1. Mass Communication & Media Literacy

2. Information R/evolution What skills do we need in a world of unlimited information? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM

3. Information Overload What can we do to manage the information tsunami? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psvYYCxMIuE

4. Personalisation Extract from Being Digital by Nickolas Negroponte (1996) How can we begin to take advantage of ‘true personalisation’ in managing information overload? In the post-information age, we often have an audience the size of one. Everything is made to order, and information is extremely personalized. A widely held assumption is that individualization is the extrapolation of narrowcasting--you go from a large to a small to a smaller group, ultimately to the individual. By the time you have my address, my marital status, my age, my income, my car brand, my purchases, my drinking habits, and my taxes, you have me--a demographic unit of one. This line of reasoning completely misses the fundamental difference between narrowcasting and being digital. In being digital I am me, not a statistical subset. Me includes information and events that have no demographic or statistical meaning. Where my mother-in-law lives, whom I had dinner with last night, and what time my flight departs for Richmond this afternoon have absolutely no correlation or statistical basis from which to derive suitable narrowcast services. But that unique information about me determines news services I might want to receive about a small obscure town, a not so famous person, and (for today) the anticipated weather conditions in Virginia. Classic demographics do not scale down to the digital individual. Thinking of the post-information age as infinitesimal demographics or ultrafocused narrowcasting is about as personalized as Burger King's "Have It Your Way." True personalization is now upon us.

5. Delicious Access your web ‘favourites’ from any computer connected to the web. Categorise them in ways that help you, and share with others. See Social Bookmarking in Plain English to find out how to use this service.

6. RSS in Plain English http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU

7. Google Reader Here’s a screenshot of my own feeds on Google Reader. Create your own account and begin to subscribe to some feeds that interest you. Follow the Google Reader in Plain English video for a 1 minute tutorial Although an effective and efficient way of syndicating and aggregating content, Google Reader doesn’t have the most appealing interface

8. Feedly Here’s a magazine style interface to exactly the same feeds that I have in Google Reader. Now the content is not only much more appealingly presented, feedly allows me to organise, filter, and subscribe to new feeds very easily. http://www.feedly.com/index.html