User talk:Cathym97

Hi my name is Cathym97, I'm working on a class Wikibook project

Cathym97 (discuss • contribs) 16:14, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #1 What makes a Good Wiki?
I would say my experience of social media is relatively straightforward, I use common platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat to communicate with friends and family mainly, but I also find them a great way to upload and share photos and memories that I know I'll be able to look back on in the future. The main differences I've noticed between engagement in social media compared to engagement in wikipedia/wikibooks are as follows. Firstly and arguably most obviously, is the complexity of the Wiki page compared to the news feeds of Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. I'm unsure of whether I might just be more used to the layout and simplicity of social media because I've been exposed to it for much longer, but Wiki engagement seems to have much more in-depth methods of communicating. There are many more options and links that allow users to take time in editing their responses and posts in order to put forward their ideas in a much more effective and detailed way. For instance, being able to use bold or italics in text, being able to write a large amount at once, and aiming your ideas and responses towards a specific person or subject seems to be a much more comprehensive way of getting ideas across than a 140 character status on Twitter. Secondly, I noticed a difference in being able to control and search for the content you engage in. Unlike social media where it becomes difficult to filter out things you would rather not see or talk about (politics, pictures of food, etc), with Wiki everything is categorised and therefore becomes easy to search for and comment on the specific posts you want. However, both of these advantages are subsequently a more time-consuming and complicated than with social media. Because of this, I would say Wiki would be more useful for research, debate or a deeper interest in a subject, whereas social media is the better platform for a shallow, quick, but still helpful view or discussion on something. In terms of collaborating, I would deem social media as the starting point to get some of the main ideas across in a fast, easily accessible and straightforward manner, and Wiki as the next step in collecting more evidence, research and communication.

--Cathym97 (discuss • contribs) 00:59, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Marker’s Feedback on Wiki Exercise #1


Posts and comments on other people’s work, of this standard, roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor. Depending on where your actual mark is in relation to Understanding and Engagement elements, it should give you an idea of strengths and weaknesses within the achieved grade band overall.


 * Excellent. Among other things, these entries will probably demonstrate a complex, critical understanding of the themes of the module. They will communicate very effectively, making excellent and creative use of the possibilities of the form (including links, as well as perhaps copyright-free videos and images, linked to from Wiki Commons), and may be written with some skill and flair. They will address the assignment tasks in a thoughtful way. They will make insightful connections between original examples and relevant concepts. They will be informed by serious reading and reflection, are likely to demonstrate originality of thought, and will probably be rewarding and informative for the reader. The wiki markup formatting will be impeccable.


 * This post is at the lower end of this grade band, so there’s 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 (especially for this, perhaps, the Understanding) criteria in the module handbook to get more of an idea of how to hit those targets. Less instrumentally, and more in relation to this particular post I think you would benefit from making more use of the wiki functionality and markup. This would go a long way to improving fluidity and functionality of posts. I suspect that, as you become more familiar and proficient with the platform, that this will make a considerable difference.


 * Re: responses to other people’s posts – these are especially good. I like that you have framed some of your responses as questions to solicit discussion (this is, arguably, what discussion pages are all about!) and also that you have engaged in discussion in an open and critical way (that is to say, you've responded to what other people are saying and are contributing meaningfully to discussion - arguably the civic element of wiki that you ought to be thinking about, which you clearly are). Keep this up!

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 16:52, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi Cathym97,

I agree with all the points you have made. I found what you said about social media being the first step in terms of collaboration followed by Wiki particularly interesting. I had not thought about the two working together, but it is a perfectly logical idea. Especially due to the fact that there are clearly differences between Wiki and social media, so by putting them together the user is able to fill in the gaps.

I strongly agree that the Wiki page is far more complex than that of social media sites, but I too must partially put this down to my own inexperience on this platform. Again, I agree that ideas can be expressed with more detail on Wiki. Especially due to the use of hyperlinks, although I am sure there are more options that I have yet too learn about.

I also agree that Wiki is very, very specific and so it is incredibly easy to find exactly what you are looking for and as you said, avoid what you are not.

So in conclusion, Wiki is an excellent platform to source and share information. Social media hints at these roles but is primarily used for fun and - as the name would suggest - social uses.

