User talk:Georgiamattie

Wiki Exercise #1: Education Project
The album, Abbey Road, is one of the best albums produced by The Beatles. The album itself was released in September 1969 first in the United Kingdom and was later released in the United States in October. The album's music style is very diverse. The songs themselves very from slow-paced, relaxing songs to more upbeat songs that people might enjoy dancing to. Popular songs drawn from this album include: Come Together, Octopus's Garden, I Want You, and Here Comes The Sun. The entire album can be found on YouTube.com. Georgiamattie (discuss • contribs) 13:32, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Comment

 * you don't seem to have responded to the brief here. An absence of reference to the themes and concerns of the module (many of which such as tech and cultural determinism) are tied up with online music markets and communities. Additionally, you could have made better use of the wiki markup by embedding links to reading and also to sites for subjects under discussion.


 * A post of this standard roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor
 * Very Poor. Often, entries of this standard are quite brief, are structured poorly and are not spell-checked. They are often irrelevant, and offer little engagement with the concerns of the module or the assignment brief. Entries of this grade may have been subject to admin warnings or take-down notices for copyright infringement. The wiki markup formatting will be of a very poor standard and as a result it will be difficult for the reader to engage with the discussion.

RE: Comments on others’ work

 * Largely absent. You have not adhered to the brief: you are required to comment on two users' posts. what you have written is very short and doesn't really solicit engagement. Remember that your comments on other people's work is weighted as heavily as your own post when it comes to grades. Not completing this part of the exercise means that, effectively your marks would have been significantly reduced had this been formally assessed. GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 16:46, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #2: Visibility and Online Footprint
I consider myself fairly visible online. I am an active online member of Snapchat and Facebook, but do not have a Twitter, Tumblr or Instagram. I try my best to keep private information about myself offline. On Facebook for example, my privacy settings are very private. Most things viewed on Facebook such as posts, photos, videos and more, are only seen by myself and my friends. Even the people that I choose to become friends with on Facebook are kept to the minimum. I like to know my Facebook friends firsthand, and will not accept the friend request of a total stranger, even if the stranger and I have mutual friends between us. Facebook allows the user to have control of their profile and of those that are able to openly access and view their profile. This makes things such as identity theft and fraud much less common for the people who have strict privacy settings. Controversy, online platforms such as Snapchat are less private and more viewed. Even though you are able to control who your active Snapchat friends are, you are unable to control if your 'snaps' are screenshotted by those you send them to. The user is able to dictate who they become friends with in the first place though. This allows the user to only become Snapchat friends with those that they choose. However, on both of these websites, the consumer is able to delete or block a friend. This can be before or after a friend request has been sent. The ability to delete and block a person makes these online platforms more private and therefore, safer for consumers. Georgiamattie (discuss • contribs) 13:47, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Might sound like a stupid question but it is a legitimate thing I've heard several times before: "have you ever tried looking yourself up online?". I recently had to find a person's details and I was to some surprised by how easy it was (and how much unnecessary information I was able to acquire, that was more private than what I needed). Similarly to you I take pride, if so can be said, to the fact that I have always been a step behind the mass when it comes to sharing personal info online or aspiring to visibility, however I am aware that even the smallest of footprints is still a footprint, as from our birth we are entered in a society and therefore our privacy is private to a certain extent. I have quite a few friends on facebook but most of them are actually acquaintances I wouldn't even probably be prone to talk to in real life but, as far as safety goes yes, I don't accept friend requests from complete strangers either and apps allow the user to filter and set privacy, although the user itself has to have some initial awareness of its own in order to make the options effective. You raise an interesting controversy about Snapchat although the app usually notifies you if someone has screenshotted your snap, but when you send a snap you know that there is that possibility so nothing is really done behind your back. Unlike us -at least from what I have gathered with your entry- some people use apps with less worries about the privacy and there are even some sister-apps to Snapchat (eg. chance) that allow you to send and receive snaps from strangers around the world. I am a user of apps like Facebook, Snapchat and Whatsapp but my contacts are quite selected and the amount of personal information I share limited, but there are people partaking in a more open social system, using the digital world as a window on the physical world, to reach people near and far and maybe expand the social sphere. Internet safety and awareness though is a topic that in my opinion has to be at least mentioned in schools (considering the average user being younger and younger) to create a safer environment and an overall more enjoyable experience, as there is a very thin line from innocent internet visibility to nightmare scenarios of stalking, identity theft and threats. Juliabutgiulia (discuss • contribs) 22:00, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Comments on wiki exercise #1
Abbey Road is probably my favourite Beatles album and includes my all time favourite Beatles song, 'Something'. I agree about the album's music style being described as 'very diverse'. 'Octopuses' Garden' and 'Something' are for example, two incredibly different songs. The only tiny problem I have with the album is it finishing with, 'Her Majesty' and not, 'The End'. Seeing as it was the last album they all worked on together it would have been fitting to finish with the lyric (from 'the end'), "And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make." MrRobot 321 (discuss • contribs) 15:16, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #3: Information Overload!
With the overwhelming amount of information available to the public, it is easy to become distracted while following through with certain tasks. To totally concentrate on a project, I prefer to be completely cut off from my surroundings. Working in a quiet area, with no loud distractions, is tremendously helpful. However, this is not the case for everyone. Many of my colleagues can work productively with numerous things happening at once. This includes: music playing, eating, talking to others, etc. Some people are just better at multi-tasking than others. Information is available in books, journals, magazines, newspapers, broadcast media, and of course the World Wide Web. The earliest form of communication was information spread through word of mouth. Then, in the mid-1400’s, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and information could be mass-produced. This meant that the knowledge of others could travel faster, further, and more accurately. It was around this time that the idea of copyright, the protection of one’s writings or other artistic work, became an issue of concern. Today, the protection or exclusive rights to own one’s work is still and issue, especially since the development of the digital era.

