User talk:Kieranmcm95

Hello this is my user discussion page which will be used for my educational assignments, feel free to comment on my page.

Wiki exercise 1 - Educational assignment
An example of a useful media device is the Forza Football Addict smartphone app. This app is targeted at football fans especially those interested in live score updates, while it also goes more in depth with many other intriguing features available. Firstly this application allows the user to receive instant notifications not only for score updates, but for other in game statistics as well as off field transfer news. Another important feature the app gives the user is the ability to select favorite teams and/or competitions to follow, these matches then appear on the home page and can be looked at in more detail for line-ups, game stats, injury news, live league tables etc. So this feature provides an element of customization to the user experience. There is also a helpful option to select any of the teams within the app and view their own page, which gives their fixtures, squad lists and more, while also providing an interactive aspect by being able to vote on squad, manager and board approval as well as being able to join a poll on whether they will win their upcoming match. Parts of the applications particularly the notifications system, can be linked to 'always on' culture with the notion of being relentlessly connected to our media tolls and being updated constantly as the event takes place. As the app has options to share scores through different social media platforms, this can become part of people's online identities or part of their online persona to give a certain impression of themselves by sharing this content.

Kieranmcm95 (discuss • contribs) 11:57, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Comment:enjoyable app I also found this app enjoyable and useful, as a passionate football follower myself I have used many apps similar to this, my main one being sky sports score center, which is usually one of the more popular ones. However the sky sports app can sometimes run slowly, or take a while to load. This could be down to its popularity, however i do not know that. I did not have any such problems with this app though. What made me enjoy this particular app was the interactive elements. I enjoyed the features in the app such as rating the players performances at half time stages, awarding virtual badges, and seeing other users opinions of the game. These features really allow the user to be immersed more in the app. I especially like the way you can see other's opinions, as i think that is an important aspect of football and sport in general. That being said many users will just want apps like these to get score updates, so could find these other features an annoyance. However overall i would recommend this app also. Cloudon14 (discuss • contribs) 11:33, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise 1: Formative Feedback
Your discussion of Forza Football Addict gives a solid description and makes a basic attempt to integrate this into module themes including always on and online identities. For this to work, you need to offer a more substantial and critical analysis. For example, you mention notifications: What kind of notifications do you receive from the app? How often does the app push notifications to your phone? You've identified something of interest but you need to extend this to convince us that this is actually worth looking in to. Your comments demonstrate a good level of engagement and again, identify how to link the topic back to the module, but would also benefit from a greater critical engagement beyond listing topics of interest.

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) 10:36, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Comment: Really Useful App
Overall a really useful application - I really like the detail that the app offers. There are lots of football apps out there but this app really seems to have an edge: small things like allowing you to choose the background theme, almost as if the app was like a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter in that it allows you to personalise it. As well as even having an option to change the update frequency of fixtures and scores based on data usage and having an exact timescale of when the match you want to follow starts at - to the second. I also really love the user interface as a whole particularly the fact that it shows you up and coming games for different leagues on the home screen, but then allows you to effortlessly look at past game results by clicking on the clock on the left or if you want to look at live updates, by clicking 'LIVE' on the right. This app runs really smoothly and I'm definitely going to keep it on my phone, being a big football fan myself. I must say, of all the football apps I've downloaded (and there have been many) I have not come across one that runs as clean and smoothly as this app. To improve your post I'd recommend sharing a link or maybe compare it to other football apps and be more informative on why it is unique.

Wiki exercise 2 - Educational assignment
When it comes to online visibility and footprint for me it’s very limited, which will be in contrast with most people in my age group and education establishment. In terms of the social media platforms I do have, it’s minimal. I currently have a Snapchat account and application on my phone which I never use and it’s only still there due to my laziness in not deleting it. I also have an Xbox Live account which I do log onto to use certain apps like Netflix but as only having the free sliver membership, I don’t interact with friends on the platform. An online medium I do use regularly is Whatsapp, which is arguably not a social media platform as it just connects you to contacts on your phone, but this will still have a lot of information and pictures of me stored in some server somewhere and also on some of my friends Whatsapp applications. My choice in having more private types of social media is a growing preference for a lot of other young people (Beach, Anson, Breuch & Reynolds, 2014: 99) and with reported statistics like 11 million young people having left Facebook since 2011, show’s there is some changes happening in young people’s media use (http://business.time.com/2014/01/15/more-than-11-million-young-people-have-fled-facebook-since-2011/).

