User talk:Eilidhmcauley

This is my Wikibooks user discussion page I will be exploring Wikibooks and talking about my experiences on this page. Feel free to discuss any ideas you have with me. Eilidhmcauley (discuss • contribs) 14:14, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #1: Educational Assignment
Boiler Room TV

With the rising popularity of house, techno and trance music in recent years we've seen the genres of music becoming more mainstream. Something that used to be predominately underground can now be heard in the charts, attracting huge audiences. Boiler Room www.boilerroom.tv is a "music platform that hosts intimate live sessions with an invite only audience". Boiler Room's are mainly performances of DJ's from the previously mentioned genre's that are recorded and posted on various outlets online (Facebook, Youtube, etc)that gain thousands of views.

Nights Out Turning to Nights In?

Although you can see these performances live if you are lucky enough to be invited, the majority of the people who see the performances are watching them through their computer screen. I find this interesting, as the real appeal of seeing DJ's perform live is being there and experiencing it first hand, audience reaction and the atmosphere of the room is the main appeal of seeing these performances.

Why do you think this is? People would maybe prefer to hear the music in the comfort of their own homes, can the atmosphere of a performance really translate through a computer screen? Maybe people can't afford to attend nights where their favourite DJ is playing? Or is this just looking far too much into it (most likely) and people are just watching them as a different way to hear music, or is the way that we experience music is becoming more digitalised like the rest of our world? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Eilidhmcauley (discuss • contribs) 15:23, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

References

www.boilerroom.tv

www.youtube.com/boilerroom

Wiki Exercise 1: Formative Feedback
You've demonstrated a clear understanding of wiki markup through use of pictures and headings, which will be useful going forward with the rest of the portfolio. The post is well written but could have been linked to module themes such as 'always on culture' more directly. I would also recommend avoiding using questions so often but rather focusing on answering these questions as part of your analysis. Also make sure to follow all parts of the exercise: you have not posted comments on colleague's pages. Engagement is an important part of the portfolio, so make sure to do this in future.

A post of this standard roughly corresponds to the following grade 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. Sprowberry (discuss • contribs) 10:15, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Comments on BoilerRoomTV
Thanks for the post on Boiler Room which is a site I wasn't aware of but I find the fact that exists not surprising. I share your thoughts about watching live or in demand music shows as I have caught myself numerous times watching live concerts on YouTube. I tend to believe that the experience of being at the concert is incomparable to the viewing of your room although not necessarily more meaningful. The experience of watching the show on a PC is enhanced by your viewing of other people's reaction to the event something that you miss while being with others around. When you watch at home a music show you are more of a viewer and less of a listener. During a live event you are unable to press rewind or stop the act and watch it later. The time as a matter of fact feels like going by faster when you are present at a live show in a closed space and I believe this enhances your experience. The future however will show us that recorded events for economical or cultural reasons appeal also to the public. Srepanis (discuss • contribs) 11:57, 19 February 2016 (UTC) Thanks for your comment! I'm glad I got to show you something new haha. The point about rewinding etc is a really good points, I think sometimes this can be more beneficial as a way to remember a moment if that makes sense? You can look back and remember a night if it's recorded. I definitely do think these kind of sites and recorded events will see a rise of popularity in the future! Eilidhmcauley (discuss • contribs) 19:17, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi, I love your work. I was wondering how you managed to insert an image into your piece? The image really contributes to my understanding of your topic and helps to visualize your passion for the music. Just wondering if you could help direct me to putting images into my work? Thanks LucyClaire (discuss • contribs) 14:49, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi! Thanks a lot, I'd be happy to help! When you open the text box to edit or post a page there is a little bar above it. It has the Bold, Italic and Underline symbol on it. If you look a little along from then you'll see a couple of more symbols. This one here is the one used to add a hyperlink, after clicking it comes up with a screen asking for the link you wish to link, and then the word you want to be there instead of the websites actual link. A picture of the symbol is shown below! To insert a photograph, click the little symbol of a photo next to the hyperlink symbol. It pops up and asks you to upload a photo, you need to upload it first and add a description and name before inserting it. After uploading it, adding the title and description you will be able to insert it. Sorry if this isn't a great description, hard to describe over text haha but hope this helped you a little bit! Eilidhmcauley (discuss • contribs) 14:57, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi, that's great. Thank you so much for your help, it is really useful to be able to insert a photo or hyperlink. This will really benefit in my assignments. Thanks again LucyClaire (discuss • contribs) 15:01, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Wikibook Exercise 2: Educational Exercise #2
Visibility Online

