Continuous Computing
Continuous computing – although we didn’t know what this term means before our tutorial class, it’s already integrated into our daily lives for quite a while. Most of us carry around with us, a digital device that can be connected to the Internet.
With continuous computing, we are no longer tied down to our desks and chairs. The desktop is not our only means to get connected anymore. We have our laptop but most people feel that it is too heavy to carry around everywhere. The most popular device that supports continuous computing is our handheld devices. These are light and small enough to put into our pockets.
We can now stay connected with people and get the information we need easily. It adapts to our location, our schedule and our preferences. In class, we can talk to friends who are seated further away without having to walk all the way to where they are seated. We can get information from the Internet to answer our tutorial questions. However, we must be careful not to let this draw our attention away from what we should focus on at that point in time.
Continuous Partial Attention
We all participate in continuous partial attention. How many of us spend hours on our laptop trying to work on our projects only to realise that nothing is done? It’s easy to spend our time on checking emails, facebooking, tweeting, reading blogs, playing online games, surfing the net, without knowing that hours had passed. This is different from multi-tasking, where we can handle several things at once. Multi-tasking saves time and is much more productive, unlike continuous partial attention.
RSS
We have to make sure do not waste valuable time on the Internet. RSS enables us to do so. With Google reader or other news reader, we can subscribe to websites or blogs that we like. Every time our favourite website posts new content, it will show up as news feed in our reader. We no longer have to laboriously type in the website address and check it for updates manually.
Social Bookmarking Tools
Another Internet tool that will help save our time spent on surfing the net, is the social bookmarking tool. The most popular and widely used social bookmarking tool is delicious. We can bookmark our favourite websites and tag it. After that we can create a tag bundle to organise and manage our bookmarks more efficiently. For example, we can create a tag bundle named ‘food’ and add all the tags related to food into the tag bundle.
This is helpful because the next time we want to visit food related websites, we don’t need to scroll through all our bookmarks to find it. Also, we can share our bookmarks with our friends by notifying them if they are added in our delicious network. If they don’t use delicious, we can still share our bookmarks with them via email.
Zi Xin