Evbestie (discuss • contribs) 18:34, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #2 - Visibility and Data Trails
All my accounts on social media are set to private, and therefore, for the most part, the only visible part of my online identity is my screen name (or first and surname on Facebook) and/or a profile picture. The only platform I have an account on that is not privatised is a tumblr blog, and this is purely because I don't post any personal statuses or photos. My visibility for those who have access to my page (primarily friends and family) is much broader. Personally, my main reason for using sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and even Twitter is to share the photos I take, rather than using them to create statuses or text-based posts. Because of this, it could be argued that this makes me more visible online compared to other people, considering uploading around 30-50 photos a month I think is enhancing my "visibility" more than 30-50 statuses would, simply because photos are an exact visual representation of you and everything you do. Of course, I am fairly strict with which photos I decide to upload, and it also differs from platform to platform; photos uploaded to Snapchat are spontaneous and fairly mundane, whereas I put a lot more time and effort into Instagram posts. The extent of visible I am also depends on the friends and followers I have allowed access to what I share. I am followed by a lot of family members and work colleagues on Facebook so my content tends to be less frequent and also more censored, whereas on Snapchat it tends to be very unfiltered (both literally and metaphorically). So, in terms of content, I feel I am more visible on Snapchat, but in terms of the volume of people who see what I post, Facebook is where my visibility peaks. Facebook also lists where I work, where and what I study, and where I live on my page and anyone can view this, and there are some instances where people who don't follow me can also see photos of me, for example, if I am in a photo with other people, and we are all tagged in this photo, everyone's followers will be able to view it, including people I don't know or haven't allowed to follow me, and it will trickle down through a lot more newsfeeds, allowing more people to comment and engage with it. This concept of media being accessible to others through the use of tagging and links can be replicated in the Wiki Project when not only communicating with groups, but also finding information within wikibooks and wikipedia for the project. It is easy to find other users through existing users that you are aware of, and new users can become visible to you through their own interactions and discussions with others. More simply, the concept of visibility in Wikibooks versus social media is very different, because on Wikibooks, privacy doesn't really exist. You are free to comment, respond and discuss any topic with any user, unlike on social media where the options to reach out to different people are much more limited.

Cathym97 (discuss • contribs) 23:35, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

@user:Cathym97 I think you make some very interesting points within this post in which I can agree on. I can relate to your post as my social media accounts are also private and I limit the amount of information I share. I can also relate to your comment on how you use these social media sites to share photos rather than statuses, as I do the same thing, I very rarely post any statuses on Facebook, however, I will regularly update my photo albums with my most recent pictures. I think you make a good point about how your Facebook profile is more censored, this links well to the topic of 'online identity' in which we were discussing in class and how people have to portray themselves more professionally on their Facebook rather than other social media accounts such as twitter, because on Facebook your posts are likely to be visible to work colleagues or family members. As I am not a user of Tumblr and have not had any previous experience on the site, may I ask what kind of information you share on your site? Sammyforbes (discuss • contribs) 10:53, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Really enjoyed reading this, and agree completely with the majority of the points. I believe there are almost two definitions of online visibility. One is literal: how much we use social media in particular and how often do we upload pictures, tweets, or statuses. The other is harder to measure for most people and that is external interaction with our online content. If we take someone with 1 million Instagram followers for example, they could upload far fewer pictures than someone with 100 followers and get 100x the number of likes.

To link this in to the idea of self-presentation that you mentioned in your post, there are definitely certain norms of using certain platforms. I'm sure we've all seen memes regarding your "Twitter personality" vs. your "Facebook personality", your example of Snapchat and Instagram posts is a continuation of this idea; I send photos everyday on Snapchat, usually of the floor, my feet, or what I'm watching on TV. I'm far more meticulous with my Instagrams, applying filters and effects to try and add a degree of professionalism to them.

In terms of data trails, there's no real escape from the linkages between social networks these days. For example, my Instagrams appear on my Facebook and Twitter. Often we see Facebook posts that are screenshots of tweets, and just as commonly the reverse. I once had a tweet of mine appear on my own Instagram feed after being screenshotted by one of the many variants on @ScottishPatter. This is slightly worrying, as my tweets are not something I would want to bleed onto my Facebook, which other than being a vehicle for me seeing videos of dogs, is almost completely unused.

Finally, photo tagging culture is something I believe can upset our carefully cultivated online image without some deal of policing. For example, being tagged in a truly rotten club photo is something that can make the hard work of picking a perfect profile picture completely obsolete. Likewise, a look through someone's tagged Instagram's maybe a more realistic representation of them by comparison to their actual feed. Luckily, the remove tag option always exists, and I for one have the strictest timeline review settings possible active on Facebook.

