User talk:ItsMartholomew

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Wiki Excercise 1: Shovel Knight
Shovel Knight is a 2-D, platforming game released by Yacht Games in 2014. The game is styled after several retro video games and has an 8-bit graphical and musical style. The game was successfully crowd funded on Kickstarter and was originally launched on the PC, Nintendo 3DS and the Wii U and was ported to the Playstation 3, Playstation 4 and the Xbox One in 2015. The game follows the protagonist, Shovel Knight, on his quest to reach the Tower of Fate and defeat the evil Enchantress and discover the fate of his friend Shield Knight, who was sealed inside the Tower in the events leading up to the start of the game. To reach the Tower however Shovel Knight must defeat the eight knights who make up The Order of No Quarter, who have been dispatched by the Enchantress to stop Shovel Knight from reaching the Tower. Also, on his journey, Shovel Knight will have to face his rival Black Knight several times and defeat numerous wandering heroes.

Shovel Knight is one of my favourite games and I own not one but two copies of it. The first I picked up in the Steam Summer Sale back when it first released in 2014. The second copy I picked up over Christmas 2015 on the Xbox One as I was getting increasingly frustrated with the keyboard controls and preferred using the controller. The game really appealed to me as I was a big fan of the aesthetic and fell in love instantly with the retro soundtrack. The Knights of The Order of No Quarter were brilliantly done too. Each boss was unique and surprisingly fleshed out as characters, with Plague Knight receiving his own playable story as downloadable content and a planned King Knight story to be released in the near future. The game was incredibly satisfying to play, with movement and combat being fluid and fast paced but it was still challenging enough to the point where it sometimes took me hours to pass a stage. The story is witty, funny, emotional and is full of satisfying moments, which usually come after you’ve defeated a boss by smacking them over the head with your shovel a couple of hundred times. I remember jumping out of my chair as I defeated the Enchantress with a final slash of the shovel before panicking as a second, more powerful final boss appeared to put me back in my place.

Shovel Knight in my opinion is a must play for any gamer. It shows that in a world where video game technology is constantly advancing, sometimes flashy graphics and pre-rendered cut scenes do not immediately make a good. Sometimes a great game can be made with fantastic but simple gameplay, textboxes, a simple art style and a catchy soundtrack.

So steel thy shovel, and prepare for adventure.

ItsMartholomew (discuss • contribs) 21:52, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise 1: Formative Feedback
This is a competent review of Shovel Knight which would benefit from use of wiki markup and links to demonstrate your ability to use these parts of the Wikibooks platform. Your analysis could have been linked more directly to the module themes and further critical engagement with the game. There's no evidence of comments on colleagues' exercises - this represents an important part of the overall mark, so please make sure to do this for future exercises.

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) 10:41, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise 2: Online Visibility
In a world which is growing rapidly smaller due to technology evolving and becoming more connected, online visibility is becoming more of an issue. The more I think about it the more I realize just how much information there is about me on the internet. On Facebook for example, my profile has my name, my age, my date of birth, where I went to school, where I go to university and even what kind of TV shows and movies I like to watch. And all of this information (plus photos of me) is available for people I don’t know to see. If a person walked up to you in the street and announced they knew your full name, date of birth, your favourite movie and to top it all off had a bunch of photographs of you, you would probably run away and call the police…

So why am I okay with Facebook knowing all this information about me? Maybe it’s because there is some sense of security, being able to change the settings so that only friends will be able to see this information, making sure it’s locked behind a password so that only you can alter it. But that information is still up there on the web, stored in a server somewhere in the headquarters of Facebook. Instagram and Snapchat all have photographs of me stored on a server somewhere, and while I laugh at the idea of them holding onto my worthless selfies and photos of my dinner, it also scares me that they are out there somewhere.

All my profiles are set to private, so I have to confirm people’s requests to be my friend or follower, aside from my Twitter account which is open. Recently I’ve stopped posting on Twitter as much as I used to. Nowadays, I tend to just retweet and favourite other user’s tweets and I have no problem with privacy on there as I use my nickname as a handle. So I am not really paranoid about my Twitter data because I don’t really have any.

