Thursday, 29 October 2009

Research Methodology

Mobile phones may be quite a new technology but we can see that they have made a massive impact on society since their introducion in the 1980's. Now they may have only recently become very common items for everyone to have but different people do still have considerably different views on them, and whether they actually improve safety and security or hinder it. Some people see mobile phones as improving safety and security but other people argue that mobile phones are actually the cause for reducing safety and security.

Due to time constraints I will not be producing a questionaire and gathering primary source information. Although this would have been preferable in gathering the viewpoints of a large cross section of society, there is enough research in the same area from newspapers, journals and books that I will be able to use in my essay.

Friday, 16 October 2009

Literature Review

Hope this is somewhere along the right lines...

Ling 2004 states that safety and security are amoung the basic reasons to own a mobile phone. He writes that the mobile phone has evolved into a general sense that they provide us with security. He also writes that they have proved their usefulness in emergency situations as a way of calling for help, and uses examples when two persons who were trapped on on a Swiss mountain sent a text message to friends back London who then raised the alarm to rescue. However Ling also looks at the aspect that mobile phones can actually reduce our safety such as in car accidents and in a study carried out by Redelmeier and Tibshirani in 1997, they looked at the data from 742 accidents with no personal injury in 1994 to 1995 and 24% of people had used a mobile phone in the 10 minutes prior to the accident, and completing the circle 40% of the participants then called the emergency services via their mobile telephone. Devitt 2008 also argues that mobile phones create more of a danger to children and teenagers by providing them with a false sense of safety and security. This entices children and teeagers into taking more risks that they wouldn't have without a mobile phone such as allowing staying out later or splitting up with friends. Some young people do see this issue themselves and are concerned about thefts or muggings.

References
Ling, R. 2004 "The Mobile Connection The Cell Phone's Impact On Society" USA. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
Devitt, R. 2008 "The Role Of Mobile Phones In Family Communication" United Kingdom. *

* This is a journal from the library website, have I included enough information?

Sunday, 11 October 2009

VARK Questionnaire

As part of the Learning and Skills for Higher Education and Work i have to complete the VARK Questionaire that is designed to inform the quiz taker what type of learner they are. My results from the questionaire are as follows:
V - 5
A - 2
R - 6
K - 4

This shows that I am primarily a Read/Write learner, however the Visual and Kinestetic learning styles follow closely behind. However the test shows that I am definitely not an Aural learner.

Does this surprise you?
These results do not suprise me because i have always enjoyed more practical lessons during school and college and during teacher led lessons often been thinking about something else rather than the lesson at hand. I also prefer practical work because it give you the kind of experience and knowledge that you cannot learn from a textbook or computer screen. As an example from my Cisco IT Essentials lessons, I often struggled actually getting everything connected properly and on more than one occaision connected a cable the wrong way round which makes the device in question either function incorrectly or not at all. I can also give an example from my job where although I am given a map to learn a new route, I like to actually go and do it to learn it which has proved successful in the fact that my boss can ask me to cover any one of approximately 17 routes, and can visualise where i'm going and the quickest way about it straight away in my mind.

Which style of learning is your least favourite?
My least favourite style of learning by some margin is Aural which is listening to a lecturer or teacher. Unless the subject is reletively interesting, i often find that i do not take in information and instead it passes straight over the top of my head. One technique I could use to improve in this learning area is reading up on the lecture notes before the lecture, so i know what its actually going to be about and engage with what is being said more.