One of the best methods to deal with this overwhelming amount of information is to use public information systems such as Google and Wikipedia. These sites make a person's research profoundly easier. These sites narrow down widespread information making it more easily accessible for a person to read and use. As discussed in lecture, collective intelligence is universally distributed and is often more enhanced by multiple people. This concept focuses on the idea that having shared intelligence allows people to collaborate with others, bringing multiple viewpoints to light. With Wikipedia for example, consumers are able to continue adding to a page created by someone else, even after it has been posted. I agree with Pierre Levy's article, What is Collective Intelligence? where he portrays the theory that collective intelligence grows as culture does. This concept relates directly to the process we are currently using in our Wiki Book assignments. The page, An Internet of Everything? correlates with the shared knowledge in humanity. These past couple of weeks, our class has been writing and posting numerous Wiki exercises, commenting on others and therefore, engaging with one another. We share our opinions, ideas, and try to teach or show the author of the original post something that they might not have known or considered before. This process shows how information in our digital era can be easily exchanged. Georgiamattie (discuss • contribs) 00:06, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

My Wiki Project group, The Stir Girls, first began exchanging and discussing ideas through Facebook. Since then, we have met in person and discussed how we needed to switch to the Wikipedia discussion page for our topic, Cultural and Technological Determinism. On this page, The Stir Girls have been able to evenly divide up the project's work and exchange ideas. We have each selected a prime theorist of cultural and technological determinism and have chosen our layout for the project. We have also decided that we must each bring an example of both cultural and technological determinism to the table, which will give us ten different examples overall. Georgiamattie (discuss • contribs) 00:06, 2 March 2016 (UTC)


 * I liked how you connected information overload with the idea of shared intelligence. One part of this really stuck out to me, when you discussed that it is always changing and growing as culture grows. I think that this shared intelligence has become one way for our society to cope with information overload. While the internet and information is always expanding, it is often most useful to deal with the overload by looking at the most recent contributions, or edits to information. For example, looking at a wikipedia page on Facebook today would have much better information than it did when Facebook was first noted by Wikipedia. Information is always being improved and added to with shared intelligence, but this leads to better quality of information in the end and a good coping mechanism to avoid too much information. Hlat123 (discuss • contribs) 09:11, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #4: Wikibook Project Reflective Account
The Wiki Project Assignment was different than any assignment I’ve done before because it brought together various levels of research as both individuals and teams; our group worked together to construct the wiki page for Technological and Cultural Determinism. Engagement was a key component to this project. By engaging together as a group, we could plan and divide up the material that we wanted to include in the project itself. This made it so that there was less specific work for every individual. Our group divided up theorists for both technological determinism and cultural determinism. We used the wiki discussion page to communicate with one another and we met regularly in person, once a week, to address any questions that were harder to do online.

