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