User talk:Brightredactually

Starting off this page! I'm working on a class project.

Image test!

Wiki Exercise #2: To what extent are my online and offline identities aligned?

There are many ways in which a person’s presentation online can reflect real-life qualities. The ways in which people manipulate representations of themselves online can be called ‘impression management’, a concept described by Erving Goffman. This concept encompasses the ways in which people will perform around others to achieve a desired impression, both purposefully and unconsciously. Even though there is a greater potential for people to purposefully misrepresent themselves on the World Wide Web than in concrete spaces, most misrepresentations still have to be reflective of reality in some way; for example, creating the best possible impression of yourself online by only showcasing your most flattering pictures and happiest occasions still represents moments taken from a concrete reality, even if the reality it builds together into is entirely cherry-picked. Sharing the correct photographs can be a powerful tool in creating a social performance. Personally, I feel I am a bad example of a purposeful online impression manager, as I tend to make a conscious effort to avoid any significant real–online reflection by preserving my anonymity on the Internet at large, very rarely using social media for anything other than built-in instant messaging services. However, it could still be said that I am practising online impression management in doing this; a coordinated lack of online identity does constitute impression management, as I have still put in the effort to change how I am represented to others, even if only to minimise the impression made.

Goffman also makes a distinction between ‘I’ (the authentic self) and ‘me’ (the expression of self), claiming that the ‘me’ will eventually begin to influence the backstage ‘I’ as well. In the sense that I prefer not to have an online identity, it could be said that I attempt to not have an online ‘me’, and that my view of myself will not be affected by how I represent myself online. If I spent more time interacting socially through digital media, however, I can definitely imagine my own public performance beginning to influence my view of myself as Goffman suggests, especially depending upon how others react to it. In itself, the choice to not purposefully build any online identity marks a significant way in which my online identity does not align with my offline one; I am social while offline, but do not often use online media socially except in the most minor ways, such as to pass on information. This does not reflect how I act in face-to-face social situations— I mainly treat social media as an easy way to organise that real-life socialising. However, there is no reason to think that my personal behaviour is somehow better or healthier than that of people who regularly use social media; Adrian Athique claims that the idea of heavy digital media users withdrawing socially is inaccurate, and that the “social atmosphere” of the Internet is in fact one of its “most notable features”.

Even as a person who does not use social media often, my offline and online identities are still aligned to some extent. Although I do not feel I have any particular online identity, this is still a result of my unintentional impression management— my lack of online presence is only a reflection of my offline lack of desire for one.

Wiki Exercise #3: Annotated Bibliography Exercise (Part B)

Didžiokaitė, G., Saukko, P., & Greiffenhagen, C. (2017). The mundane experience of everyday calorie trackers: Beyond the metaphor of Quantified Self. New Media & Society, 20(4), 1470-1487. doi:10.1177/1461444817698478

In this article, the authors create a discussion about casual users of Quantified Self technology, contrasting them with those who consider themselves members of the Quantified Self movement and attempting to discover the different goals of the two groups in using the same technology. The authors did this by monitoring a group of casual users of a self-tracking app who had no involvement in Quantified Self. By recording the participants' responses in a series of semi-structured interviews about their experiences with the app, the authors identified several ways in which Quantified Self metaphors did not apply to everyday users. This article is extremely useful to my group's research, as it provides an impression of how the majority of users will interact with self-tracking technology, rather than the smaller group of extremely enthusiastic users who usually have the greater opportunity in characterising how this technology is used. Although the scope of the study is limited, only having 31 participants, its conclusions are taken from replies consistent across the participant group; it can still be considered reliable due to how uniform its results are. The article concludes that casual users are more likely to self-track to achieve concrete short term goals such as weight loss, and less likely to reflect on past data than dedicated Quantified Self enthusiasts might suggest. Overall, this article provides a practical impression of how self-tracking technology is used by ordinary people, which is especially useful to our research when a significant number of self-tracking studies focus on power users instead.

Wiki Exercise #4: Collaborative Essay Critical Evaluation – What ARE Wikis? What kind of resource are they? Wikis are platforms for creating group hypermedia projects, allowing for large numbers of people to edit the same document using in-built sets of tools that make complex formatting as easy for newcomers as possible. Wikis use hyperlinks to form complicated networks between pages, allowing for the creation of unusual internal structures for larger projects, offering no particular start- or end-point. For example, the Wiki project that we used for this semester’s assignments, Wikibooks, allows people to write online books collaboratively, and each chapter can be accessed and read in any order from a single contents page. When I first saw the main page of our class project, I was surprised to read the instruction that “while this is a class project, anyone may contribute as Wikibooks does not permit "ownership" of material.“ However, I later discovered how strong an emphasis Wikibooks and its parent organisation, the Wikimedia Foundation, place on how anyone should be allowed to contribute to any project; this philosophy matches the intended use of Wiki technology itself— it is designed to be entirely collaborative.

The qualities Wikis possess that allow them to facilitate collaborative research especially well can simplified down to accessibility and a great potential for community-building. The accessibility of editing Wikis is very practical advantage. When first met with the page editor on Wikibooks, members of my group did not have trouble adapting to using the website’s editing tools; the option to directly type HTML as an alternative option to Wikimarkup helped to make it especially accessible. Wikibooks, and projects running on Wiki software in general, are designed so that “the hurdles and prior knowledge required for communication in and design of the mass medium of the WWW are reduced to a minimum.” The inclusion of edit logs, which provide an archive of all previous versions of documents, also contributes to the ability for Wikis to facilitate collaborative research; by allowing users to quickly check recent edits, the constant change of a Wiki page is made far less confusing. The ease Wikis provide for collaborative editing is one of the main factors in their large potential for fostering communities.