I would say in general I am very visibly online. Despite having a private Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, my Twitter is public and accessible for anyone. I am very active on all forms of social media, the only one that I would say I'm not so visible on is my Tumblr account. I have a different username on that website and despite the fact that my photos and name are on my blog it doesn't seem to ever pop up anywhere. Since most of my usernames are based on my real name (as is my name on this website) I would say it's probably incredibly easy to find information on me just by Google searching my name. It instantly links to my Twitter and even comes up with my brother's Twitter account. A google image search of my name brings up not only photos of me, but also photos from my Depop page and a fundraising page I created months ago.

Even just looking at these photos show me that I can't control what comes up in google, a last.fm page I haven't used in years was also brought up, and there's nothing I can do to change that. Fortunately nothing embarrassing for me has ever came up, but the problem is if it did there would be nothing I could really do about it.

Why Different Levels of Visibility for Different Platforms?

Most people choose different levels of security and privacy on online platforms for different reasons. Personally, my Facebook is private because it has a lot of personal information about my family, where I work and what university I go to, etc. For this reason I choose to only share this information with friends and family, or atleast people who are friends of my friends and family. With my Twitter, which is completely open, I share my daily thoughts and feelings. Opinions and jokes more than any real personal information, so I don't feel compelled to make it private. My Tumblr account is quite different, I keep it completely hidden from people that I know in "real life" and see it as more of a place to vent without hurting the feelings of anyone who knows me. I know quite a lot of people use the website for this reason. I think people have many different sides to them, and using different platforms on varying levels of visibility and privacy lets them feel free to express all these different sides without worry.

Can being visible online be a problem?

None of this bothers me too much at the moment, but probably because I've never had any consequences of being incredibly visible online. I imagine as I get older and employers start looking through these things I'll probably be more worried about it. Being active on social media for me is something that I don't even think about and like I said previously the only website that I'm cautious about keeping private is my Tumblr and even then it is freely open to anyone who knows my username! Eilidhmcauley (discuss • contribs) 19:52, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Comments

I think this entry is really interesting. All of the same platforms we use are similar and again my Facebook is private, yet my instagram is open to anyone which is similar to your Tumblr. It's funny to think about all of the information that is still available across any platform online no matter how 'private' we think our accounts are. Like you said, Google itself is notorious for knowing everything so it is problematic that our information, pictures and data is so easily accessible. It is even more concerning to younger people as it doesn't hide their information and even events which happened in the past are still stored somewhere. LucyClaire (discuss • contribs) 11:22, 24 February 2016 (UTC) Thanks for your comment! It definitely is strange how we change our privacy settings across different platforms. I think this is something that will become more of an issue, as it stands the internet is still reasonably new. I can't help but feel we'll definitely regret how much we've shared online as years go on! Eilidhmcauley (discuss • contribs) 13:45, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi, I completely understand your reluctance to integrate your internet world with your real life, as it can be difficult for people to see a different side to you. On platforms such as twitter, where I only follow people I know and trust, it is therefore easier to post something I believe in without fear of being judged or misinterpreted. I find it very scary to think how easy it is for anyone to find out about your family, friends and interests. In fact, it is so easy that there has to be a word to explain the phenomenon of impersonating a stranger on the internet and fooling people into believing they are you. Once you have posted information/pictures, they are forever lurking on the internet. It is truly difficult to remain as a username on a website like Tumblr, which is unfortunate because I don't believe people should be tricked into revealing personal details if they do not wish. As you said, you should be allowed to have a place to vent. Interesting read! NoRagrets9 (discuss • contribs) 19:44, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Availability of Information Online
In recent years the amount of information that the average person is able to access has increased hugely since the invention of the internet. While years ago you would have to spend hours in a library reading books, we have a huge amount of information at our finger tips and most of us can access it on our smart phones, which most people carry around with them at all times. Information doesn't necessarily need to be through things like news websites, the BBC for example and Wikipedia. It can be through social networking sites like Twitter which have enormous amounts of information uploaded by users each day, around 500 million tweets a day to be exact.

