Report 2

Learning the internet, Links to previous generations showing progress in the knowledge of internet use.

Learning the internet

Learning the inernet is a hands on process. It can take weeks maybe even months and actually you can never know everything about it, so there is always somthing to be learned. It just depends on how you go about it. What Ive noticed is that there is some sort of method to learning the internet. I break down this learning process into three phases,CONFUSION, RESISTANCE, and THE SPIDER MAN PHASE

Phase 1, Confusion


This phase is for the novice or the beginner when we don't really know what we are doing. Its like every new skill you try to learn, or take on. Remember learning to ride a bike? Its like that, in this phase its all trial and error. If you are a novice like me don't worry, you know what they say, once you've learned to ride a bike you never forget! (At least thats what they say, I wouldn't know I never learned to ride one!)

Christina Kealoha says, "When I first got on the internet, I felt confused and disoriented. I didn't understand what I was supposed to be doing and I felt a lot of anxiety because I wasn't sure that I would be able to complete all of the tasks. I also felt inadequate because I didn't know what was going on."

Terri Slaughter said," in a hypertext environment can sometimes be frustrating andsometimes rewarding. I have found that it is mostly frustrating because after I finally find the information I need, I am unable to completely understand what it all means."

Sharla Supnet Says, My first search ended up nowhere except for me feeling frustrated and helpless.

Chong Yoon says, "While on the internet, it seemed pretty complicated, somewhat confusing, frustrating, and difficult to find particular topics and items, especially when there's no information given on the "how to do something" functions. I mean there were the help commands on the screen, but the wording is sometimes too darn complicated to understand."

Phase 2, Resistance Phase


The resistance phase follows the confusion stage, its when we want to give up and call it quits. Its when we resist learining somthing new because we are unfamiliar with it. This phase is usually a little harder to detect than the rest because we think of it as just part of being frustrated or confuded, actually it is the result, but we need to keep pushing on!

See how one student resisted help because he assumed that he knew how it worked.
YoonWahn Cho says,"As I found out that last time, I don't ask for help easily and just keep working on and assume how it could work. I was not ready to ask for help. The situation was becoming worsen because I can not even find the very first button that was on the handout. I was just kept looking and looking but my anxiety was extremely high and felt bad about the fact that I didn't even start yet."
In another situation, Sol Valdez has too much pride to ask for help or admit that he dosn't know how to do things. He says,"The monitor then handed me an old beat up looking disk that had the number four on it. I was tempted to say, "Thanks bra, but I got a disk." Reason told me not to say anything and just act like I knew what it was for. He then said to me , as if he had read my mind ,"You put in disk to start." Suddenly it all came clear to me, how could I have been so stupid; "You put in the disk to start", that's all I had to do. When I finally got to my computer, I quickly and confidently popped in the disk and waited and waited. Nothing happened. The girl next to me I guess observing what was going on, took pity and instructed me to "press da button to turn em on". In my mind I thought "What if I was just thinking yet, you don't know?". But I said thank you anyway."

Donna Handoe says, "In class we were given the preliminary instructions for our first report. These instructions, at first seemed pretty simple; we would just report on our impressions of the previous generations writing. Then it became more complicated. We had to type in all kinds of commands just to make our reports look like regular word processing. What was I getting myself into? I had serious thoughts about giving up and dropping the class" By this we can see that she is resisting technology, she just wants to give up and drop the class, but she goes on to say, "but I knew that if I didn't stick it out I would be letting my computer-phobia get the better of me." So we can see that she recognises the resistance phaze but still keeps moving on! (I'm glad that she decided to finish the class, many people in my class gave up and dropped it.) Stick with it it'll get easier, I promise!