Wikis are different from ordinary group project platforms in that they provide an opportunity for socialisation. By allowing users to discuss and create their own ‘user discussion pages’, Wikis create the ability for a community to form. Although Wikis are not social networks, they are able to serve a similar function to social networks— there is a large overlap in the benefits provided by both. James Carafano even states that “an online community is a social network”, although Wikibooks and other Wikis are very different in structure to the sites that would normally be classified as social networks. The role of Wikis as digital commons may be one factor that separates them from bearing greater similarities to social media— although community-building is an important aspect of how Wikis become productive, working to amass knowledge or finish a project is always a Wiki’s main goal. Ultimately, Wikis present a complicated and extremely useful method for of structuring group projects, presented in a way that allows for extremely easy accessibility. In addition, its potential for community-building allows it to facilitate collaborative work online far more easily than any alternatives.

INSTRUCTOR FEEDBACK: ENGAGEMENT ON DISCUSSION PAGES & CONTRIBS
Grade descriptors for Engagement: Engagement on discussion pages, and contribs of this standard attain the following grade descriptor. Whereas not all of the elements here will be directly relevant to your particular response to the brief, this descriptor will give you a clearer idea of how the grade you have been given relates to the standards and quality expected of work at this level:
 * Satisfactory. Among other things, satisfactory contributions may try to relate an idea from the module to an original example, but might not be very convincing. They may waste space on synopsis or description, rather than making a point. They may have spelling or grammatical errors and typos. They might not demonstrate more than a single quick pass at the assignment, informed only by lecture and/or cursory reading. They may suggest reading but not thinking (or indeed the reverse) and will have little justification for ideas offered on Discussion Pages. The wiki markup formatting will need some work.

As instructed in the labs, and outlined in the assessment brief documentation, students should be engaging at least once a day, for the duration of the project. The following points illustrate how this engagement is evaluated.

Evidence from contribs to both editing and discussion of content (i.e. volume and breadth of editorial activity as evidenced through ‘contribs’). These are primarily considered for quality rather than quantity, but as a broad guideline:
 * Each item on a contribs list that are 3000+ characters are deemed “considerable”
 * Each item on a contribs list that are 2000+ characters are deemed “significant”
 * Each item on a contribs list that are 1000+ characters are deemed “substantial”
 * Items on a contribs list that are <1000 characters are important, and are considered in the round when evaluating contribs as a whole because of their aggregate value

Overall:
 * there are a small number of substantial-level contribs in evidence, but these all happen in the final couple of days of the project period. This implies very little to no engagement in the discussion, and goes exactly against advice given in labs, lectures and podcast materials. You therefore scraped together this result based upon the quality of work, but the engagement and discussion is absent

Engagement with and learning from the community on Discussion Pages
 * Evidence of peer-assisted learning and collaboration
 * Very Poor
 * Evidence of reading, sharing, and application of research to the essay
 * Excellent
 * Evidence of peer-review of others’ work
 * Poor

Reflexive, creative and well-managed use of Discussion Pages
 * Poor
 * Clearly labelled sections and subsections
 * Satisfactory
 * Contributions are all signed
 * Good

Civility. Your conduct is a key component of any collaboration, especially in the context of an online knowledge-building community. Please respect others, as well as observe the rules for civility on wiki projects. All contribs are moderated.
 * Satisfactory

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 15:24, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Instructor Feedback on Wiki Exercise Portfolio
Posts and comments on other people’s work, of this standard, roughly correspond to the following grade descriptor. Depending on where your actual mark is in relation to the making criteria as outlined in the relevant documentation, it should give you an idea of strengths and weaknesses within the achieved grade band overall:


 * Satisfactory. Among other things, satisfactory entries may try to relate an idea from the module to an original example, but might not be very convincing. They may waste space on synopsis or description, rather than making a point. They may have spelling or grammatical errors and typos. They might not demonstrate more than a single quick pass at the assignment, informed only by lecture and/or cursory reading. They may suggest reading but not thinking (or indeed the reverse). The wiki markup formatting will need some work.


 * The quality of the actual content you produce is quite good. Unfortunately, apart from the first element of Ex2, you seem to have submitted work late every time, and this has had an impact of the mark for your portfolio. There is, therefore, clearly room for improvement here. I think in order to engage with the wiki exercises a bit more, it might be useful for you to look at the Grade Descriptors and criteria in the module handbook to get more of an idea of how to hit those targets, and also always pay careful attention to the detail in assessment briefs, especially requirements and deadlines.


 * Making more use of the wiki functionality and markup would have gone some way to improving fluidity and functionality of posts. I suspect that, if you become more familiar and proficient with the platform, that this would make a difference.


 * Re: responses to other people’s posts – these are fairly good, if a little brief and late. The peer-review element for Ex4 is missing. Remember that the comments are "worth" as much as posts themselves. The reason for this is not only to help encourage discussion (a key element of wiki collaboration!) but also to get you to reflect upon your own work. This can all, of course be used to fuel ideas that might form part of your project work

General:
 * Reading and research: evidence of critical engagement with set materials; evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material – all ok, apart from peer-review elements.


 * Argument and analysis: well-articulated and well-supported argument; evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position); evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections); evidence of independent critical ability – all ok.


 * Presentation: fairly good use of wiki markup and organisational skills.

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 16:26, 1 May 2019 (UTC)