User talk:CalSmith96

Wiki Exercise #1: Educational Assignment

For me one of the handiest and more interesting websites is Behind The Name. The site is dedicated to the etymology of names and lets you find out the meaning and origin of almost any name in existence, as well as showing the equivalent names in other languages and common diminutives. They also offer alternate spellings and how the name is written in other scripts, such as Arabic. I find it extremely interesting to learn the history of certain names and how they've evolved over the centuries into their current forms - especially my own name and the names of my friends and family members. The site goes on to show the countries where the name in question is most popular and how much the name's popularity has dropped or increased over recent years in each country. Though the site's main focus is on first and middle names they also have a section based on surnames that tell you the source of the name (e.g. Occupation, location, etc) on top of its language of origin. Users are allowed to submit any names not already within the database so it's possible to find out the etymology of the more unusual names out there - providing they've been previously submitted.

On top of all this interesting trivia the site also has a random name generator feature which is useful for me because I'm a casual writer who struggles with naming characters, and often spend far too long mulling over names through Google. This generator is especially useful when looking for non-English language names because the site allows you to select which country/area's names you want to randomly generate; and also whether you want masculine, feminine or even ambiguous names. I used this feature a lot for stories in English class in high school and it saved me lots of time that would otherwise have been wasted on finding names for characters I wouldn't even write about again.

Though it's not as easy to get lost in and waste time on as other sites such as TV Tropes I still enjoy browsing the site every now and then when curious about the sources of common (and not so common) names. CalSmith96 (discuss • contribs) 13:01, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Comment

 * A very well-written entry. It would have been useful to try to feed this into the themes and concerns of the module more explicitly e.g. the tensions between cultural and tech determinism and the kind of knowledge or information base you are referring to. Drawing down from the scholarly materials encountered on the module, you could have made better use of the wiki markup by embedding links to reading, and also of course, to Wikipedia articles covering factual information. There's certainly plenty of scope here, and the potential for your work to improve is very much evident.


 * A post of this standard roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor, probably at the upper end of the garde descriptor:
 * 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.

RE: Comments on others’ work

 * These are on time and ok - evidence of some of content, scope and reference to module themes is there, even though I think this could be made more explicit. Remember that your comments on other people's work is weighted as heavily as your own post when it comes to grades - I think that you could have made more of the format and included citation and links to sources in your comments in order to engage discussion GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 14:44, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #2: Visibility and Online Footprint
I feel that I have a fairly visible online presence since I have accounts and profiles on lots of different websites and networks, for example Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Steam and Google+ among many others. Although I am not overly active on a couple of them I still have a presence on these sites and it's still possible to easily find whichever personal information I decide to make public on them. I'm generally pretty relaxed when it comes to publicly giving away certain personal details such as my age and birthday, name (I don't explicitly give away my surname anywhere other than Facebook but it's the single most common surname in the English language so I'm not too worried if anyone were to find it out since there will be thousands of other people with my full name) and vague location; but I refrain from posting pictures of my face to any profiles that are public. This is partially for privacy reasons but it's also just my personal preference - I hate having my photo taken and a lot of the public sites I use are focused on certain topics (e.g art or games) so to me it feels irrelevant for me to post my face. I don't publicly post my e-mail, instant messager usernames, or phone number on any site and only let some close friends know them - if I tell anyone at all. On each site I'm on I tend to link to my pages on other websites aside from my Facebook account since all my more private information is on there.

All my profiles/accounts on all websites are public apart from Facebook - I keep that account private and only add people I know in real life or close online friends I don't mind knowing some of my more private information. On every other site I'm a member of I'm fine with having anyone follow me or see the little personal information I display because none of it is overly excessive and it won't affect my life offline. I feel that all or most information about me online is under my control since I don't post anything overly personal and I'm camera shy so no real life friends ought to have any pictures they could post of me against my will, and likewise for highly personal information such as my phone number or home address.

