|
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 Reflection on wiki experience Today, we were assigned task to form a group to research on a given topic and upload it onto our class's wiki website. Our topic was on internet security. Honestly speaking, I didn't really get much chance to interact with the classmates in the class, so this served as a great chance for me to know more about them! Working in a group makes progress of a project/task productive as when there are more people gathered to brainstorm/research about a certain topic, we are able to share more different perspective of views and come up with more ideas. This is a really significant learning experience as I got to learn more about different opinions of my classmates and view the topic from a different perspective. Thus, it really helped in widening my scope of knowledge :) Besides gaining more information and ideas from my groupmates, I also tried my best to contribute as much as possible. I was assigned to research more about the current measures to improve internet security. I think it is really important to not only receive, but to give as well, because we are usually more familiar of what we've contributed, thus enhancing our learning in the process. The most challengine experience was to collate the large amount of information and summarise them into main key points. This may not be a tough task for others but I'm not good and summarising, hahah! I'd also advise next batch of students that are going to contribute on wiki to work closely with the groupmates. Contribution would definitely be more effective if you're able to work well and closely with your groupmates. For this, I'm thankful for having cooperative groupmates and we were able to work well with one another! :D If there are any relevant topics to my diploma, I'd definitely use it since the information contributed are collated by different sources and from a different point of view. Furthermore, the key points are more focused and summarised. Thus, it's definitely useful and less time-consuming since I would not have to search all over the web to get the same piece of information I want :) 0 comments Twitter! :D Twitter is really useful as it serves as a platform to allow students like us to interact with another. For example, when someone tweets about a certain topic, it may gain certain interests from others and we may start responding to one another's tweets, sharing information and opinions. This helps us to learn from one another and from there, we tend to have better memory retention of the discussed topic, which is also know as metacognition. Since twitter has a word limit of 140, it allows users to be clear-cut and direct. In EIR context, we've followed an EIR teacher and it is rather convenient as twitter serves as a platform for us to raise any queries easily. Following different classmates also allowed us to discuss about issues relating the the EIR lesson taught. Thus, twitter is really useful as it improved interaction between teachers and students. It also allowed us to know and understand each other better. This is rather different as compared to blogging on blogspot. On blogger, we tend to type long posts to elaborate happenings, feelings and opinions. However, using twitter, we would summarise our thoughts simply into the 140 word limit. Twitter is just like a mini blog to me :) For research purposes, blogs do serve as a good site to provide information and opinions of different individuals. Even twitter may serve as a micro-blog, it is unable to provide that extensive amount of information. Instead, twitter is useful for me as I would use it to follow useful users such as STCOM, which is The Straits Time. News articles would be shared by the account with links provided and they are useful for my research at times! I would say Twitter and Blogspot are equally useful, both are social network tools I adore :D 0 comments My dream holiday! Since quite some time ago, I'm really into Switzerland! If I've the opportunity to travel, my dream holiday destination would definitely be Switzerland! :) Why Switzerland? Well, during year 1.1, I've been assigned to research about Switzerland for one of my project. It was when I was rather fascinated by the beauty of the country, really hope to able to catch of glimpse of the spectacular scenery in person.  Figure 1. Bern and Aare River, Switzerland So gorgeous!!! :D One main reason I would want to visit Switzerland is because of the scenery! Yes! I want to try skiing too! It's rather boring to stay in Singapore sometimes as we don't get to experience the four seasons like winter! Furthermore, skiing seems super fun! View the video below to find out why I want to go to Switzerland :D Switzerland is really pretty, isn't it? :) I got most of my information about Switzerland from the website mySwitzerland. This purpose of the website is to promote Switzerland Tourism, and is the national marketing and sales organization for Switzerland. It covers a wide range of topics and useful tools/links from attractive offers, detailed information on all kinds of subjects, dream pictures, links to partners and a simple and easy-to-use platform for bookings via Switzerland Travel Centre (STC), the vacation specialist from Switzerland Tourism. For example, there are tabs at the top of the websites showing different helpful information that is provided by the website.  Figure 2. Tabs of mySwitzerland.com Thus, the presentation and arrangement of the website is very organised since users can easily have a complete glance of what they can find from this website. Furthermore, when one click on different tabs, a different page will load, and different sub-links would also appear below the tabs, which provides even more information about the topic on the tab being clicked. In this case, the website covered interesting and useful information, such as the top 200 attractions of Switzerland, which are further categorised into culture, nature, sports, museums etc.  Figure 3. Top attractions of Switzerland I think the most important criteria would be the presentation and arrangement. If the presentation is lousy and disorganised, readers would not be interested to read the information. For example, if the top 200 attractions of Switzerland were to be presented in one entire chunk without categorization, users will need to read through the wordy paragraphs in order to acquire information about the attractions they would be more interested in. I've also visited Switzerland through Second Life. I would say it is really different from what I've expected. Instead of a Europe country, it seemed more like an asian country in Second Life. I would definitely prefer going to Switzerland in person instead :)  Figure 4. Switzerland in Second Life P.S. I've commented on my EIR classmate's blog! It's quite fun to see each others' blogs and comment on them! :D  2 comments Citizen Journalism I think that Citizen Journalism is a very unique way of allowing people from all over the world to share information with one another. There are times when we come upon things that are fascinating or amusing, and we want to share it with someone but fail to. This is where I think citizen journalism is useful since it allows sharing of updates all around the world and people are able to voice out their opinions accordingly to their own different perspective of views each. It also helps to reflect the changing society and culture of different age group as time goes. For example, there might be posts of teens being more daring and open-minded where they behave intimately in public and images are captured. However, this also means that people that are the main leads of these news updates being posted have no privacy since they did not have the chance to grant the permission to have their images or news to be posted on a public website. I've evaluated Stomp according to accuracy. I chose this as the criteria because for other news websites, we're mostly able to trust the articles because they are posted by professionals. However, for Stomp, almost anyone can post an article. The articles might not be accurate as we're unable to confirm the source and credibility of the information and author. Furthermore, alterations might be done to pictures. Information may be subjective and some may be bias, thus providing inaccurate assumptions.  