LewisCollie (discuss • contribs) 22:49, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise 3 - Information Overload

I think it is a lot easier to be distracted by information you find online compared to information found in physical books or articles etc. The reason for this I think is that it is so much easier to upload information online, and anyone can do it, therefore the amount of information is higher. You can type anything you like into a search engine and get results within seconds, and a lot of the websites have links to further websites, so its easy to get lost and distracted from what you originally wanted to find. To deal with this, my main focus is to be as specific as possible when searching for things, because I feel like if I am vague with what I’m trying to find I’ll only get more results, and more information to be distracted by that might not even relate to what my original query was. If an article or website links to another source of information, again I will double check it definitely links back to what I’m trying to find out. I also think plagiarism with online information is a big issue, so making sure websites have references for things they are claiming is something else I look out for. However, this is often not the case with a lot of online information, so usually I just make sure the site I’m getting it from is a legitimate one that I know wouldn’t plagiarise or provide misinformation. In terms of the Wikibook project, I find it quite overwhelming the amount of depth and detail that needs to be put into what we are writing. I think this is mainly because there are a lot of people on our chapter, so we’ve had to split the topics up into quite specific ones and it might be more difficult than usual to find enough information on it. However, the mass amount of information online is probably helpful in this respect, because it will give us more opportunity to find the details we need, and it might help us to get distracted in order to get new and interesting points we can put into our topic.

Cathym97 (discuss • contribs) 11:48, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #4 – Wikibook Reflective Account
We finished our section on the Wikibook: Living in a Connected World last week and I would say although it was a challenging process, I have definitely learned a lot about different research methods, and using Wiki*edia in general. Wiki*edia was something I wasn’t all that familiar with; aside from using Wikipedia pages simply for a brief overview of a topic. Even when using Wikipedia however, it was very rarely for academic work; I have been sworn off using any kind of Wikipedia based sources by every lecturer I’ve had; so to only use it in an assessment took some getting used to. In terms of collaboration with my group, I found this slightly confusing. The discussion pages were very useful for connecting with others on the course, and those doing different topics to me, because it was likely I hadn’t met them or didn’t have any other way to contact them in talking about the project. However, in our individual group of 5, working on Privacy in Relation to Living in a Connected World, we found it a lot easier to communicate by meeting up, or discussing things in our Facebook group chat. I think this is just because we needed to do the most sorting out and exchanging information within our smaller groups, and because we are so much more used to Facebook messenger or face-to-face meetings, it was instinctual for us to do it this way.

I also found that on our the discussion page, because there was so much information, unless you tagged every single person in the group, there was a chance a lot of people wouldn’t see what you had written, as they wouldn’t think or would forget to look at every part of the page every day. It was useful being tagged in an entry, as a notification would appear on your account that lead you straight to what was being discussed. I often found I had missed people posting important information, simply because I’d forgotten to scroll right down to a certain point in the discussion page to check for new entries.

It took me a while to work out how to add links, pictures, tables etc to the wiki page, I mainly looked at how others had done it first on the page and tried to replicate this in my own work. It reminded me a lot of HTML coding, something I studied in school; so once I had the hang of it, sharing links with people (and teaching others how to do links) turned out to be a really useful way to communicate, as, like with tagging, it took you straight to where you needed to go without having to navigate around the entire wikibooks that we weren’t familiar with. It is a great example of Web 2.0, using links to further collaborate and interact with fellow researchers in order to produce the best quality collective work as possible. As David Gauntlett  explained, the Wikibooks pages allowed us to produce a piece of research greater than the sum of its parts, and that by engaging with each other as much as possible we were simultaneously creating.

Because the topic of Privacy was one that was spread out across a lot of the lecture content; I found I didn’t focus a whole lot on the ideas discussed in class. There wasn’t a huge amount of readings or lecture slides dedicated to the specificity of my topic, and because privacy is also quite a vague and definitely an umbrella term, I instead used a lot of online articles and surveys. It was easy to link all this extra information I found back to the more general module themes however, mainly because that was the entire point of my group’s chapter in the book.

Overall, I found the Wikibook project quite confusing and overwhelming at first, but as I got used to how it worked, I noticed how considerably it helped me understand the different themes and ideas of the module.