Yet another student, Angie Inouye contemplates about dropping the class as she expalins, "When I first registered for this Spring 1996 semester, I guaranteed thought it would be a fun and less stressful semester for me because I registered for two sociology courses (my minor), which are both a lecture type class, and two psychology courses (my major), one is a lecture type class and the other is a writing intensive class. Boy were my intentions wrong! From the first week of school, I was ready to drop out of my two major courses."
As you can see many people think about dropping the class just because its hard in the beginging, but if you stick it out, as you can see in the next phase it's actually worthwhile learning.

Phase3, The Spider Man Phase (transformation into a "web slinger")

In this phase students become more famillar with using the internet and are confident and no longer have to bumble around, waisting time and getting frustrated. They are like a worm that has blossomed into a butterfly. Or like a baby bird that just learned to fly.

Michelle Ota says, "At first, navigating through all of the files began to confuse me, it all seems like a big blob. But as I practiced using the links, going to and from my home page to other people's documents and the instructors home page, things began to come together. All it really takes is a lot of practice."

Robin MillerSays, "My homepage was a little more fun to make, although, I wasn't quite clear from the beginning what was expected. But, gradually, I caught on. (Sometimes I have to be hit over the head with things.)"

Chatelain Jasmine says,"The first day in class you may have explained that there is 3 diferent dimensions but as long as you don't see the screen it doesn't make any sense to me so maybe it weel be good to explain it all the first in front of a screen. well now after 1 month I have understood the picture and I fell comfortable going from one to another. By writting down all the procedures, I learned fast, and now, I don't need to look a it anymore."

Ronel Agarpao says, "My newest hobby is browsing through the World Wide Web. I wasn't into computers before, but after taking Dr. Leon James's course, Psy 409, using the computer has been a part of my daily life."

Learning the internet in a Cyber-Community


Well, learning the internet can be quite difficult in the beginning. At first putting up a page is really confusing because you can't just type exactly what you want, theres all sorts of rules and mark up tags that you have to learn. But once you get all that down its pretty easy! Actually by learning it this way, (in a cyber community) it seems alot easier because all your classmates are as lost as you are. This way you all help each other out and figure things out together. Where if you had to do this alone, you would probably just give up! Not only that, but you have all the previous generations to help guide you and give you hints on what to do and how to do things faster. If you take time to read them its kinda' good to know that other people have done it and are going through the same dispaire as you are and have succeded.

Advise for future generations

My advise to you is to just keep at it and don't put it off till later! Do it now!!! You'd be supprised how little time you have to do all of your reports. If you don't understand just ask, NEVER be afraid to ask questions!! You won't look dumb, I almost gurantee that someone else has the same question but is too afraid to ask. This is the fastest way to find out how to do somthing! So my only advise is to get help AS SOON AS YOU CAN and just get the reports out of the way. Think of it this way if you get all the reports done really fast then you won't have to think about them during mid-term or finals week. Otherwise you have to work on it day after day, rushing to get it done before the semester is over.

If you look at all the other reports they will all tell you the same thing!! So take my advise, DO IT NOW!!! (the reports look quick and easy to do on paper but it actually takes longer than you think. If you've ever taken Psychology 100 (unit mastery), and put it off till the end you probably can relate. It's kind of like that! If you just get moving in the begining, you can just take it easy when it gets to the end of the semester, but if you keep putting it off, you will have to spend many hours in the lab towards the end of the semester.

What I have found that saved me lots of time in the computer lab (which as you will find is much more that you would like to) is that when you look at your reports, find the parts which don't have links. You can do those at home (like an explanation of how you fealt using the computer the first time or somthing like that.) Then to further minimize your time, when you are in the computer lab just print them out and take them home, it takes too much time to read stuff in detail in the lab. Then when you go home you can do all the reports at home. You don't even have to worry about being connected to UHUNIX, you just do it all in Word for Windows or any other word processor (this way you can spell check too), and save it on a disk. Then when you get to class open word for windows, bring up what you typed at home, highlight it with the mouse, and go to "edit" and click on copy. Then just open the file you want to put it in and copy/paste it in exactly where you want it. (if you didn't understand what all of that meant, ask some one who took the class last semester or Dr. James and he will show you. The thing that was most helpfull to me was learning to use the copy/paste commands. I used them for EVERYTHING, from URLs(addresses) for links, to posting my reports, and even repeating redundant things like links to Dr. James home page on every report.

