ICT in the News

In today’s world news there are many stories concerning IT and recently there have been some big stories within the world of IT that have reached worldwide news.

The biggest of these stories would have to be the breakdown of the BlackBerry network and services. The glitch happened on Monday 10^th October 2011 and was blamed on a server fault at BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion. The network, that disabled owners of a BlackBerry device to use services such as email, messaging and web browsing, was down for a number of days before all services could be restored and put back to normal, the main service that customers were complaining about was the collapse of the favored BlackBerry Messenger, more commonly known as BBM, as this, when working, enabled users to send free messages to other BlackBerry devices, the network was reported to be down across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Another huge news story over the last few months was the London riots, and these riots are hugely reported over social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, many people either boasted about how they were involved in the riots, uploaded pictures of themselves in the riots (an example below), invited others to join in with the riots, planned attacks on buildings or simply just commenting on the events that happening over the time of the riots. And, following these social media activities that were carried out, the police and the government have managed to track down many of the people that were involved in the riots. 

E-Government

E-Government is becoming another big part of today's world, it offers many different services that allow people to find information they need or want and take part in things to help to make their Government better and in a whole, make their community better. In this blog, I am going to explain the features of E-Government and why it is good.

E-Petitions

An e-petition is a petition set up on your local council website for members of the community to easily and quickly look through the current petitions and sign them if they agree with them. This allows petitions to be more easily accessed by a much wider audience than ever before, anybody that lives, works or studies in the Kent area can now view and sign these petitions to their own accord.

I personally have signed a few petitions on these sites, one petition that I signed really took off, and it was a petition to do with bus travel for 16-19 year olds allowing them to pay a reduced one off charge in return for a years worth of travel in and around the Kent area, 12686 people signed this petition and it was so popular, due to the importance of the subject, that it was taken to a full council debate in which a conclusion was made to trial the pass in three areas and depending on the success of the trials the pass will them be available for everyone in Kent between the ages of 16-20.

This shows how important petitions are and shows the effect it can have, this is why the government have made it much easier for people to sign petitions online and in turn saving the government a lot of time and money as they do not have to register all of the petition slips, so by the government creating a website that offers such a service as the petitions it generally helps everyone in the community including employees of the government.

NHS Direct

NHS Direct is an online medical service that offers many different features that may offer help to save you the time and effort of getting your self checked up at a hospital or your local GP. It was introduced to try and solve waiting times at GP clinics and especially in hospitals as the average waiting time at a hospital is well over 3 hours on a weekend.

The service offers a free 24 hour helpline that residents of the UK can call any day of the week, any time of the year to help find out whether their illness or injury is bad enough for them to go into hospital or if they can stay at home and treat themselves with help and advice from the helpline.

How the online service works is it has questionnaires in which people answer interactive questions followed by more questions depending on your answers to the previous questions. Once you have answered these series of questions you will then be told some advice on what to do next and in serious cases you will be told to get yourself straight to the hospital.

The obvious advantages to this service is that by people checking their symptoms online, they may not have to go to hospital therefore cutting down on the waiting times, this can also be an advantage to the doctors and nurses as they then do not have to feel rushed when seeing patients as they have less patients to see so the ones that they are seeing can give have a thorough check to make sure they haven’t missed anything.

But there are obvious disadvantages too, this being that if a patient is checking their symptoms through the interactive questionnaire on the website, they could incorrectly answer one of the questions or click the wrong button therefore giving the client the wrong outcome, meaning that people could end up going to the hospital that do not need to or visa versa.

Taxing

With everything in the modern world being done through the Internet, taxing is another thing to now be being done through online services. There are many types of tax that you are now able to pay for online such as car tax, you can also claim your tax repayment and complete your self-assessment tax return.

Some websites also offer information on whether people would be entitled to benefits, what ever the benefits are, as you may already know there are many benefits that can be offered to people who may not be able to work or are looking for a job.

The advantages to websites that offer this services are that it makes it easier for people to pay taxes and that it can save people a lot of time by giving out a lot of information on the website. The disadvantages are that it could be difficult for some people to understand where they find the information and generally navigating their way around the page and from this they may waste time trying to find something and not actually getting an answer.

Statistics

There are some sites on the World Wide Web that offer services that show statistics concerning your local government and community whether it be the local crime rating in the area or to check the weather report for your area. There is one website, www.police.uk, that provides you with helpful information about crime and policing in your area, all it requires you to do is enter your address, postcode or place name. Once you have searched you area it will show what type of crime in was and where exactly it was in the area, this is a great example of e-government as it is a very advanced service.

