This Media Presence site has been created for two purposes. Primarily it provides an alternative publication means to the standard essay response format. As my lecturer Lidstone (2009) advises in the Assignment 1 description, the assessment can be presented in a number of forms including “a combination of text, illustrated table or in any other format.”

A secondary role is an exploration of new media capabilities. A majority of knowledge and information in today’s on-line world is available in cyberspace and stored in various sites, databases and repositories within the ever-expanding parameters of the world wide web. The ancillary purpose of this exercise is to explore practical on-line publication tools that will allow me to better understand and utilise the resources of the www. As you will read during the course of this assignment, I have had a long association with different media forms and maintained an interest in their impact on myself and society as a whole. My quest as a media pilgrim (Zygmunt 1996) is to present and publish knowledge in a new format. I seek a format better suited to the online nature of available knowledge resources and environments, a format that encompasses and combines a variety of available rich media components with an ease of publication practice.

Most importantly, the assignment considers a number of key issues and/or developmental phases that I have experienced during the course of my life. I need to identify how these have influenced the decisions that I have made shaping the current ‘me’ and the circumstance I now find myself in. Why is it that I want to enable an ease of publication using rich media components on the www?

By analysing these key phases in conjunction with the political and social environments in which they occurred the notion is that I will be better able to understand who I am and, more importantly, how I got to be who I am. By extension, this understanding can be manipulated to shape where I am going.

I anticipate that this exercise in self reflection will benefit not only my own future outcomes but also the futures of those that I come into contact with within my capacity as an educator. By better understanding the way I think and how the environments around me have contributed to, and continue to shape, my thought I will be able to appreciate and understand the way others think. This insight into the thoughts of others will in turn allow me to better understand their needs as students. It will also help me to stylize the structure of the communication and educational mediums that I use to assist them.