As you probably know technology moves very fast, and by the time some of you read this, it may not make sense or you may be wondering why I chose to do that way. Well technology moves so fast that by now there is probably a much easier way to do all of this. I know because when I look back on past generations, I myself don't understand what they are saying, like they talk about using E-macs?? What the heck is that?? Well you will probably look at mine and say what the heck is he talking about. So just be a little understanding, and know that this is the only tools that we had at this time. From what I hear, Word for Windows 7.0 (which just came out) is able to save text as .html so you don't have to add tags or anything. There is also Netscape Gold 3.0, which I've heard, adds all the tags in for you.

Help for future generations "tags"

Ok, so you signed up for Dr. James Cyber Psychology class, if you just started, you're probably lost like I was during the first few weeks *er* months. If you haven't figured it out by now you can't just type in what you want to. You have to have all these tags and stuff, which make it very frustratating. So I've made a small list of tags along with a little explanation of what they do. REMEMBER THAT ALL OF THE TAGS BELOW NEED TO BE PRECEDED BY < AND PROCEDED BY > and they don't have the ' in the begining and ending of them.

'h1' ----- Makes letters this big.


'h2' ----- Makes letters this big.


'h3' ----- Makes letters this big.


get the point? the bigger number the smaller the text size.
dd ----- This makes an indention in the begining of a sentence it it the equivalent of a tab.
'br' ----- This allows you to start writing on the next line.
It's like hitting enter.

'b' ----- Makes the text bold like this.
'em' ----- Makes the text italisized like this.
'font color=red' ----- Makes the text red
'font color=blue' ----- Makes the text blue
'font color=green' ----- Makes the text green
Got it now? Just type in any color you want! also applies to backgrounds too just type in 'bg color='what ever color you want and the back ground will be that color. Theres also aqua, yellow, purple , brown , orange , gold and black and white if your background is different colors. There are lots of other colors too just try them out and you may find some that you like. There are also some funky ones which you might have to look up the number for but for the most part you can just type the name of the color in.
'center' ---- Centers the text, like this.

'hr' ----- makes a horisontal line across the screen like the one below.
OK so now you know some tags, you also need to know how to end tags. What I mean by that is, lets say that you want to center your title so you type in 'center' the title of your report but you don't want the rest of your report to be centered. So to stop the centering process you would type in '/center' after the title (notice the slash in the front) so for example if your title was "kool stuff" it would look like this 'center' kool stuff '/center' then the rest of the report would be regular with the text alligned to the left.(keeping in mind that each tag must have a < in front and a > in the back of both the begining and ending tags.) This applies to most of the tags (some don't need ending tags) but they apply to color, text size, and centering. If you're see somthing on someone elses page that you don't know how to do you can just click on "view" and then "document source" then it will show you how they did it. (it will show you all the tags) You can also use more than one tag on a single piece of text, for example you can make text both blue and bold kool huh!?

Backgrounds and images


Ok so if you want to have some cool background all you gotta do is just find one that you like and click on the right mouse button. Then 'save as background' now you should have it on your disk or on the hard drive. So now move it over to your background file, and which ever page you want it to appear on, just type in 'background=the name of the background' on the top in the body and thats all to it! cool huh? You can also check out this page which has many bacgrounds for you to choose from. You can also make images into backgrounds. Just click on them with the right button as I told you before and 'save as image' then in the body just type in 'background=the name of the image' and it will repeat itself over and over and over and over and over..... and that will be your background!! If you don't understand what I'm talking about or your background is not comming out, go the the page whith the background you want and click on 'view' on the tool bar and then 'image source' and you will see how its done. Make sure that you have all the quotation marks in place, check the spelling, and look for extra spaces in between.

For lots of images you can check this page out!
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