One of the greatest strengths of completing a project in this manner was that it brought numerous points of views to the table. Since there were five of us in the group, we had the combined perspectives of five different people. In this sense, the layout of this project can be linked to collective intelligence, the idea that other individuals in our group were constantly enhancing our project. It is the mutual recognition that my group had that further enriched our page on Cultural and Technological Determinism. An additional advantage to this project that I had not been expecting was that by working together, we were able to check and read over each other’s work. One of the most prominent negative aspects I have noticed of Wikipedia, is that it is not always correct. As individuals, we must use diligence when working with a website such as Wikipedia. There is always the possibility that someone could be writing about a topic that they do not have a proficient understanding of. This means that a person could upload something onto Wikipedia that is inaccurate or misleading to the audience.

Working together allows people to share specific goals or aids with one another. It was in 2001, that David Gauntlett in his book, Making Is Connecting addressed the concept that by working together we are able to produce better work, faster. It is basically another way of saying that two heads are better than one. For Gauntlett, ‘harnessing the collective abilities of the members of an online network, to make an especially powerful resource or service […] any collective activity which is enabled by people’s passions and becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.’ (2011: 7) More content is generated faster and the task at hand is accomplished easier. I believe that my generation is full of digital natives. Overall, it is our younger generation that is very skilled and fast at understanding and using technology, specifically computers. Digital natives began being born around the 1980s and are still being born today. For digital natives to have free, active access to the Internet means that they are creating a new form of civic culture. This generation can also be described as civic activists because young people are very engaged with technology. People are becoming more and more involved in online culture and are therefore, becoming ‘prosumers.’ They are actively involved in designing and customizing products for their own benefit. This term, prosumers, only began being used recently. It is the idea of ‘efficacy’ that alters our generation’s reality. It is basically the concept that our contribution alone will not be important enough to actually make a difference. This can be explained better by explaining young people’s idea of voting in the United States. Many people my age who are of eligible age and standing to vote, do not, because they believe that their one vote will not make a difference. However, this is not true. I really enjoyed this assignment because not only did I learn more about technological and cultural determinism, I had a great group and made friends in the process. Georgiamattie (discuss • contribs) 10:20, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I would completely agree with you about the fact that this generation has become more involved with technology. And I also agree with you about the fact that it is not true that our generation hasn't made a contribution to society that will make a difference. Everyday new technology is being created. just by looking back less than 20 years we can see a huge difference between how life was (such as the transportation, technology, etc.) and how life is today. The creation of technology by our generation has opened up a door that didn't exist less than 20 years ago which is proof that we ARE making a change in today's society. Granted it may not be as big as a change as the abolition of slavery or the women's rights movement, but nevertheless it is a change that affect us al. Valesagasti (discuss • contribs) 08:21, 8 April 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Feedback on Wikibook Project Work
Some contribs to the contents page include a number of entries on some key figures in Cultural Determinism. These tended to be characterised by biographical details, rather than analysis and discussion of ideas. There is a very odd entry on Pat Buchanan, which centres on some aspects of his political leanings, but never really delves into how these relate to Cultural Determinism as a concept – and the odd part being that you left out some of the more well-known aspects of his political career so that even the biography aspect is not complete. A more critically engaged editor would have attempted to draw links, comparisons and contradictions between the thinkers included in that section. They would have also devoted more time to content development and editing (you appear to have only contributed in the final few hours of the project period). Had you given yourself the entire project period, you could have gone some way to doing this.

Wiki Exercises


 * 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.

Content (weighted 20%)

 * Your contribution to the book page gives a satisfactory brief overview of the subject under discussion in your chosen themed chapter. There is a fair range of concepts associated with your subject, and an effort to deliver critical definitions. There is evidence that you draw from relevant literature and scholarship, however your own critical voice in the building of a robust argument is slightly lost, perhaps due to a variable depth of understanding the subject matter or over reliance on rote learning. The primary and secondary sources you found about the chapter’s themes cover a somewhat circumscribed 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 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) 15:05, 3 May 2016 (UTC)