NET11 - Introduction

Wow!
My first online course, NET11 and what a nice experience.
Ive spent the last week or so going through the process of :

• Orientation and familiarising myself with the online tools
• Introducing myself to the group
• Reading through the course content, curriculum and notes
• Trying to keep up with the discussion board (in 3 days there was over 150 messages ... wont leave it that long from now on!)
• Seeing if I can help anyone with my basic skills
• Setting up this blog / deciding what format use
• Buying a new monitor for study purposes of course !
• Updating my Microsoft Office
• Installing/ configuring and playing with MSN messenger

Now its time to dig right in to it!

Wikipedia is a very UNreliable (originally I had this as reliable but the postings to the board made me revisit this!) source of information, I refer to it alot because its easy to understand, lays out the information in a consistent and aligned format. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page .

My First issue - The information source.
Doing Google searching produces heaps of potential answers & results, but alot of the results are based on sometimes what I call 'misinformed opinion'. Unfortunately we rely upon and believe other peoples opinions on the web, which is their interpretation of the actual fact, and not the actual fact itself ... get what I mean !
Here I raise my first issue with the Internet - the information source - do we believe it or not and is it the information the stuff we really want ? (Ed note - refer module 4)

I'll give you an example :
Go to wiki and type in router or follow this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Router - a nice, clear explanation of what it is.
Now go to http://www.google.com.au/ and type in Router. The first entry I see today is www.ozcableguy.com/routers.html - this isn't what we want! With Google searching you have to be quite a bit more specific on what you want to search for.When the results are presented, you have to question the source and the content. I use the format in Google of 'define:router' - this gives me quite a few definitions from what looks like more reliable sources than 'ozcableguy' !

Anyhow, reading the content and Wiki'ing away at the titles to get the full understanding and setting a few bookmarks, I got sidetracked here for a few hours in computerworld, learning about a wireless networking concept and yep, the latest mobile phones !

Nothing here really I don't understand, I practice alot of this stuff daily in my job, to friends, experimenting and at a course I did 8 years ago at Interim covered these topics so its been a great refresher to rid myself of 'misinformed opinion'.

Observations
Like what I'm doing so far - will step up the pace!