Cathym97 (discuss • contribs) 20:29, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

References

Comment
I'm glad I'm not the only one who struggled with the discussion page. I found that towards the end I started just adding new headings in so people would see those because I couldn't always guarantee that they would read through the entire page if I had just kept on putting new information into the planning sections. It also got frustrating to have to type out the ping markup constantly and since we were such a big group it was tedious to try and grab everyone's attention by pinging them. I think had the group been smaller the discussion page probably would have been a lot easier to handle. I can see the reasoning behind using Wikibooks though, we had to be more active in suggesting ideas and contributing and engaging as our grades rely heavily on that and had it been a different method of group work it wouldn't be as easy to see how we'd engaged. It was a new experience, at times frustrating, but it was interesting and I think we all probably learned quite a bit from it.

Hi, I also agree that discussion was a major problem with the Wiki. I think that the wiki in general just isn't built for good discussions in comparison to say internet forums or social media platforms. Tagging was useful because it did help me be aware of who commented on something involving me, however the wiki itself doesn't really help with teaching the user these sort of things. Theres no cheat sheet or guide for how wiki formatting work so one either has to find outside sources on how it works or copy the structure from other users, which while okay, doesn't seem super effienct. I do agree with your point that wikibooks did allow the users to work together to effectively create something that was greater than the sum of its parts. BrianstirlingStudent (discuss • contribs) 22:04, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Content (weighted 20%)
The introduction section here is a little brief, however it draws its strength from being well written, in an accessible language. In addition to this, very usefully, each section has been laid out in bullet point format, with a very brief summative sentence for each section. The sections themselves represent wide coverage of many of the main issues surrounding privacy in contemporary popular culture.

However, of particular use here – and very much a strength of the chapter as a whole, is the section that draws together the issues raised here, and applies these to other areas of the wikibook as a whole, explicitly making more of the platform than would otherwise have been, had the groups decided to write this chapter in isolation. To be clear, the execution of this section could have been better – greatly improved through more systematic use of interwiki links to draw attention to the specific pages, sections and issues from the various pages in the wikibook which you were commenting on. Another specific section here that could have been improved is the section on celebrity vlogging. Whereas it is true that there hasn’t been a lot written on this (yet – there is a growing interest in the scholarship, and we can expect much more appearing in the short term), it should have been acknowledged that the scholarship on celebrity culture as a whole is very well established, and that most of the issues raised in relation to YouTubers (e.g. “the price of fame”, privacy issues, and the implied “fair game” logic) are covered in existing debates on celebrity. All that said, the potential for this last section was recognised and other parts of it fully engaged with existing research in the field, and therefore is rewarded.

Structure-wise, the chapter seems to hang together fairly well – the definitions section at the beginning, whilst by no means exhaustive, gives the reader a sense of the subject matter under discussion early on, and also some useful working definitions of key terms used. Some typo errors and inconsistency of formatting appear dotted throughout, but these are not the norm for this chapter. Odd inclusion of bibliographical material of theorists, but no discussion or application their ideas in that section (especially in the case of Fuchs, where it lists a few of his research association and academic achievements. A little bit more joined-up work would have improved on this section enormously.

The unusual step of including a survey and posting the results here is an extremely useful one. Something that absolutely HAS to be thought through in ALL future work is that if one is conducting a survey (even if for demonstration purposes, as included here) or indeed ANY work with people, one must go through an ethics approval process – this is to ensure no harms (relative or absolute) occur for researchers or participants. This process will become more apparent later in the degree programme, particularly in final year projects. The glossary is really useful – not quite exhaustive, but good for quick reference purposes. Use of interwiki links in here would have been useful. The references section again evidences research, reading and sharing of resources. Some of the formatting seems to go awry towards the end, so a little more joined-up thinking there would have been useful, but overall good.


 * Good. Your contribution to the book page gives a good brief overview of the subject under discussion in your chosen themed chapter. There is a good 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 a good range and depth of subject matter.

Wiki Exercise Portfolio (Understanding weighted 30%)
Posts and comments on other people’s work, of this standard, roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor. Depending on where your actual mark is overall (and particularly in relation to Understanding and Engagement elements), that should give you an idea of strengths and weaknesses within the achieved grade band, relative to the descriptor


 * 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.


 * Reading and research:
 * evidence of critical engagement with set materials, featuring discriminating command of a good range of relevant materials and analyses
 * evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material to a fairly wide degree
 * Argument and analysis:
 * well-articulated and well-supported argument through judgement relating to key issues, concepts or procedures
 * 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);
 * clear evidence of 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