Overall Learning

Creating a blog has been extremely advantageous. It allows me to reiterate what I learn about each week. I think this is very important for me in order to store information in my long term memory. It was a enjoyable idea to write about each activity in an informal manner such as a blog.

Prior to creating my account on blogger  I did not think that I would like writing a blog each week however I found it was the most enjoyable task in social media to write about everything I had learnt and share  photos. I was including people in my learning experience.

I learnt about screencasting, prezis, mitt app inventors, flickr, diigo, youtube, bookmarking, crowdsourcing, mash ups and pinterest.

I am certainly going to make use out of social media applications such as flickr and pinterest.I will be using Diigo for bookmarking for college sources. My favourite e lab was making the magic 8 ball, it was such a new experience for me to learn about coding and I got the hang of it quickly.

Our app is progressing nicely. We had to speak about the idea for our app in front of the lecture in week 9. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with my group so far.

Individual reflection:
We each contributed equally to the app. Our idea was aimed at people and students on a budget who wanted to be active. Everyone in the group felt it was an issue that we wanted to do activities outdoors however we never had people to do them with us. Our app allows people with the same interests to meet up and do activities in public parks. The idea for our app was brilliant, I feel students would get the most use out of the app. Our groups method of communication was on whatsapp and facebook. We found the wikis to hard to discuss things on. Our app is a success because we all pooled are resources and skills together effectively in order to get the finished product that we aimed for.

Week 8

This weeks lecture he has to watch a talk ted about the impact on privacy as a result of social media. We had previously learnt in lectures about the issues of privacy and social media, it was enjoyable to add to my knowledge on this topic from the talk

I had to make a flickr account. I uploaded photos from my desktop. I added tags and description to the photos so I could distinguish the photos apart from one another. I change the privacy setting  to public as I feel flickr is like  instagram therefore I feel the point is for people to look at your photos. I also created an ablum. I intended on using flickr to store all my photos because  my memory on my computer is full so I need a new place to store my photos

Here is the link to my flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/131044932@N02/

Week 4

In week 4 we had to do tutorial at home. I learnt how to use Diggo and Pinterest.

I already had a pinterest account therefore I did not need to set up a new one. I first heard about pinterest when I was in my final year in secondary school. My friends would use it for searching for ideas for projects. However, I do not avail of it's services often.

We had to download the pinterest button onto our browser, then create a board and add a pins of our hobbies. We had one specified image that we had pin which was a photo of Fungie the dolphin. In the tutorial we were showed how to like and re pin photos.

Pinterest is a very valuable service, I like to visualise my future and make vision boards therefore this website will be very useful in order to do so

I learnt that Diigo is a free social bookmarking service. It is an online tool for collecting and organising  web documents. We had to download the diigo button onto our browser. We had to bookmark a website and read the article which was about the negatives to mash-ups. I also explored other features of diigo such as the highlighter, taking notes, screenshots, searching, collaborating and using, bibliography and sharing.

Diigo will be very useful for college especially for the subjects which I am majoring in -sociology and Information and social computing. There is a lot of researching and reading involved with the coursework for  these subjects. My old system of storing information for involved linking the webpage of a particular reading or article on to a Microsoft word document. I now can simply click the diigo browser button in order to store my articles and readings.

Week 6

This week our lecture was titled: Video communication.
Therefore everything about this week revolved around video communication. Two of our readings were Ted talks which we had to watch online. The first talk was by Paul Lewis it was about crowdsourcing and the future of investigative journalism. It was interesting to discover the impact of our actions on social media and how it can contribute to a society. Magaret  Gould Stewart conducts the talk on Youtube and copyright. I did not like this talk, I found it very uninteresting. Margaret discussed how the youtube channel works with copyright holders and creators in order to foster a system which everyone benefits from

This week we learnt how to use screenomatic. Screencasting enables you to capture information on your computer screen and combine this material with audio to create a video.

We had to go into Go to http://www.screencast-o-matic.com. and Watch the demo video. Open Microsoft and record bits of information. As homework we had to add audio to our screencasts and upload it to youtube.

 

Week 7- Mash ups

Week 5

This week we had our third face to face lab in newstead. This week our lab was about learning how to use Prezi. I found this very valuable because I have consistenly resorted to using powerpoint because Prezi was too complicated for me. This tutorial helped me to grasp Prezi. 

Our group  have decided on the idea of our project. We are creating an app where people can avail of free public activities in public parks. We also decided as to how we wanted to present the app. We are going to do this by a Prezi, I am in charge of making the presentation so after learning about Prezi. I deciced to make my prezi about the function of our app and how to use it.

Here is a link to my prezi about our app:

https://prezi.com/tx_5dhuh5my5/how-to-use-the-app/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Week 3

 In week 3 the class had to attend another face to face lab in the Newstead building. This was our second demonstration on the MITT app inventor. We had to practice creating another app, this app resembled a magic 8 ball. The aim of this tutorial is for the magic 8 ball to produce an answer when the screen is touched.

I enjoyed making the magic 8 ball. I liked practicing coding because my project  team and I had wanted to get start making our app and coding it. Consequently, the more times I used mitt app inventor the easier it will be to make the our app.

The programme coding of the app is much more complicated in comparison the first app demonstration of the cat:

This is what the magic 8 ball appears like after all the coding is finalised:

Week 2

For preparation for class this week we had a choice between two readings:

Meier, P. (2012) 'Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge', [Online], Available: http://irevolution.net/2012/07/26/truth-and-social-media/

or

Flanagin, A.J. &  Metzger,M.J. (2008) The credibility of volunteered geographic information., GeoJournal, [electronic] Vol 72, Available: http://kfrichter.org/crowdsourcing-material/day3/flanagin08.pdf

I selected the next reading. This reading discussed crowd-sourcing, I previously studied crowd-sourcing  in a first year in a social computing module. I enjoyed learning about it therefore I thought it would be a good idea to add to my knowledge on the subject.

Crowd-sourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. We can crowd source on this blog pertaining to a particular issue.

We had our first face to face lab in Newstead with Shane. We had to use MIT app inventor in order to build programs and test apps. We had to download emulator onto our phones or laptop. I downloaded it onto my laptop. An emulator can be used to test your app- functions and appearance. These will be particularly important when we are creating our apps. Our task in this lab was to make a picture of a cat 'purr' when the emulator screen is touched.  My cat made noise when I touched the emulator screen. I was happy that I was able to make an app and learn about the different features on the mit app inventor such as user interface, the viewer and blocks

This is a screenshot of the Mit app inventor website

Initially, I had difficulties setting up the emulator.
Each time I clicked on the aistarter on my laptop this image would appear:

However, after multiple attempts of re-downloading the emulator software I combated the issue and my emulator now appears like the following image

Shane asked the class to parcipate in an experiment. The experiment involved not accessing social media for one day. I started at 8.00am in the morning and I was on whatspp by 9.30am. I can conclude that it was a difficult challenge it revealed the impact of social media in our lives.

Week 1

This week we did not have any e-labs. However, we we're still expected to complete task at home.
We had to complete three tasks:
1. Create a blog using blogger.com
2.Watch a video on 'How to Collaborate effectively'
3. Watch a video on 'How to create a wiki on blackboard' and then complete a quiz

I had no issues with setting up blogger.com. I did however had to set up a new gmail account because I did not want to use my college gmail account for this activity. In order to set up the blog, we had to customise are settings such as privacy and personal layout of the blog. Shane also needed to be invited as an author of the blog for him to access it and see the work we have completed.

I learnt that a blog was an online dairy. I enjoy writing diarys therefore I will thoroughly enjoy this exercise