By continuing to look at information available about me online, there is examples of some pictures, videos, posts, etc., of or about me on some friends social media feeds which will be untagged. This means it could be argued I don’t have my own online identity or narrative shown through a media feed, profile pictures, etc., so in a sense it doesn’t give me this characterisation or back story which people using certain social media may have. In contrast it could be argued that an inaccurate representation of me could be presented through this untagged information as some could see this and come to wrong conclusions, such as me being a ‘social media hater’ or being ‘scared or unable to use new technology.’ Both of these assumptions are untrue as l have knowledge of how these mediums work and I would still agree that I’m part of the ‘always on’ culture by being permanently connected to the media technologies that I use, maybe not to the extent as others in my peer group or even in the same ways as them.

In terms of whom I share information with and why, most information I share online is to my closer friends on Whatsapp. The main reason why I don’t distribute information publically is that I don’t feel enough of a need to share things about myself online to take the time to create these accounts. When it comes to using social media as a mode of contact, there is other ways to contact people such as Whatsapp which I use, but I do agree there is complications when having to contact those who I don’t have their phone numbers or having to contact strangers. Another reason behind not sharing a lot of content online is due to not really being interested and knowing that I won’t use it, for example when I created a Snapchat, which I found uninteresting and more of an annoyance. These points are not showing that I am against social media and even though I find some aspects annoying, boring or distasteful, I can still see some positives within these platforms which have made me consider creating more social media accounts from to time. Kieranmcm95 (discuss • contribs) 11:51, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Comment
I find it really interesting that you do not use social media since it is rare nowadays that one does not use Facebook. I personally would find life much harder, particularly at university, if I didn't have a Facebook account since I depend on it so much for contacting others - especially for group work! I personally believe in the future that it will ultimately become desirable to be private and people will pay a lot of money to have their data inaccessible from others and removed from being online completely. I agree with your morals and ideas and believe that they are true: you do not need a Facebook to contact your friends and it is not necessary to have it to stay in touch with people you are close to. I think what is so desirable about having Facebook and being on all these social networks is it provides an opportunity to manage yourself and build relationships with people and create an idealised version of yourself. Rossmurray26 (discuss • contribs) 02:43, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Wikibooks Project
Hi Kieran,

It looks like you and I are going to be working together for the group project since we are both in the same seminar class and have both been assigned the topic on Technological and Cultural Determinism.

Please get in touch so we can discuss how we're going to go about it. Rossmurray26 (discuss • contribs) 12:01, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Wiki exercise 3 - Educational assignment
There is a huge amount of information which is online within many different contexts, platforms and devices, which shapes the way people live their lives in this day and age. We have all different types of information from online shopping which holds banking information to social media accounts containing personal information. Even within the same context of social media there is a mixture of information, for example Snapchat which uses information regarded as disappearing content to Instagram which can be seen as permanent or at least semi permanent content(http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/snapchat-adds-disappearing-text-and-video-chat-9310236.html). I also feel this abundance of information has both positive and negative factors. Some positives could be this idea of having so much information readily available at your fingertips, relating to ideas of the ‘always on’ culture as we seem permanently tethered to the devices we use. Other positives is the ability to contact and receive data from anywhere in the world in seconds, being able to save information across lots of platforms or devices and allowing people to share information or ideas online which incites debates about almost any subject you want. This sharing of information can be seen adding to the collective intelligence as an online member, by being able to put forward creative ideas. In terms of negatives having this huge amount of information about people creates security risks with ideas surrounding surveillance and information potentially being corrupted or stolen, while these huge amounts of data can promote ideas of laziness or distraction as people can be skewed from their original online purpose by having so much other information to deal with or use.

By continuing to look into this idea of distraction created by all this online information, we see this is arguably very likely to create distractions. Firstly the sheer amount of things you can do online creates so many options or tasks which leads to the procrastination of the most important ones, but what types of information distracts people and to what extent is in contrast depending on the person, e.g. a gaming addict or a light social media user. This distraction is heightened by these integrated apps or devices, which allows you to access a range of multimedia information through the one source and it again allows diversion from your central purpose, for example the ability to connect social media accounts to different apps such as Spotify or the range of multimedia data that can be accessed through gaming consoles originally for the sole purpose of playing games (Schäfer, 2011). This wealth of information has been dealt in this way in my opinion, as human nature of having so many choices and not always choosing the right one. By looking again at dealing with these huge amounts of information, it should be dealt with factors of priority but as mentioned before there is so much to do it can lead to the factor of individual choice. Other contributing factors could also be on time available to use or share all this information, the ability to understand it or the finances to be able to access it. Kieranmcm95 (discuss • contribs) 11:41, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Comment
I agree with almost all of your well made points here. As an avid user of Snapchat myself, I do enjoy the disappearing aspect. I feel Snapchat, while still allowing procrastination, is more for fun use rather than giving users information. As it states in that article, that Snapchat rejected a 3 billion deal offer from Facebook, I feel this is a big difference. If Facebook had managed to complete that deal, then I would expect Snapchat would of became just as bad as Facebook for adverts, and for shamelessly plugging information into its users. I would recommend this read; https://techliberation.com/2009/08/23/can-humans-cope-with-information-overload-tyler-cowen-john-freeman-join-the-debate/. This questions weather we can actually handle this information overload, and how it is affecting us. I would argue that although a positive is that we see information that is sometimes useful to us, its not in the capacity that we actually want to see it. It is forced upon us, so we do not take in the information how we would of wanted it, rather we take it in as we are presented it, in my opinion. 195.40.5.74 (discuss) 15:56, 3 March 2016 (UTC) (discuss) 15:55, 3 March 2016 (UTC)15:55, 2 March 2016