If I were to create my own version of Stomp, the only thing I would change is to add the policy of having 2 or more witnesses sending the information to the server before factual information is confirmed to be more exact. The article would then be officially posted. I would also ensure that there would be a section at the end of each article whereby there are recommendations of actions to be done or perhaps things to avoid doing in public as a form of education for the public. 2 comments Practical 6 - Databases While researching for information, most of us tend to use basic search engines such as Google which is one of the most popular ones. However, I realised even though it returns us the information we wants, it is too common. For example, everyone researching on the same topic as you would most likely get the same piece of information that you've got as well. Therefore, I've learnt to visit a different type of website, whereby you would be able to find more information, different from others :) It's the invisible web, databases! Just like its name, it is invisible! Why do I say so? Search engines are capable of retrieving information from the World Wide Web, however, that is not all! Search engines are unable to access and obtain information from databases, such as highly-quality authoritative materials! Not only the information is not available elsewhere, databases provide updated and reliable information since it is highly maintained. I would say a research, would never be considered effective if you only use one search facility. However, effectiveness would be multiplied if one were to combine the usage of multiple search facilities. Therefore, no search facility would be more effectiveness over another since it's subjective to each person, but a research would definitely be effective if one uses different search facilities in conjunction to obtain relative information. Thus, I would definitely include databases while researching for projects/assignments as I want the content of my work to be more specific and reliable, and achieve an effective research. In fact, I've tried using one of the databases provided by TP quite some time ago, to research further about subjects of my diploma, which is aviation related. This was also why 'Air Transport Intelligence' came in handy. :)  For my wiki experience, I realised more students had updated the wiki about the topic and I was able to learn more about it. Everyone has different perspective of view and I'm glad EIR provided the wiki as a platform for us students to share and learn from one another. In addition, it's also nice to see updates of other topics which are really intriguing as well! 0 comments Site feeds and Wiki updates :D Site Feed I've just added site feeds onto the sidebar on my blog! After reading my blog, you may visit my friends' if you want to! :D I always like to add useful or interesting links to share with my readers! It's always a great gift to share isn't it? Adding site feeds also benefit myself because I can easily visit the sites I love just a click away. I can also navigate to my friends' blogs easily and see what they've updated since the last time I've visited! Wiki collaborative work I think that collaborating work with other students researching on the same topic is great as I can get different information that I did not manage to find. It's a really great way to learn from one another. The more is always the merrier! I really benefited reading from the posts on the Wiki because the information is rather complete and are very interesting! 0 comments 4th eir lesson update! Meta Search Engine vs Subject Directory. 안녕하세요! :D (Annyeonghasaeyo, that's hello in korean!) It's time for another update! My eir blog is about one month old already! Decided to give it a revamp, like the new look? Hope you do! :) In this lesson, we were assigned to evaluate the effectiveness of various search engines. What are the websites that comes to your mind upon search engines? Google? Yahoo? Oh c'mon, don't you have any other special websites besides these two? Well, fret not because I'm going to introduce some interesting and super useful search engines that you've probably never come across! Search engines like google and yahoo have their own databases of different websites. Today, I'm going to share with something called Meta Seach Engines! Unlike search engines like gooogle and yahoo, Meta Search engines return you results of your topic from various search engines! Meta Search Engines does not have databases of their own. In this case, you'll get everything relevant to your topic from almost everywhere without the need of searching one by one, from google to yahoo then to msn and so on! Isn't this like super amazing? :D This is made really convenient especially for students like us, that often have to do research work on projects. Can't wait to try the Meta Search Engines? Let me share a few with you!  MetaCrawler  Mamma It's super cool isn't it? Look at the name, Mamma, mother of all search engines, totally fits its functions perfectly! :) Next, we were also told to evaluate subject directories too! In case you've no idea what subject directories are, they list sites categorised by topic and location. This is convenient when you want to find resources pertaining to a specific topic. To show you an example, this is a search I've conducted on Yahoo Directory using my topic. To get to my topic through the categories, I clicked on Directory>Science>Earth Sciences>Geology and Geophysics>Volcanology>Volcanoes.  Simple isn't it? Nowadays, researching seems to be almost as easy as ABCs! :) If I were to compare 2, I would definitely prefer Meta Search Engines because it's super awesome! It almost seemed as if I can get anything I need there! Meta-search engine is more effective in helping me to find resources related to my research topic since it is able to collate relevant and focused resources according to my needs at one go. It is totally different from subject directory since results are based on the subject chosen with the directory, not according to whatever is typed on the search bar. 0 comments |
The name is Jing Yi, Sheron. I'm 18 turning 19, birthday falls on 09April. I study in TP AMS P903, I wanna fly, to the ends of where the sky will finally lead to. Random facts? I love dogs! To be exact, I love my little doggy like crazyyyyy, he's my megalove :] I'm a die-hard fan of sweets, chocolates, icecream and stuffs. I may look fierce, but I don't bite! C: Wanna know more about me? You just have to keep reading ;D the sites. Blogger EIR-RAWKZ Second Life friends. Donovan Jun Siang other websites. twitter plurk formspring facebook October 2010 November 2010 December 2010 January 2011 Designer : Chili. x o x o |