The advantages to this service are that it is a very quick, easy and up to date way of finding out information, it is a massive advantage to find out crime rates in a certain area as if someone is thinking of moving house they may want to find out such information to make sure the place they may be moving to is safe for them and has the community that they want to live in.

The disadvantages to this are that websites may be inaccurate therefore giving people the wrong impression of an area; it also can make people find out things that maybe they do not want to know.

In my opinion I think that offering statistics like this on the Internet is a very clever way of giving people information as it is very easy to get hold of and generally very easy to interpret. 

Online Education Services

In the modern era, much of the teaching is either done through the internet, or information that is being taught is found on the internet, there are many websites that let students do work online and look for information online and, in this blog, I am going to discuss such websites.

MyMaths

MyMaths.co.uk is a website that offers an online, interactive maths environment. MyMaths is used all over the world; in fact it is actually used in about 70 countries and by about 4 million students a year. The students can access either on-site (at school), or off-site (at home), this enables the students to revise a lesson or do ‘homework for fun’ to enhance their knowledge of mathematics, and MyMaths have claimed that their website has been proven to raise standards of achievement in the mathematics area of learning. 

The lessons that they offer include many things to make the lesson more interesting, things such as games, interactive lessons and interactive worksheets just generally making the whole experience of having to do homework or class work more fun and for some students capable. This online service is also very useful for teachers as it gives them an easier way of setting homework and allows them to teach in a fun, different way while also making it much easier for them to track their students progress.  

So the advantages of MyMaths would be that it makes it much more fun for the students to do work, it helps the teachers teach and allows them to track progress much easier than ever before and it offers games to keep students entertained while also teaching. Along with the advantages there are also disadvantages, these would be that some students may get side tracked by the games and may not get the work done and schools may have to pay fees for joining sites like this. I personally think these types of websites are brilliant as they offer lots of information and display in a fun and interactive way, and, for some people, it makes homework something to look forward to.

Virtual Learning Environments

Virtual Learning Environments, or more commonly known as VLEs are internet servers that allow you to access all of your work maybe from school or work from the comfort of your own desk at home. It requires you to sign into your account you have saved the work on and download it to your home computer and either print off your work or carry on with it. This is very helpful and time saving as it means you do not need to carry a pen drive or memory stick around with you, which can be a hassle as it is easily lost, and you do not need to bother with sending it home via email as it will all be stored on this easy to use VLE.

The many advantages to this service are that it gives you a lot of flexibility around your work and where you can access it from, it gives you the opportunity to gain extra information, and is a general time saver giving people the possibility of working for longer periods of time as they do not have worry about the hassle of saving it to a memory stick or sending it home through an email server.  But there are also some disadvantages with it being quite expensive to install and set up, and there is also the possibility of losing or forgetting passwords and usernames, which can be solved but does cause hassle none the less.

My previous experiences of a VLE is that they are very useful and generally are a great help, but you are leaving the reliability of your work in the hands of the internet, so to speak. If your internet was down for example you would not be able to access your work that you may need to use urgently, by saving a back up copy onto an offline device such as a memory stick, it cancels out an advantages in cutting down time, but then at least you know you will have access to your work whatever the situation.

BBC Bitesize

There are many revision sites that offer students a quick and in depth analysis of a subject or specific topic that they want to revise maybe for an up coming exam or to help with homework. One of the biggest revision sites would be BBC Bitesize, it offers 20 topics to choose from in the GCSE area of learning with many different videos and interactive activities in every subject to give students a broader choice of how they revising, this helps students choose the best way of learning for them as it does offer written things like revision notes and then a miniature test. I personally have used this site many times in the past; especially when revising for my GCSE examination, it gave me a better understanding of some subjects and generally helped me revise.

The advantages of these sites are that they are easy to use, enables the student to revise in a way that may possibly be better or easier for them, but there disadvantages, a user may get distracted from revising and just play the games on the site or do something else on the internet, the information given on the site may be from a different syllabus to the one your actually using for your subjects at school.

Online Resources

The Internet is now one of the main ways to get information on anything, it is so simple anyone who has a basic knowledge of the Internet or computing can easily find anything they want on the web. There are many search engines that if you type something into the search bar, it will return with millions of results, for example, if I typed into ‘football’ it comes up with 1,350,000,000 results, as you can see there is bound to be the information you are looking for on the topic of football throughout the results returned, but then that is a very broad search, if I search a more specific query I will get less results but would still more than likely be returned with enough information to find what I was looking for.

Finding this many results is an obvious advantage if you know what your looking for, if you do not know what you are looking for you could be faced with a problem to try and find genuine information and may use false information for something like work or important documents, this could then turn into being a disadvantage.