ItsMartholomew (discuss • contribs) 12:00, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Comments

A lot of people are mentioning the amount of data that Facebook gathers, what do you think a site such as this would do with this data? Particularly after the account is deleted? There may be no solid answer to this question but it's something I've always wondered about, especially as I myself have a deleted Facebook account with lots of information that Facebook now holds. HoDstripes (discuss • contribs) 11:36, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise 3: Information Overload
How do I deal with being distracted by all the information out there? The short answer is I don’t really.

Whenever I log into Facebook I am bombarded by notifications reminding me I have events coming up, or that I have memories with people to look back on. Whenever I add new people I get the option to immediately post on their wall, or look at their new stories. Even the notification that appears at the top of my screen stating “6 new statuses!” feels like it’s forcing me to view the photo of a dog that a friend from primary school has posted or get left behind in the forever updating newsfeed. Looking at my Facebook right now, I have over 500 friends added onto my profile, but if there was a way to tell I’d be surprised if I spoke to any more than 50 of them on a daily basis. An experiment done by the Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, or TESS for short, found that the average person has two close friends that we can rely on. So why is the average number of Facebook friends over 300?

The internet is a powerful tool, we have a wealth of information at our fingertips that we can search through instantly. If I wanted to find the answer to a question all I have to do is bring out my phone, load up Google and type it in and be rewarded with page after page of answers. The phrase "google it" has become people's go to phrase when they can't remember the name of the actor playing a side character in that movie they're watching or who wrote the song that just came on the radio. And these search engines are becoming more advanced, for example, SHAZAM listens to a piece of music and can identify the song that's playing for you! Whenever I go on the internet I end up going down the rabbit hole. One link leads to another and before I know it I'm two hours deep into articles about ghosts and urban legends.

ItsMartholomew (discuss • contribs) 12:08, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Comments
I really like the way you underscored the distraction effect with examples of your everyday life and through this reflected your own behavior. Especially your question concerning the average number of Facebook friends made me think about it in a deeper way. I guess in some way it is just an evolutionary driven urge. As humans are dependent on social contacts and social confirmation the number of Facebook friends becomes a kind of indicator for us to define ourselves. The more friends we have, the more we feel socialized. As a consequence, we get overloaded by thousands of information every day. So I guess to some extent the distraction is a kind of side-effect of our urge to be connected and up to date.

Even though the search engines are becoming more and more advanced and offer us convenience suggestions in our everyday life they just push us into dependency: ‘[...]those little devices in our pockets are so psychologically powerful, that they don’t only change what we do – they change who we are.’ Turkle´s statement therefore really sums it up. Even though we argue that we are overloaded with the information we need to figure out that we are driven by it and the overload is somehow satisfying. I know that sounds strange but imagine you would have only a small and pre-selected amount of information you would feel limited and not up to date – or, at least, that´s would I feel. The overload just forces us to set up priorities and re-learn to select important information out of a bunch of unimportant ones. Therefore, I figured out a kind of strategy to handle the overload in my everyday life as described in my exercise. --Esser.h (discuss • contribs) 14:09, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree with your point about feeling left behind for not keeping up with everything on your news feed. Obviously keeping updated on the lives of people you know is pretty much the whole point of Facebook, but I would imagine most people would feel the same if they have such a large number of Facebook friends. Rather than make staying informed easier for us, the news wall just seems to leave us feeling that we are barely keeping up with what is going on in our social circle, to the point where it can actually be a relief to switch it off and forget about it for a while. It is odd that a website's use seems so important, almost necessary, to socializing in society, yet can be so overwhelming. On an unrelated note, why do you have such a large number of Facebook friends when you are aware you speak to such a small percentage of them on a daily base? I feel silly asking this considering you asked it already, but what is stopping you from removing a hundred or so people? Facebook does encourage continuously adding people, admittedly, and it is pretty much the Really? It's fooling some people,
 * Hi, to get back to your question concerning my Facebook friends. As I mentioned in my exercise #2, I have only a small amount of Facebook friends (I checked it: 30). These are all friends I know really well but nevertheless, I´m not talking to them on a daily base (maybe the reason why I´m abroad at the moment and most of them are living in my home country). So I don´t have the problem to remove people because I will only add people that are my friends in real life. Even though I know that Facebooks purpose is to add hundreds of friends and share everything but I don´t want to. And every time I visit my Facebook page Facebook reminds my to add some more friends - this kind of pressure is so exhausting. Year, you may already notice, I´m not the average Facebook user. --Esser.h (discuss • contribs) 10:15, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Well thanks for your input but the question was actually directed at Martholomew. I should have made that clearer.  On an unrelated note, what on earth has happened to my comment? -ReluctantCyborg (discuss • contribs) 11:10, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
 * Hi, okay, sorry for the misunderstanding. And concerning your comment, I´m not sure what happend I just wrote my comment under yours and didn´t change anything, I promise! I´m really not sure why the hell there are sentences missing. But I guess that this probably must be my fault so I´m really, really sorry. I have no idea what I did wrong or how to recall it. So, if you get into any trouble because of this please tell Simon or Greg that this was probably my fault. I´m really sorry!!!--Esser.h (discuss • contribs) 21:24, 4 March 2016 (UTC)
 * oh hey, no worries, they should still be able to find it in the edits. And from the history of edits, I think something went wrong like 3 comments after yours.  No idea what, but whatever.  Sorry to worry you!  I only thought to check a while after I replied. -ReluctantCyborg (discuss • contribs) 21:34, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

