REPORT 4
My Involvement with Internet
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What has motivated you in this class?
When I registered for this class, I had recently loaded software onto my
home computer that would allow me access to the Internet. I had browsed
among some news groups and had mastered e-mail, but I had not yet tapped
into the vast world wide web. I thought this class, in addition to
earning me some sorely needed credits, would give me the opportunity to
learn to reach all the information available to net users.
In the first few weeks of the semester, I began to fear I had taken on
something completely beyond my capability. I found myself trying to
create in a language foreign to me, with no html/English dictionary at
hand. As I saw my classmates' work appearing, I was motivated to master
this foreign language, believing I was capable of learning anything, if I
was detemined enough. With the help of my classmates and my cousin in
California (via e-mail and a few frantic phone calls), my site started to
emerge. The sense of accomplishment I felt upon seeing my first page
appear gave me the motivation to continue with producing my homepage, and
each of my reports. I hoped to provide visitors with interesting links
related to my topic, and was thus motivated to spend hours and hours,
night after night, searching and searching.
What conflicts have you experienced?
The largest issue I had to deal with was my personal conflict with
frustration. Inititally, being faced with a blank screen and the task of
creating a web site, while having no resource for instruction to even
begin, made me feel defeated before I even started. I looked at the work
of student generations that had come before me, and it was all
meaningless. I needed something that translated html codes into plain
English. I wasted so much time trying things, only to have my reports
appear jumbled and my links non-working.
But by far, the most difficult conflict to overcome was a time conflict.
After a ten hour work day, sitting for three to four hours at the
computer, searching for sites with "Good Ideas for Improving Procedures
in Business and Government", waiting up to 25 minutes for my browser to
load a document, and then coming up with material that did not fit my
subject was frustration greater than I could handle. I discovered that
dialing into UHunix from my home computer in the evening was virtually
impossible, and I had to force myself to wake up at 5 am every morning
in order to write my reports. In short, the frustration came from having
a limited amount of time to accomplish what I needed to accomplish,
knowing what I needed to do, and being prevented from accomplishing it
because of slow resources.
How demanding and challenging was this experience, and in what way?
This course demanded more of my time than any class I have taken. I
realized that my method of accomplishing my work was not the most
efficient, but it was the only way I could get it done. I loaded
Netscape and Winsock onto my home computer the first week of the
semester, but was never able to get them to work. I discovered I could
connect to UHunix using Windows Terminal, but could not get the cursor to
move or edit the document. Report 2
details how the Help Desk helped me solve that problem. Once I was able
to use terminal to write my reports, I still had to disconnect from
UHunix and connect to my server to look at my work. I wasn't able to
click back and forth and make quick changes. This method added to the
time required to accomplish each little thing. The demands of meeting
the responsibilities of my job and my home life required waking up at 5
am to get a hour and a half in UHunix in the morning, and spending the
few hours of free time I had in the evening working on this course.
The greatest challenge has been in doing searches. My database topic of
"Good Ideas for Improving Procedures in Business and Government" was very
broad. I decided to approach it by trying to encourage contributions
from visitors to allow them to have a say in how they felt government and
business needed to be improved. I used that same approach in trying to
find sites that presented such ideas from the public. With such a broad
topic, my searches produced results in the thousands, consisting mostly
of documents from various government bodies throughout the nation and the
world. Staying interested and motivated in this topic was extremely
challenging.
How worthwhile and valuable was this experience, and why?
One night last week I found a program on a local access channel that was
a discussion about the internet. Someone from the UH HERN project was
being interviewed. As he talked about different features of the
Internet, I was amazed at how much I understood. I knew before he
answered what gopher space was, that html meant hypertext markup
language, what a link was and what it should look like, and the
difference a browser makes in how a page will appear. I had felt this
class had been a struggle the entire time, and didn't realize I had
learned so much. When it was suggested at work that our agency could
benefit from having a homepage, I found myself offering to set it up.
While I found my database subject difficult to manage and much of the
sites I discovered boring, I did find some interesting sites and
information on other topics while I was browsing. I know now, that if I am
looking for information on a particular topic, that I can use search
engines to find the information. I had always hoped to use the Internet
for research, and now that I have a better understanding of how the
Internet is set up and how to travel around, I think I will utilize the
Internet to access information on topics of all kinds.
How involved did you become with the online experience, and with which
aspects? How has it affected your life?
Dr. James, our instructor, warned us on the first day of class that the
Internet could be addictive. He told us about students in previous
generations who spent hours daily on the computer. Well, addiction was
never a risk for me. While I spent every free minute at my computer
working on the assignments for this course, the time was spent in
frustration. I worked hard, but not necessarily smart. My method of
using my browser to read and search, and having to modem into unix to
write was not the most efficient way to accomplish the tasks assigned,
and while it worked, it took too much time. Every evening, as I
performed my searches, a little voice in my head kept reminding me of all
the other things I needed to do (prepare for the next day's meeting,
clean the house, get ready for hula rehearsal, spend some time with my
family). Much of what I found in my searches was boring, boring,
boring.
On the positive side, I learned so much about the internet that I forsee
using in the future. I think I will continue to browse for things I am
interested in learning. I found many sites, not related to my database
topic, that interested me, and without the pressure of completing class
assignments, I will use my new found expertise to continue to browse and
learn. Another aspect of the Internet I have utilized is e-mail. Before
taking this class, I had used e-mail to keep in touch with my cousin in
California. After years of keeping in touch via one or two phone calls
a year, we use e-mail on almost a weekly basis. Since starting this
class I have added other relative on the mainland and a few very busy
friends to my e-mail address book, and I have found e-mail an invaluable
resource for maintaining regular contact otherwise difficult in our busy
lives.
Being a non-traditional student with a demanding career and busy
schedule, my reaction to this course was less one of adventure and more
one of squeezing the required tasks into my schedule. After spending
much of the day on the computer at work, more hours at the computer in
the evening was not fun or challenging. After a day of reading, meetings
and phone calls, the results of my Internet searches were not
stimulating. But in spite of myself, I learned the skills needed to
traverse the Internet and to create a source of information for others.