School Email

School email is a very useful thing; it is basically just an email server that is just used for a specific network of people throughout the school. Once set up correctly it allows students to type in a teachers name with out an actual email address and send them an email directly. It is just an easier way of using email throughout a school.  The advantages would be that it is very quick and easy to use, allowing users to send an email in an instant as long as the server is set up correctly. The disadvantages would be that the server could crash leaving the students, which may have been relying on this service, without a way to contact the teachers. 

Copyright

A copyright is a set of rights granted to you, as the creator of something you made or created that is original, for a period of time. An example of something that has been copyrighted and is well known to be copyrighted is the iPhone, the iPhone have been copyrighted to make it special among mobile phones and especially touch screen mobile phones. 

e-Commerce

In today’s environment, use of online services for money related purposes are forever increasing. Use of sites such as Amazon and eBay are at an all time high with many users of the internet beginning to discover such sites. People are now happy to input there personal details and credit or debit card details to have the privilege of using there credit or debit card online.

Brick and Click

Many businesses now offer an online shop to partner their high street shop. Businesses offer the offline services, bricks, and online services, clicks, and some companies offer a third way of ordering, over the phone, if they do not offer this service then many of them will offer a telephone support line.

An example of bricks and clicks is when a store allows the customers to order a product through the website or order it physically in the store, once ordered customers then have a choice of getting there products delivered to their house or going to the store to pick up the product once it has been delivered to the store. A site that offers this is republic.co.uk:

There are advantages and disadvantages for both customers and the business for brick and click, advantages for the customer being that they can try on cloths or actually physically hold an item to know what it looks/feels like and the advantages for the business that, over the internet, you get a bigger audience that could possibly buy from the store. The disadvantages for the customer being that they would have to pay for postage and packaging if bought online, and for the business, having to pay for the shop building and, if they have staff, staff wages.

Online Businesses

Over the last few years, solely online businesses have become some of the biggest businesses in the world, sites like amazon.com and play.com being amongst the biggest of them. With businesses like this being the solely online they do not have a physical store where people can go and try things on or generally look, this is a disadvantage for the customer and an advantage and disadvantage for the business as they do not have to pay for the building but could lose out on sales through this.

I personally use these sites often as they generally offer much cheaper prices than other stores as they have to pay for other things such as staff costs and buildings which solely online sites do not have to worry about.

The advantages for the business of this way of selling is that they do not have to pay as much money in overheads as the price of a website is much cheaper than a price of a building, another advantage would be that they can have their whole selection of products being shown on the website whereas this would not be possible in a building. The advantages for the customer would be that they are able to shop at any time of the day as the website is open 24/7, this would be convenient for people that work during the day and possibly not being able to go shopping before or after work, it is also very good for students who maybe do not have to ability to travel to and from a shop very cheaply or maybe not even at all.

Online Banking

Online banking is becoming a very prominent way of banking in today’s world. People can use it for many different uses; they can transfer money from one account to another, look at their balance and generally manage their money more easily through this online service. Although used by millions, people still believe that online banking isn’t safe to use as they believe many things could go wrong such as, being scammed, losing their details or making a mistake causing them to lose money, this is why the majority of banking is still done in the actual bank on high streets. Online banking has become very safe and easy to use over the course of it being around, which is why people are now not so worried about using it, they realise that it is a very quick, easy and safe to use.

I personally use this service, as, for me, it is very useful for checking a balance before I buy something online, and I know that everyone in my immediate family also use this service.

Auctions

Auction sites are another service that is becoming massive. Sites such as eBay.com and Gumtree.com are increasingly becoming some family’s main way of shopping as they offer many products, may they be used or new, at discounted prices, many people see such sites as “an online boot fair” as, along many other products, some people try and sell anything. Many sellers sell things at discounted prices to get people to look at their product and think “this is really cheap” and when they look at it closely they see that the seller is charging more money in postage and packaging, or P+P, so that they are actually making a profit so in turn, buyer isn’t actually saving anything.

Every time a user buys or sells something, the other person in the process, either the buyer or seller, leave feedback, which, if good, makes your account more established so people would be more incline to buy from you, making you a ‘Power Seller’ but if they leave bad feedback them your rating goes down making people not want to buy from you. This can be an advantage to buyers and seller, but it can also be a BIG disadvantage.

Many people use this service to make a little bit extra cash; maybe to buy new things or to pay the bills, here is a video to prove this:

There are obvious advantages to sites like this, making money from old junk that you may not want anymore but somebody else does, and generally clearing the house from junk, but there are disadvantages as well, people may offer fake products to buy at the price of the actual product so people will think that the product is genuine.

Overall, e-Commerce has become one of the most useful services available today online and gives people the ability to do everyday things much easier and quicker.