CalSmith96 (discuss • contribs) 13:50, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Comments:

This is an interesting piece as I found your comments regarding facebook and the privatisation of your profile very similar to how I feel about it. I also keep my facebook account private due to there being more personal information that I would only want friends to see. With regards to you being camera shy, do you ever have to deal with being tagged in a friends photo which can then be seen by friends of friends? Also what is Steam? :) Kyra Paterson (discuss • contribs) 20:05, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #3: Information Overload!
In this day and age there is a whole plethora of information available to us right at our fingertips online. In the blink of an eye you can find out just about anything through the magic of modern-day search engines such as the corporate giant Google - as well as other smaller or not quite as popular or successful search engines such as Bing. With so much information so readily available it's extremely easy to get sidetracked or distracted when researching on a specific subject, especially on a tedious subject. One of the worst - or best, depending on your outlook - sites when it comes to getting distracted and falling down the metaphorical information rabbit hole is probably Wikipedia itself. You can go on the site to find basic information on something such as a movie or to find the definition and origin of figures of speech but inevitably end up reading on something completely unrelated that was mentioned briefly or linked on the first page you went on. Then from there you begin to click more links and read more and more irrelevant pages to your initial foray and before you know it you've wasted an hour and have the bare minimum research starting point to show for it.

For me my main method of resisting the urge to get side-tracked is sheer willpower. In the past I've tried blocking offender sites irrelevant to my studies - such as social media - to encourage me to get my work done but in the end I always found a work-around or simply go on the sites in question on another device. So now my main method is simply trying to overcome the urges, or starting all my work earlier so that if I do get sidetracked then I still have time to make up for lost minutes or hours. I'm my own worst enemy when it comes to research and studying and I'm perfectly aware of my short attention span so I try to allow myself some leeway in terms of time left to complete a task. Willpower and having an early start on various projects have come to be my main methods to avoid (or cope with) information overload online as they are the methods that have worked best for me thus far - especially compared to the aforementioned failed attempt to block offender sites. I'm aware that these methods most likely don't work for many other people but whatever method works best for each individual varies per person since we all have varying strengths and weaknesses when it comes to what distracts us, and how often it does so.

The main factors in this being my preferred coping method are that others I've tried haven't worked for me, and even if they did the blocking method wouldn't always be beneficiary in the end since some of the sites I get distracted or lost on can help me in some areas of my research or studying. For example, part of my degree is in French and I have a few native French speakers on my various social media sites who could help me out with parts of the language I'm struggling with among other things.

Overall, the readily available information on any subject in this day and age is a bit of a double-edged sword - on one hand it makes it easier to find the information you want, but on the other it makes it a lot easier to get sidetracked. For me the battle against getting distracted and sidetracked online is still ongoing but my current coping methods have personally helped me a lot compared to the past.

CalSmith96 (discuss • contribs) 13:41, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Comments

I enjoyed reading your post as it looked into getting distracted while working on a specific project in more detail than in my post. I especially appreciated the description of link surfing, a very bad habit of mine. I understand there as being two images of the serial link surfer. One is of someone who upon seeing a new link, thinks to themselves, “that’s looks interesting" and the other is someone who clicks on links, "just because". I believe the majority of us fall into the latter category. You mentioned the possibility of wasting an hour on this is and I concur. I could start on the 'Rocky' Wikipedia page with the sun high in the sky and find myself on the 'cheese ripening' Wikipedia page as the sun sets.

Starting projects early as you discussed is probably one of the best methods to avoid negative effects from the inevitable distractions. I'm always underestimating the time taken to complete an online task as I don’t factor in social media distraction which may seem insignificant but the time spent on them does add up. Your main method of sheer willpower is probably the most attempted method but I assume has the lowest success rate for people. You are so lucky that this works for you.

The most interesting part of this article was when you mentioned Facebook as a learning tool because of the access it allows you to native French speakers. I had never given that idea much consideration. It is exactly the 'double edged sword’ you described. If you leave the tab open you risk being distracted by Facebook’s unimportant aspects but if you are constantly opening and closing Facebook that too will become a pain. MrRobot 321 (discuss • contribs) 02:28, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #4
In the Wikibooks project my four-person group were tasked with writing on the subject of Cultural and Technological Determinism, along with several other groups. The first thing that was decided was how the work would be divvied up between the groups and in the end each group was to write their own section on a specific aspect related to our chapter; and our group (WBOT) decided we would tackle the section on oppositions to both Cultural and Technological Determism. Up until this point all decisions and discussions had been made on the discussion page of our chapter for the project but from there our group scheduled to meet face-to-face to further discuss the work we would be tackling and to further divide the workload so that it became more manageable, and also so that each person would have the opportunity to put forward their own contributions and participate.