Comment: Great Analysis
I also think your ideas are very justifiable and I too agree with most of them, however, I think there is more to it than just having loads of options to explore loads of different internet sites. I feel that the main reason is that the internet, and in particular social media, is impressionistic. Because of this, we spend so much time checking up on what our friends are doing and how we can improve our own user page. I feel that due to our innate human desire to be liked, we are constantly checking up on new ways to portray to our audience that we are having fun and living well. The sites' integration with each other provides more means for becoming further distracted since when we go on Facebook, for instance, we are also looking at tweets, YouTube videos, Instagram posts and Vines. Snapchat is an exception since it is based on disappearing content which expires, hence, perhaps this is why content posted on there is more real and less superficial and I feel that this is a great and unique quality that Snapchat possesses over other networks and perhaps is why Facebook tried to buy it over. Snapchat Rejection of Facebook's $3 billion Offer Rossmurray26 (discuss • contribs) 18:23, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Wiki exercise 4 - Reflective Account
The wikibooks project allowed me and all the students doing the digital media module to interact and work together on a collaborative project as well as taking individual initiative and doing our own assessed work. As part of the collaborative nature of the module we were first given the chance to comment on classmate’s individual posts for the exercises, this allowed discussion to be created meaning we could develop ideas of the module and further our knowledge of wikibooks before starting the project. These ideas could also be discussed in a face to face context in seminars and computer labs to reiterate points or to bring up challenging issues people may be unsure about. The wikibook project itself meant we were all working together in collaboration, while being put into groups of 4 within our seminar classes with each group covering a different topic. My topic had around 20 members so meant we had to split up sections through online discussion on wikibooks, this allowed people to put ideas forward and meant we had to work together to find the best and fairest way to allocate a section to each group. This form of online communication allowed us to have different chat areas, so we could chat to everyone involved in the project, those doing our book chapter and those in our groups, so this meant discussions were organised and you could filter who you wanted to chat to avoiding any confusion. Through this online platform we could use the talk page to discuss and develop various ideas, resolve any conflict that may have arisen, share the workload and organise any meet ups, while letting you discuss wiki mark up, formatting, the layout, structure of the book, source material and references. There were some drawbacks to using the wikibooks platform, due to there being so much information it did become messy at times and also as you had to wait for replies it did slow down the project to an extent. As mentioned before we were able to arrange meet ups for an offline face to face context, this was useful as we were able to get an instant discussion and able to talk about splitting the workload evenly, instead of waiting for periods of time for responses online.

This project can be related to many ideas covered within this module to gain an intellectual insight into the topic of digital media. The wikibooks project can be looked at in relation to the civic web and David Gauntlett’s web 2.0 definition; the wikibooks project can be seen as an online community using their joint capabilities to create an informative tool. This then means it could have some sort of civic and political value, by representing individuals as part of a collective group effort to achieve a creative goal which has an academic worth to it. We can also consider the wikibooks as a form of collective intelligence; in particular Pierre Levy’s definition can be looked at where it can be seen as having a shared appreciation among the contributors of the project while allowing the individual to enhance their own ideas and knowledge. Another idea which could be discussed in terms of the wikibook project could be Clay Shirky’s thoughts on cognitive surplus, so means the combined work as a group for the wikibook project would lead to more in depth and extensive results in comparison to that of the individuals work just being put together. While Shirky also discussed cognitive surplus in terms of the idea that people are usually willing to help out for the greater good especially if they have easy access to required resources, this point could be argued against our the case of the wikibook project as our project wasn’t completed through voluntary participation but was for a compulsory university assignment. This doesn’t mean it couldn’t have allowed a sense of creatively or importance by contributing to a wealth of information but at the same time it is yet to be seen whether this project will lead to a passionate involvement or future reproduction of these types of projects from the students in question.

Marker’s Feedback on Wikibook Project Work
Your contribs show a sustained, intense engagement with colleagues and content over the last week of the assignment. There is also evidence of secondary reading and engagement with module themes in both chapter and exercises. A greater consistency of referencing would help demonstrate where material came from.

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

Engagement (weighted 50%)

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

Overall Mark % available on Succeed

FMSU9A4marker (discuss • contribs) 14:52, 3 May 2016 (UTC)