparently I need to check this system at least once a week for any official communications. It seems to be connected with the Library as well, I will have a better look around soon. There was not a great deal about OASIS in the orientation tutorial, which I noted in the feedback section of the survey. I think it would be helpful to mention OASIS and briefly explain the relationship of this system to our participation in this and other units. (I dimly recall logging into a similar system at Murdoch, but beyond initial login I don’t think I ever returned!)

Next I logged into WebCT. This is where I will be going every day to read up on unit and assessment information, find course materials and enter the online discussion forums. It is the same system used by Murdoch during my last unit, so it was very familiar.

After having a good poke around the different sections in WebCT, my next task was to introduce myself on the forum. I discovered the thread started by our tutor Cynthia, who provided some very useful information and guidelines for the unit. We are expected to complete one module per fortnight, and our participation on the forum counts for 10% of our final assessment.

Quite a number of students had posted after Cynthia and I took the time to read through their responses. Cynthia had introduced an interesting topic to help “break the ice” - our first experience of the internet. I was quite encouraged to see many of the other students have things in common with myself - such as geographical location, study goals, interests and personal situation. I took some brief notes of a few names and points as a memory jog.

This group seem very different, and more appealing than the group from my last unit. There are fewer students for a start, and the majority of us are here with a common purpose and interest in Internet Studies. A few of the students have started blogs and posted links, I shall probably share mine at some stage. I suspect my participation on this forum will be greater than it was on my last unit’s forum. I am looking forward to it.