User talk:Mausjjudith

Wiki Exercise #1: Screen Time
Groupon is a company that offers a platform since 2008 where people can buy almost everything of electronic gadgets, health and fitness, beauty and spas, travelling and a lot of other products and services. The idea is that companies offer products or services for low prices, because of a temporally discount. If there are enough people interested in these products, the company will get a commission for that disposal. This kind of business model belongs to a new kind of buying behavior. When people register as a user at the website, they can name in what categories they are interested and so they always get proposals of things which are discounted at the moment. If you name your e-mail address at the registration, you can get a message with all discounted products and services. Besides you can also choose a category and search for a special product or service if you want to. Each of these categories has a few sub-categories so that you can search more precisely. So this is a website which supports online shopping. Another interesting aspect is that this website adapts to your location so that it only searches after possible results which fit in with your research criteria.

But there are also disadvantages of this platform. For example that these proposals often are declared as offers which should attract the user and increase the purchasing power. Besides some customers are not very satisfied with their payment methods. Many people say that they do not get their money back or have problems with the delivered products. My experiences with this website are very good. But in the end it is everyone’s own decision whether to buy products on this website or not.

Weblinks

Website from Groupon

Mausjjudith 12:04, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Marker's Comments

 * @Mausjjudith: A fairly well-written entry. It would have been useful to try to feed this into the themes and concerns of the module a little more clearly e.g. cultural determinism where consumer culture (and relations of capital) often drive the R&D aspects of any given communications tech; also that commercial interests here seem to be a priority over the privacy of an individual’s data. Interestingly, Jaron Lanier names Groupon in an example of data monetisation and some of the inherent problems in sustaining such a business model, in – I think – his You Are Not A Gadget book. Drawing down from this material, you could have made better use of the wiki markup by embedding links to reading, and also of course, to Wikipedia articles covering factual information (such as the link to Lanier and the external link to his book above).


 * A post of this standard roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor:
 * Satisfactory to Good. 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 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 need some work.

RE: Comments on others' work

 * These are on time and ok - however, they are a little on the short side and could do with development in terms of content, scope and reference to module themes. Remember that your comments on other people's work is weighted as heavily as your own post when it comes to grades. GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 15:18, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

Comments
Hello Judith, I like the way how you are describing this topic and that you are considering the positive as the negative aspects of this website. It gives me some additional information about this platform and how I can use it effiently. I think a great idea could be to provide a link to an article, where someone maybe describes his/her experiences with this platform. Best regards, hope to read more of your work soon --Handkel (discuss • contribs) 12:21, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

This webpage sounds very similar to other online shopping pages like Amazon, eBay, Etsy... Interesting feature is that people follow certain categories and get alerts about discounts. That must be very profitable for the businesses. I imagine that quite often people buy products they would not have bought otherwise when they receive messages with attractive deals. I feel the need to buy extra stuff even when I scroll through Amazon trying to find the thing I actually need to buy. So that sort of webpage can be a terrible thing for someone who can't control their shopping behaviour, but for responsible shoppers it might provide great deals. Sirrinari (discuss • contribs) 14:44, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

@Mausjjudith I am glad you wrote about this fantastic app, I'm a huge supporter of Groupon! There have been many occasions where I wanted to do something interesting for a weekend and Groupon really does provide intriguing, cost efficient options for trips or places to go. I find that the locator is essential to the apps success. I have been able to change my location to future destinations where I am going and I can book Groupons for my vacations before I even get there. I have recently (in the past year) noticed they have been placing ads on social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram. They seem to be using one's location for that as well, which I find to be an effective sales decision on their part. Thank you for reminding me about Groupon and i'll have to go find some Groupons for while i'm in Europe! Emily boston (discuss • contribs) 13:46, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #2: Visibility and Online Footprint
How visible am I online? I think I am not very visible on the internet. On Facebook people I don’t know can have a look on my name and date of birth but even not on my year of birth. They cannot see any postings or pictures. My friends can see much more of my site. They can see all pictures which were posted on my site and most of the pictures posted on my own. But I only let them see current pictures of mine, not of many years ago. I want them to get an idea of who I am, but they should still don’t know everything about my life. I don’t like pictures of ordinary things like the food I am eating or things I am doing. These are private things. If I am interested in telling my friends what I’ve done, I write them personal mails or meet them. I use this website to stay in contact with friends and people I don’t see very often. Besides I have an account on Tumblr. But there aren’t any information available about me. I only use it to follow fashion blogs or blogs about travelling, to get new inspiration and see some nice pictures. I also have accounts on Google+ and Youtube. But I haven’t used them for years now. I only had to make one on Google+ when I bought a new smart phone. Years ago I registered on Youtube together with a friend, but I don’t even know why we did that. On each of these profiles you can’t get information about me. I only use them to get inspiration and to broad my mind. Sometimes I think these online profiles are overrated. People define themselves about these accounts and try to create a great profile and represent themselves as something they don’t really are. I don’t know how easy it is to find out more information about someone, but I hope that I make it difficult for others to find other information about me as I want to share. Mausjjudith (discuss • contribs) 15:04, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

