Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Reflection on Comic Activity
In class today we did an activity where we paired up and made a short comic about collective intelligence. I was not sure at first where I would start and neither was Rachel. We had never met before but after a little bit of talking, we were able to come up with some great ideas together. She offered ideas that I had not thought of and vice versa. Working together was very beneficial for this assignment because with our shared ideas we were able to make a decent comic in a few minutes.
Response to Jenkins Blog & Quality Chapter
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2008/02/last_week_my_travels_took.html & Born Digital Chapter 7: Quality
Summary:
The common topics between the blog post and the chapter are the quality and validity of shared information. In Jenkin's blog, he recounts his experience at the Educause Learning Initiative conference which was about incorporating technology into college education. An important report given, called the 2008 Horizon Report, listed many technologies that are soon going to play a big part of teaching, learning, and creative expression. Some included mobile broadband and collective intelligence. Jenkins believes that collective intelligence, knowledge received from big groups of people, is necessary for young people. He gives some positive consequences of using collective intelligence in education. He mentioned that schools have a monopoly over the spread of knowledge and collective intelligence can change that for the better by having people learn from diverse sources not just one main source. There was an activity done to demonstrate collective intelligence where an expert on the topic of Caribbean culture named Julian wrote down all that he knew about it while a group of teens did the same. Of course the lists were different, with Julian's being more organized, but both were good contributions. Jenkin's post was very optimistic, but the chapter seemed to shed a different light on the topic of collective intelligence. It began negatively with an account of how John Seigenthaler Sr. was wrongly accused on Wikipedia of being a part of the Kennedy assassinations. The inaccuracy of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia editable by anyone, led to much controversy. The next thing that was brought up was an incident where during a CBS broadcast, documents were shown from President Bush about him wanting to get treated better than others in the National Guard. Investigation into those documents proved that they were false. Two examples of poor information quality set the tone for this chapter. The purpose was to show the importance of information accuracy because a lot of our choices and thoughts are based on that information. There is a debate on whether online sources such as Wikipedia are less accurate than printed sources such as Britannica. Nature, a highly regarded scientific journal, did an experiment where experts carefully examined some articles in both encyclopedias to test accuracy. Of course, neither were perfect but surprisingly, Wikipedia wasn't trailing too far behind Britannica in accuracy. However, with sites like Wikipedia, such as Youtube and blogs, problems can arise because most of the information is shared by amateurs. At a time where the internet is the people's first choice find information, it would help if the information was correct. Information quality is hard to judge sometimes, though, because of its different contexts. What may help one person in one situation may be completely useless for another.
What Surprised Me?
There were two statements in the chapter that really annoyed me and one was on pg. 161 where it says, "The majority of the population born digital doesn't perceive quality of information as an important issue, it seems." I don't understand what being born in a digital world has anything to do with us wanting accurate information. Everyone would prefer to have the correct info, why wouldn't we? Next was on pg. 162 where it says, "Many young people don't worry about the carcinogenic properties of tobacco, either. . ." That statement is so false. Almost everyone I know does not smoke tobacco and is disgusted by it. If anything it's the older generation with their chewing tobacco and pipes that don't care about the carcinogens in tobacco. I feel like the author made a lot of generalized conclusions about teenagers and it is not the first time in the book that he has done that. It's ironic how the chapter was on information accuracy and those few lines were not in one way accurate.
Ponder This:
Even though many professors look down upon using Wikipedia for research, do you think it is still a good way to start your research before getting into the specific details?
Summary:
The common topics between the blog post and the chapter are the quality and validity of shared information. In Jenkin's blog, he recounts his experience at the Educause Learning Initiative conference which was about incorporating technology into college education. An important report given, called the 2008 Horizon Report, listed many technologies that are soon going to play a big part of teaching, learning, and creative expression. Some included mobile broadband and collective intelligence. Jenkins believes that collective intelligence, knowledge received from big groups of people, is necessary for young people. He gives some positive consequences of using collective intelligence in education. He mentioned that schools have a monopoly over the spread of knowledge and collective intelligence can change that for the better by having people learn from diverse sources not just one main source. There was an activity done to demonstrate collective intelligence where an expert on the topic of Caribbean culture named Julian wrote down all that he knew about it while a group of teens did the same. Of course the lists were different, with Julian's being more organized, but both were good contributions. Jenkin's post was very optimistic, but the chapter seemed to shed a different light on the topic of collective intelligence. It began negatively with an account of how John Seigenthaler Sr. was wrongly accused on Wikipedia of being a part of the Kennedy assassinations. The inaccuracy of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia editable by anyone, led to much controversy. The next thing that was brought up was an incident where during a CBS broadcast, documents were shown from President Bush about him wanting to get treated better than others in the National Guard. Investigation into those documents proved that they were false. Two examples of poor information quality set the tone for this chapter. The purpose was to show the importance of information accuracy because a lot of our choices and thoughts are based on that information. There is a debate on whether online sources such as Wikipedia are less accurate than printed sources such as Britannica. Nature, a highly regarded scientific journal, did an experiment where experts carefully examined some articles in both encyclopedias to test accuracy. Of course, neither were perfect but surprisingly, Wikipedia wasn't trailing too far behind Britannica in accuracy. However, with sites like Wikipedia, such as Youtube and blogs, problems can arise because most of the information is shared by amateurs. At a time where the internet is the people's first choice find information, it would help if the information was correct. Information quality is hard to judge sometimes, though, because of its different contexts. What may help one person in one situation may be completely useless for another.
What Surprised Me?
There were two statements in the chapter that really annoyed me and one was on pg. 161 where it says, "The majority of the population born digital doesn't perceive quality of information as an important issue, it seems." I don't understand what being born in a digital world has anything to do with us wanting accurate information. Everyone would prefer to have the correct info, why wouldn't we? Next was on pg. 162 where it says, "Many young people don't worry about the carcinogenic properties of tobacco, either. . ." That statement is so false. Almost everyone I know does not smoke tobacco and is disgusted by it. If anything it's the older generation with their chewing tobacco and pipes that don't care about the carcinogens in tobacco. I feel like the author made a lot of generalized conclusions about teenagers and it is not the first time in the book that he has done that. It's ironic how the chapter was on information accuracy and those few lines were not in one way accurate.
Ponder This:
Even though many professors look down upon using Wikipedia for research, do you think it is still a good way to start your research before getting into the specific details?
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
One Tip for Using PowerPoint Effectively
DON'T BE AFRAID TO GET BOLD AND BIG!
Bold and BIG letters capture people's attention, especially for important facts that you want people to remember. PowerPoints can easily get boring and leave the audience falling asleep because of the repetitive visuals. Switch it UP a bit to keep the audience watching and interested.
Bold and BIG letters capture people's attention, especially for important facts that you want people to remember. PowerPoints can easily get boring and leave the audience falling asleep because of the repetitive visuals. Switch it UP a bit to keep the audience watching and interested.
NY Times Talk
The topic for this luncheon was “Living in our Digital World: Where are We Going in this Information Society?”. They started off talking about technology and all the new gadgets and gizmos available such as face recognition software. Also, devices such as computers keep getting smaller and smaller and technology is really taking over our world. Next, they talked about the recent movie "The Social Network". They asked who had seen it and what were some people's opinions. A few said that it gave geeks a bad name. Then, it switched to the internet and the fact that people do not have much control over it. They posed the question, "Why do people put their location on Twitter and Facebook?" Lastly, they talked about what is considered plagiarism and the issues with copyrighted music.
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