Reading #5
“Information Navigation 101”
Andrea Foster
The “Information Navigation Article” is about the history of information literacy. The term “information literate” was coined by Paul Zurkowski. This was in the 70’s before universities and such even thought about this topic! It was not until about 15 years later when the term “information literate” became a well know subject across the country. Information literacy is not just about knowing how to browse the Internet, but more specifically how to maneuver your way through and find useful information and analyze websites for precise information. The cult following section of this article discusses the ways their fellow colleagues in the library are responding to this “information literacy” topic. Some say they are treating it like criminal code, while a dean of libraries at a university is pretty much saying it’s not as important as people are making it out to be because finding information is become easier. Even with the skeptics, professors are going to the libraries more to get help for their students because more and more are becoming reliant on everyday search engines or some are in a situation where they are the first ones from their families to go to college. They usually have not had the exposure to finding proper information prior to arriving at a college. Some schools are requiring students to now take an information literacy test to determine their literacy levels! I believe this is an eye opening article because even though “information literacy” has been around for a long time, the term is rather new. With more and more school officials realizing that being “information literate” is important to a students learning, I think it is great to see universities take the initiative to promote programs to help students be able to really learn how to do research. However, I think they should start this earlier in a student’s career like their freshman year in high school! After all, the earlier this is imprinted in their brain, the more they realize it’s actually easier to find “scholarly info” in a database then searching some website. Like the saying goes, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks!” So, hopefully this “information literacy” effect will start to trickle down to younger generations of students!
Thursday, April 16, 2009
News Report #5
"All in the Facebook Family: Older Generations Join Social Networks"
John D. Sutter
04/13/2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/13/social.network.older/index.html
Once again this is an article about Facebook. However, it isn’t about privacy issues or sexual predators like my previous news reports. This article focuses on the uprising of the “mature” crowd, which could be anyone from your parents to grandparents. Yes, according to this article, many parents and grandparents are signing up to keep up with their families that are in different locations throughout the United States or World for that matter. According to “Insider Facebook,” females are the gender of the older generation that is predominately signing up. I think this was bound to happen because a lot of older people started off on MySpace, however, they have more issues in terms of spam than Facebook. It seems that Facebook put a lot more emphasis on security before taking in such a large following. This in turn reflects a better image. I agree with the interface issues. Especially over the last few months Facebook has changed theirs twice. This can get confusing for people who aren’t familiar with computers. My sister, who is 28, has a Facebook and MySpace account, but would rarely go on Facebook because according to her “it’s confusing.” I agreed with her, but told her she would like it a lot better because it’s just a lot cleaner in terms of styling and page load speed is faster (most PHP sites are faster than ASP.Net (MySpace)). Once she got the hang of it, she logged on more and we communicate more frequently. I still talk to my parents on the phone, so they have yet to create a social networking account. While there are increasing numbers of the older crowd accessing these sites, I do not think there will be a day when every person over 40 has a page. It is good to keep up with your family, but you lose that certain form of interpersonal communication that you get when talking on the phone and some conservatives will probably not break the trend.
John D. Sutter
04/13/2009
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/13/social.network.older/index.html
Once again this is an article about Facebook. However, it isn’t about privacy issues or sexual predators like my previous news reports. This article focuses on the uprising of the “mature” crowd, which could be anyone from your parents to grandparents. Yes, according to this article, many parents and grandparents are signing up to keep up with their families that are in different locations throughout the United States or World for that matter. According to “Insider Facebook,” females are the gender of the older generation that is predominately signing up. I think this was bound to happen because a lot of older people started off on MySpace, however, they have more issues in terms of spam than Facebook. It seems that Facebook put a lot more emphasis on security before taking in such a large following. This in turn reflects a better image. I agree with the interface issues. Especially over the last few months Facebook has changed theirs twice. This can get confusing for people who aren’t familiar with computers. My sister, who is 28, has a Facebook and MySpace account, but would rarely go on Facebook because according to her “it’s confusing.” I agreed with her, but told her she would like it a lot better because it’s just a lot cleaner in terms of styling and page load speed is faster (most PHP sites are faster than ASP.Net (MySpace)). Once she got the hang of it, she logged on more and we communicate more frequently. I still talk to my parents on the phone, so they have yet to create a social networking account. While there are increasing numbers of the older crowd accessing these sites, I do not think there will be a day when every person over 40 has a page. It is good to keep up with your family, but you lose that certain form of interpersonal communication that you get when talking on the phone and some conservatives will probably not break the trend.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
News Report #4
"Conficker: What Happens After April 1?"
Stephanie Hoffman
4/2/2009
http://www.crn.com/security/216402353
This article about the Conficker worm, talks about a brief overview of the worm that until a few weeks ago, was not even known. Many of the people interviewed in this article say the Conficker worm is something to worry about, but it is not likely to be as harmful as some bugs we have seen in the past. While nothing happened today as many experts believe, experts believe it will strike again once the publicity decreases.
I first heard about this worm about the middle of March when it was first talked about on the news. I recently saw an interview on 60 minutes about the worm and many corporations have been hit even though they have much better security than the typical user! UNCW sent out a mass email the other day about this. You would figure with the elaborate network on-campus, the University would have notified students and faculty when it first came about! After looking on Google for some additional information about the Conficker worm, it appears it is not a worm that just suddenly appeared within the past few weeks. A few articles were written in January of this year. One in specific from the BBC (1/20/09) says this worm was first discovered in October of 2008. If security experts would have publicized this worm earlier then I believe there would be way fewer infected computers! One statement I do not necessarily agree with is the last quote in the article that says, “If you're worrying about how to prevent all those other threats that are out there, then you've already taken care of Conficker.” I do not agree with this because another version is supposed to be released in the near future. You may be safe now, but for how long? That’s always been a problem with the Internet; so many ways to exploit someone’s personal information and it seems your computer can never be secure enough!
Stephanie Hoffman
4/2/2009
http://www.crn.com/security/216402353
This article about the Conficker worm, talks about a brief overview of the worm that until a few weeks ago, was not even known. Many of the people interviewed in this article say the Conficker worm is something to worry about, but it is not likely to be as harmful as some bugs we have seen in the past. While nothing happened today as many experts believe, experts believe it will strike again once the publicity decreases.
I first heard about this worm about the middle of March when it was first talked about on the news. I recently saw an interview on 60 minutes about the worm and many corporations have been hit even though they have much better security than the typical user! UNCW sent out a mass email the other day about this. You would figure with the elaborate network on-campus, the University would have notified students and faculty when it first came about! After looking on Google for some additional information about the Conficker worm, it appears it is not a worm that just suddenly appeared within the past few weeks. A few articles were written in January of this year. One in specific from the BBC (1/20/09) says this worm was first discovered in October of 2008. If security experts would have publicized this worm earlier then I believe there would be way fewer infected computers! One statement I do not necessarily agree with is the last quote in the article that says, “If you're worrying about how to prevent all those other threats that are out there, then you've already taken care of Conficker.” I do not agree with this because another version is supposed to be released in the near future. You may be safe now, but for how long? That’s always been a problem with the Internet; so many ways to exploit someone’s personal information and it seems your computer can never be secure enough!
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