We receive information not only through the internet but even through television, advertising, newspapers, radio etc. We are constantly bombarded with information in our daily lives and sometimes it can be difficult for us to process it all.

Finding the Needle in a Haystack
In terms of finding information online, there is so many places to go sometimes it can be quite daunting, it gets easily confusing and is becoming increasingly easy to get distracted. It's hard to try to find specifically what you're looking for when the amount of information is so vast and you often find yourself looking at things completely irrelevant to what you're supposed to be doing. Sometimes finding the exact thing you're looking for can be almost impossible, as trying to find a small fact or figure when there's a full sea of information becomes increasingly difficult as more and more data is being uploaded to the internet daily.

This is a problem that I'm sure most students and people in general face, and it's not something that's going to go away any time soon.



A Solution to the Problem?
I think at this stage it's difficult to find an efficient way to deal with all of the information that we have available to us. This is something that is still a fairly new issue so I imagine it will take a while for us to properly crack instead of sifting through thousands upon thousands of pages of information to finally find what we need. This is something that's slowly killing our ability to make decisions as we are posed with far too much information on a daily basis for our brains to properly handle.

Eilidhmcauley (discuss • contribs) 20:00, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Comments Hi, I really enjoyed reading your piece. It was interesting to see the link between Twitter and the amount of information which is available on social media. My question would be how do you organise all of your information online and how trustworthy are you of this? I really like the way you structured this work, especially the metaphor "Finding the needle in a haystack" which I think sums up the whole argument perfectly. There is so much information which would have only been available in books and now within a second, we can have so many different sources of information. It seems that you understand the amount of different information which you come across in a day and are careful with the sources you use. LucyClaire (discuss • contribs) 11:19, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi, this was a really interesting piece. I like that you have brought media other than the Internet into your argument about there being an overload of information out there as it is true that we take in information from many other sources, no matter how attached to our phones we are. Also your suggestion that Twitter can be used to find reliable information is interesting and I agree with you about it if you're getting information from reliable news sources like the BBC rather than just random people on the Internet. Your layout of this exercise was really good as well! Jdwharris (discuss • contribs) 00:11, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #4: Wikibook Project Reflective Account
"Any collective activity which is enabled by people's passions becomes something greater than the sum of its parts"

Trying to get a group of around thirty people to collaborate on a project is no small task, but when you throw in the extra pressure of it being graded and most of the collaboration taking place online and it becomes almost chaotic. This project has undoubtedly been one of the most stressful I've done so far at university.

The purpose of this exercise was for a large group of students to share their "collective intelligence" and engage together on one topic, but in order for this to be successful it required a much higher level of engagement than what was received. It tried to encourage civic engagement within the groups, which would meant that everyone would have been ready to contribute from the start, been helpful to each other and really engaged with this assignment. Unfortunately this wasn't the case, although my group started up the project fairly early and tried to set up a structure that would benefit everyone else this ended up backfiring as other groups felt that they were being pushed out. This continued to happen throughout the whole project and no matter how much our group tried to compromise with other groups up until the very last minute we were being criticised. This was the part of the project that I found most stressful, as it was supposed to be about us using our collective intelligence to produce an informative chapter I felt that I was having to be responsible for other people aswell as myself. By the last week there was many people who hadn't started working on the project yet and felt that there was nothing left to write about, but when sections that needed to be worked were highlighted they were still left untouched and had to be quickly wrote up in the last minute.