You make a really good point when you mentioned "feels like it’s forcing me to view the photo of a dog that a friend from primary school has posted or get left behind in the forever updating newsfeed". With having as you say 500 or more friends, it is hard to keep up with every thing that is going on within a social circle. Obviously some of the things that come up on Facebook, such as unwanted advertisements that people would have no interest in and would rather not see. You make another good point when you say out of all the people you are friends with on Facebook that you would only interact with around 50 of them which would be around the same for myself. With some Facebook profiles having over 1000 friends, you would really question are they actually interacting with them, and taking an interest into everyone's lives or is just for a social status? All in all, a very good read and a very informative insight to your opinion on this topic! Spedlow (discuss • contribs) 17:46, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

I think your analysis is very interesting in terms of how you have contrasted the two ways we can access information online. We can either become deeply engrossed in websites for far too long and receive more information than our brains can handle, or we can simply use it as a tool to find out some interesting film trivia or beat someone in an argument. I would say that both are factors of the always-on culture that has evolved and as you mention the universality of terms like "google it" really shows you how far this has ingrained into our lifestyles. I also agree with you that facebook notifications are getting out of hand! This seems to be a pretty recent occurrence, especially the whole 'memories' thing, and now they have added 'reactions' as well. I would personally argue that all these little gimmicks are signs of its eventual downfall! Ted 95 (discuss • contribs) 18:09, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

I like that you took a different approach and looked at not being able to cope with distraction rather than trying to think of ways you could. It led to a very interesting read. It would be good if you put in references for things like researchers doing a study so we can also read the actual report etc. You should think about deleting some of those "friends" from Facebook, if you haven't spoke to them in about the last 5 years then you probably won't any time soon; then you can cut down on that nosy habit of wondering what's going on in other people's lives. Digitalkitty (discuss • contribs) 10:09, 4 March 2016 (UTC) Digitalkitty (discuss • contribs) 10:09, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

I found your approach to this assignment interesting, I liked the idea that you were leading into that not only is there too much information but that a lot of it is also forced upon us and changed out definitions of certain words. I know personally that Facebook, due to the ability to add any one, has changed how I use the word friend I'm real life. This information overload of the Internet has impacted our daily lives in a maybe unhealthy way. If this is how it changes our dynamic of friendships I wonder what it will eventually do to our families. GlasgowTexan (discuss • contribs) 10:56, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise 4: Reflective Account
Over the past couple of months myself and other students from my course have been taking part in creating a WikiBook online called: An Internet of Everything? We created groups and then those groups worked on the individual chapters of this book in a collaborative process. I found it interesting because not only were we working in small groups of four or five, but also with other groups who were also be working on the same chapter as well as with the people working on the other chapters.

