Week 6- Ted Talks-

This week I watched a few more Ted Talks in preparation for the class.

These talks were about crowd sourcing and youtube and copyright.

Margaret Gould Stewart talks about- How YouTube thinks about copyright- she is YouTubes head of user experience and talks about how the video site works with copyright holders and creators to foster a ideally creative eco-system where everybody wins. This talk reminded me of one I had previously watched and mentioned in my blog post from week 3/4 about laws that choke creativity and was given by Laurence Lessig.

The other Ted Talk was about crowd sourcing the news and was given by Paul Lewis. This talk was about how everyone can be a potential new source and about the future of investigative journalism.

Week 5-
This weeks we learnt all about Prezi and how to use it. We also made our first prezi, I found this very helpful and decided we would use Prezi for the e-marketing part of our group project.

Prezi is a presentation software, used for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas.

We started off by setting up a Prezi account and selected a theme for making our own prezi.
I decided to make my prezi on artificial intelligence.

I used the different features of prezi to add images, diagrams and youtube videos. I also added a variety of frames and customized my theme.
I really enjoyed using prezi and feel more confident now for when i go to use it again.
From watching the tutorial I am now aware of all the different features and how to use them!

Here is a link to my prezi: http://prezi.com/n6uprayadg7e/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

Here is a screenshot of the theme I was using and what my prezi looked like:

A Day With No Technology!!

One day in class, Shane suggested that we all try carry out a day using no technology.
Hearing the challenge at first doesnt sound like the worst and in fact, I thought I would be able to handle one day pretty easily!
Although, it was certainly easier said than done! I decided to try it one day and being honest, I didnt make it very long.
Firstly, I found it difficult to even remember the challenge I was taking part in and a lot of the time I found myself going to pick up my phone, not because I needed it for anything but just out of boredom and without thinking. I found it almost impossible to carry out daily tasks like checking emails and making arrangements with people. It stopped me from being able to research and look up certain information.
I felt like I could be missing out on big news or plans without being able to look at my phone. By the end of the day, hours without technology had felt like days!
This challenge made me realise just how much we rely on technology today.

Week 4-
This week was all about Social Bookmarking and Social Tagging.

As part of our Elab this week we each had to set up our own Diigo account. A social bookmarking service is an online tool for collecting and organising your web documents.

Diigo- a free social bookmarking, research and knowledge sharing tool created to mimiic the ease of taking notes while providing a network for sharing and discovering information. 

Features of Diigo include: Highlighting, taking notes, screenshots, searching, collaborating and using groups, bibliography and sharing.

For this Elab, I set up my own Diigo account and added the Diigolet button to my browser.
I then went on and read the article about the dark side to mashups http://techland.time.com/2012/04/06/combing-social-media-sites-can-be-hazardous-to-your-privacy/

I bookmarked this article by clicking on the Diigolet button and added a titie, description and tags.
Tagging is a significant feature of social book marking as it enables you to organise bookmarks so that information is easily accessible.


Screenshots of adding Diigolet button and bookmarking and tagging the article:

Week 3- Face to Face Lab

This was our second face to face lab for social computing and media.
This week Shane showed us on the projector how to create our second App and also how to install the emulator on to our computers (this was be important for our group projects.)
The emulator is used to test the android app that you have created to make sure that it works properly.

This week we were creating an App titled 'Magic8Ball'. I found that as we made this app I was forced to remember everything from the first the first time we used this software. It was a lot easier this time around and Shane was also going around answering any questions we had.

Week 3- Ted Talks

In the preparation for class this week I  watched a number of Ted Talk videos in relation to 'The rise of Collaboration'.

I watched Linda Hill on - how to manage for collective creativity.
She spoke about tools and tactics companies use in order to keep great ideas flowing!

I also ended up getting a bit carried away and watched quite a few more talks, all which are relevant to our coursework.

I particularly enjoyed Eli Pariser’s talk on ‘The Filter Bubble’

Eli Parisers speech on the ‘Filter bubble’ was extremely effective and gave me a further insight into the access we have to information today. Throughout this talk Eli is putting across how web companies today adjust news and search results based on a number of factors including our personal tastes. However, we are now suffering from one unforeseen consequence of getting trapped in a ‘filter bubble’. This invisible shift of information flow online and not being exposed to certain news is stopping us from broadening our worldview. In some ways it is frightening to think of the power that Google has, being the search engine that the majority of people use and the influence they have on forming opinion by being able to shape the news effectively any way they want.

I found it very striking to see that there are 57 signals Google looks at when it comes to attuning results to your personal preferences. A quote from Eric Schmidt in the video stated that: “it will be very hard for people to watch or consume information that has not in some sense been tailored for them.” Although this is true, the web is giving us what we want to see but this isn’t necessarily a good thing as we are being shown more of what algorithms think we want to see and not what we should see. It is essential that Google isn’t allowed monopolise

Another Ted Talk that i found very interesting was Laurence Lessig who was speaking about 'Laws that choke creativity'. This was in relation to the issues surrounding copyright. 

The first work shop for social computing and media.

The workshops take place in the Newstead building.

We explored certain software used in the creating of an app. The work I was doing was quite new to me and I felt I was learning a lot.
We were using MIT app inventor.

Shane was present for this class and explaining a bit about how to use it which I found very helpful.
 We set up how our app would be displayed as we create it on an android device or emulator and started building the app named 'Hellopurr'.

This is the same software that we would be using for the creating of the app for our group projects. Therefore I found this particular class extremely helpful.