When meeting in person our four-member group decided to split into two: two of us tackled opposition to Cultural Determinism, whereas the other two covered Technological. This drastically cut the overall workload and would allow us to have a more focused end product since people wouldn't have to jump between concepts and confuse their arguments. From there each sub-group decided which theorists each of them would discuss for their own section to prevent overlap - however, overlapping actually became an issue for certain sections of our topic as a whole since some ideas were relevant across multiple sections, but in the end this was resolved among the groups in question via the discussion page and by the end of the project the overlaps and repeated information were minor and necessary for the chapter to flow. After this meeting we did all correspondence through our discussion pages both among our small sub-groups and among our bigger 20+ person group. We also had a "help" section where people could ask for help with page coding or share some tips and tricks they had found that may have been useful for the rest of us.

This project as a whole demonstrated many aspects of the Civic Web - specifically, Cognitive Surplus its participation aspects. Cognitive Surplus is the idea that the actions of groups of people are louder and add up to more than the actions of individuals do. Another idea linked to this is that people are much more willing to take part in something beneficial to other people at the cost of their own free time (especially when access is free and easy) than we are given credit for, and this is perfectly demonstrated with the existence of Wikipedia itself (and other Wikimedia projects). Our larger 20+ person group working together to split up the work is an example of a group's actions being more effective than an individual's - by splitting into multiple smaller groups and dividing the workload we managed to achieve much more than if a handful of individuals with no communication with each other had attempted the same thing. A group of people who keep in touch with each other and clearly communicate what they will be doing are much more likely to achieve a clear and detailed end product compared to individuals whose interactions with each other are minimal at best.

All in all this project was in interesting experience that fully demonstrates the power people with knowledge and/or resources have, and how they can better the world even just through something as minor as sharing insight and information on a public educational platform such as Wikibooks. It was also interesting to simply learn the tricks and ways that Wikimedia sites work such as its coding and regulations - before now I had never edited a Wiki* page in my life, and hadn't ever made an account. I was always intimidated by the thought of editing or contributing to articles on Wiki* sites but after this project I realise that formatting is a lot simpler than I anticipated and that even someone as technologically-inept as me can easily code pages and chapters for Wikipedia and other such sites. CalSmith96 (discuss • contribs) 15:45, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Comments
I agree when you say that "the actions of groups of people are louder and add up to more than the actions of individuals do". In fact, in my opinion, 'more is better' and, in a project like the one we did, more people were necessary to do a better job. An only person probably would not have been able to. Obviously, as I said in my discussion, when a great amount of people have to work together, sometimes it happens that things get difficult and messy, but, at the end, I think we ended up to do a good job. --Nikynikay (discuss • contribs) 10:07, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Feedback on Wikibook Project Work
You make a number of contribs to the chapter content over a period of a couple of weeks. This allowed you to add content and edits on specific theories, scholars and research, but ensure citations, formatting and other elements were all in place. Some really good work on Brian Winston, and others, illustrating that you have done some worthwhile independent reading and secondary research. These are processes and skills that will become more important as you progress at honours level.

Wiki Exercises


 * Good. Among other things, good entries will make a clear point in a clear way. They will relate concepts to original examples in a straightforward fashion. They will make effective use of the possibilities of the form (including links, as well as perhaps copyright-free videos and images, linked to from Wiki Commons). They may also demonstrate a broader understanding of the module's themes and concerns, and are likely to show evidence of reading and thinking about the subject material. The wiki markup formatting will be very clear.

Content (weighted 20%)

 * Your contribution to the book page gives an excellent brief overview of the subject under discussion in your chosen themed chapter. There is an excellent range of concepts associated with your subject, and the effort to deliver critical definitions, drawing from relevant literature and scholarship, and your own critical voice in the building of a robust argument is very much in evidence. The primary and secondary sources you found about the chapter’s themes cover an excellent range and depth of subject matter.

Understanding (weighted 30%)

 * Reading and research:
 * evidence of critical engagement with set materials, although some ideas and procedures more securely grasped than others
 * evidence of independent reading of somewhat circumscribed range of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material
 * Argument and analysis:
 * well-articulated and well-supported argument featuring variable depth of understanding
 * satisfactory level of evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position in discussion);
 * satisfactory level of evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections in discussion);
 * evidence of variable independent critical ability

Engagement (weighted 50%)

 * Evidence from contributions to both editing and discussion of content to a variable standard (i.e. volume and breadth of activity as evidenced through contribs)
 * Satisfactory engagement with and learning from other Wikipedians about the task of writing/editing content for a Wikibook
 * Reflexive, creative and fairly well-managed use of discussion pages using deployment of somewhat limited judgement relating to key issues, concepts or procedures

Overall Mark % available on Succeed

FMSU9A4marker (discuss • contribs) 15:01, 3 May 2016 (UTC)