In his book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky believes that as people get more free time they begin to spend this time being more creative. He also believes that groups of people online can achieve more than scattered and disorganized people can. I think the WikiBooks project was a prime example of this. Alone we would have never been able to create something as big as the entire book in the time period we had. I like to think of the entire operation as cogs in a machine, one tiny cog connects to another bigger cog which connects to another even bigger cog (and so on) until the machine is working. If one of those cogs fails then everything grinds to a halt and the machine stops.

So is there a place in this world for something like our WikiBook? I think there is, but then I’m also an optimist. Looking back at what we created as a group all I can think of is how easy it is for a small group of people to come together, pull their knowledge and create a short book on a certain topic which they can then host on a website for free. As someone who has paid more than £60 for a textbook before I wish more people would work together to create something that anyone with an internet connection could access, learn from and add too. However, I can acknowledge there would be some issues with this system. For one, there would be nothing to stop someone from maliciously deleting the project. Secondly, referencing and plagiarism would also probably be a problem.

Another thing that stood out to me from this project is finding out more about my fellow students. Although most of us never met in person we had to converse through the discussion page about the chapter we were writing. Through this I saw the things they were interested in and saw them debating with others over the information they were writing. It was an experience you don’t get when writing an essay by yourself.

The idea of cognitive surplus really appealed to me and I though it applied well to the WikiBook project. One of Shirky’s core pillars of cognitive surplus is that by simply providing the tools to create, people will pick up and use these tools to make the world a better place. I think WikiBooks has that potential, we just need to pick up the tools.

Comments

I agree with you that a project like this is a great demonstration of what a large group of people can achieve even through small contributions each. To put together such an extensive range of information in such a short time, compared to how long it would take one or even three people, is really quite something. Your metaphor about the cogs in the machine was interesting - I don't think I have heard someone use it in such a positive light- but I guess the key difference to the typical "cog in the machine" situation, is that now any one "cog" can look at the finished project and benefit from all the research that has been accumulated and summarized. Your final comment was also pretty striking, I can understand why some people might accuse Shirky of being a bit utopian, but I feel there is little to lose with having some optimism in web users, if not humanity as a whole. -ReluctantCyborg (discuss • contribs) 16:53, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Clay Shirky's theory on cognitive surplus is, arguably, one of the most relevant theories regarding the wikibooks project, and your identification of the grand scale of the project and what was ultimately accomplished through creative collaboration is a testament to its structure. I sincerely applaud your optimism when discussing the project, especially after comparing it to "cogs in a machine", and it is true this project was dependent on the effort and contributions of others. Personally, while working on my chapter I felt at times there were a few cogs gone AWOL. As you have discussed about having to purchase expensive textbooks, and how easier it would be if more people created work to a similar degree as the wikibooks project, it is good that you have acknowledged that this would lead to complications, and I believe the most notable being the limited control over the content which would affect its validity, and the work of anyone using it as a source. Beespence1 (discuss • contribs) 23:23, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Feedback on Wikibook Project Work
Your contributions to your chapter are insufficient. There's some evidence of collaboration but you could have been more involved in the process. A degree of reflection is evident from the exercises, but this needed to be tied back to critical discussion to demonstrate a greater understanding of module themes. You are missing references to things such as TESS and there is only limited evidence of reading around the subject

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 limited critical engagement with set material, although most ideas and procedures insecurely grasped
 * evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material limited, displaying a qualified familiarity with a minimally sufficient range of relevant materials
 * Argument and analysis:
 * poorly articulated and supported argument;
 * lack of evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position in discussion);
 * lack 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 independent critical ability limited, due to the fact that your grasp of the analytical issues and concepts, although generally reasonable, is somewhat insecure.

Engagement (weighted 50%)

 * Evidence from contributions to both editing and discussion of content suggests minimally sufficient standard of engagement (i.e. volume and breadth of activity as evidenced through contribs)
 * Acceptable engagement with and learning from other Wikipedians about the task of writing/editing content for a Wikibook
 * Limited reflexivity and creativity, and a somewhat insecure management of discussion pages

Overall Mark % available on Succeed

FMSU9A4marker (discuss • contribs) 14:53, 3 May 2016 (UTC)