The other problem I felt with the project was that there wasn't actually much collaboration, and I am at fault on this aswell, as most people uploaded content in the last few days so there couldn't really be a thorough peer review process. I know personally I could have collaborated better at the start, as I felt like many of the topics I had chose to write were too small to share with other students so instead suggested they could write something related to it instead. I tried to remedy this and asked for collaborators towards the end but again no one was really interested, a few people came forward but found themselves unable to do it in the end so I ended up writing a couple of topics completely on my own, although I tried to incorporate other ideas that people had shared with me.

This project was an interesting one, and the themes behind it around civic engagement and collective intelligence are intriguing but I felt that the biggest downfall of it was the lack of engagement. I think because it is a university project and not everyone may be interested in the topics that they were writing about it meant that people didn't put as much effort in as they should have (me included), this mixed in with the fact that we are university students and had many other things to work on at the same time and that all of the communication was online made it very difficult. It wouldn't have been possible to have met in person with everyone working on our section but I feel like it would have helped, because it was completely impossible to get everyone working on the Wikibook at the same time and to have a good communication system, so this meant that a lot of things were left till the last minute and we didn't have a proper chance to look over and critique each others work.

The end result of the project was surprisingly good considering all of the chaos going on behind it in the contributions page, for any future projects like this I think the importance of communication between the group as a whole cannot be understated, but actually trying to gather the group together to communicate is a lot more difficult than it seems. Eilidhmcauley (discuss • contribs) 10:52, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Comments

Hi, Eilidhmcauley. Your experience of this project really does sound stressful! I agree with your stance that the project needed far more engagement than it received (I am also including myself in that) - in our chapter, we had a contributor who almost immediately began setting up the page for us and started putting out ideas for the structure and groups' participation, however I think most of us were quite grateful for her input. It was suggested for us that each group take a section of the chapter, and that way there would hopefully be no overlaps, but it did take a while for everyone to claim a section. Working with such a large group of contributors was quite intimidating - I know that I should have began contributing far earlier than when I did, as coming into the main discussion where plenty of contributors had already become well-known from their helpfulness and leadership was a little overwhelming, I almost felt as though I wasn't a good enough contributor to join them. I did not even think to criticise anyone for assuming a leader position and laying out a plan, as I was appreciative of their eagerness and sensibility, and I felt a little bit of direction was necessary when working with such a large group. I think the 'Always On' culture links in to your point about the communication system. As you were only really engaging with the project when you came away from real life and logged into Wikibooks, I felt that it could be easily forgotten. We are so used to having our phone buzz when someone wants our attention that I think it was difficult to get into the habit of going out of our way to check our Wikibook notifications; similarly, when waiting on someone's reply it could often be frustrating as we are so used to people responding within a short period of time due to the fact that the notifications would appear on our phones, which we check regularly. Muir97 (discuss • contribs) 11:13, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Feedback on Wikibook Project Work
This is a solid attempt at engaging with both module themes and wiki culture. For instance, it is clear through your contributions that you have engaged with and understood many aspects of wiki markup to enhance both your exercises and chapter. Your constant engagement with the assingment is clear through a range of contribs throughout relevant sections. Feedback to colleagues is generous (although absent in the first assessed exercise). While there is evidence of secondary reading in chapter contributions, this could have been demonstrated more clearly in the wiki exercises to supplement the good level of reflection.

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, clearly grounded on close familiarity with concepts and ideas encountered on the module
 * evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material through evidence of close familiarity with a wide range of evidence
 * Argument and analysis:
 * well-articulated and well-supported argument featuring appreciable depth of understanding
 * good level of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position in discussion);
 * good 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 appreciable independent critical ability

Engagement (weighted 50%)

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

Overall Mark % available on Succeed

FMSU9A4marker (discuss • contribs) 14:49, 3 May 2016 (UTC)