Comments
It's very interesting that you just focus on your social media accounts and especially on facebook, because that's the first thing we all think about in this context. If I want to find out about someone I always check his facebook profile at first. And I really like that you looked at it in to perspectives, the one of your facebook friends and the one of strangers, I think most people forget about the second group and I immediately checked what strangers could see of my facebook profile. But what about social media accounts that you once had but deleted like e.g. schüler.vz? Do you think there is still any information about you available? Askoelsche (discuss • contribs) 15:26, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

I think that information which are on the internet once, will be always on the internet. It does not matter if these websites exist anymore, because these information are recorded on other sites and special trails can be always traced. Therefore I really was surprised that there were no information about me on the first five sites, when I googled my name. What do you think about that? Mausjjudith (discuss • contribs)

Exercise #3: Information overload – Blessing and curse at the same time
The internet is a very impressive invention. But there are not only advantages like global connections and for example the opportunity to order things from China and getting the delivery three days later. On Wikipedia there is an interesting article about Information overload that gives you an overview about the history and some general causes. It can be a blessing and curse at the same time. A blessing, because there are information available about almost everything, at any time. Besides you are up to date about what is going on around the world. But that can be also a downside. Wherever we go we are faced with hundreds of posters, we get lots of messages from WhatsApp and other messengers and we want to be up to date about what our friends are doing 24/7. Look up the extract from Daniel J Levitin’s book, a neuroscientist, who said: “When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing this. Ironically it makes us less efficient. Most of the time we are busy trying to handle all these impressions we are confronted with the whole day. Our mind is overwhelmed by the amount of information, because humankind is not able to handle so many impressions. Besides being distracted from this amount of information keeps us away from the stuff we actually have to do and it takes a lot of time which we would need for more important things. I think this is why lots of people are glad when they have the chance to have a break from all this. I know that many people leave their cell phone at home, when they are going on holiday or switch them off after work. In this way they try to escape this information overload and relax for some time. And that’s the way I try to do it too, because I cannot relax, when I am on my cell phone all the time. In the end I try to use this amount of information sensibly. I look up interesting things and keep myself informed about world events. Of course I am using Facebook, but every time I can, I switch my cell phone off, to get away and come back to reality. Mausjjudith 01:03, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Comments
Good point! This reminds me of the article we read in class. "Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle" by Danah Boyd. Even if you switch off your phone, online is always around the corner. Whether it be television, the internet, or someone next to you checking their twitter feed, we are always exposed to information. In the words of Danah Boyd "I may not be always-on the Internet as we think of it colloquially, but I am always connected to the network. And that's what it means to be always-on." So is their ever an instance we will feel totally relaxed and not consumed with the overwhelming feeling all that information out there gives us? Kacollins95 (discuss • contribs) 12:58, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Exercise #4: Wikibook Project Reflective Account
David Gauntlett once said “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.” This quote matches very well with my experiences of what it means to create a wikibook. Before we started this project I had never used Wikipedia this way, shared or participated in this kind of process, because I am more passive than active online. And that is what we were supposed to do the last weeks, too. We created a wikibook on the subject of An Internet of Everything?. This book was divided into subtopics and on each of this subtopics worked students in groups, who also were divided into smaller groups. The aim of this project was to create content by working collaboratively in groups and as individuals. To produce and share knowledge. We had to do a lot of research and added it to our chapter so that everyone could participate and improve it. At the beginning we discussed how to solve this task and who wants to do what. But during the further process it got too complicated to meet each other. Besides one part of the task was to gain points by engaging on the discussion page. Sometimes it was difficult to follow the conversations so that we quickly created subtopics to precisely talk about respective topics. Only because so many people worked together well and contributed the so called ‘cognitive surplus’, this project could get this huge extent. A project like this one has to be structured well, otherwise it wouldn't work. Because we shared our knowledge and helped each other. Besides this knowledge gave us new insights to other parts of the topic so that we could add new aspects to our topics.

But this task also implicated some difficulties. On the one hand it was difficult in such a big group to compromise so that everyone gets their own tasks to do. Often people did aspects others wanted to do or did it a way, others didn't want the things to be done. On the other hand it was interesting to elaborate such an extensive theme and to create a completely wikibook. It confronted me with a completely new task. I have never before used Wikipedia that way and to be part of this group project was an experience.

Finally I would say that this kind of module completely fulfills Alvin Toffler's idea of the ‘prosumer’, who developes from a consumer to a producer. People want to participate in the society and be a part of it. But not everybody wants to share knowledge for free and wants to participate into those processes. I don’t know, whether I will be a part of something like this again, but it was definitely worth doing it. Mausjjudith (discuss • contribs) 19:57, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Feedback on Wikibook Project Work
Main contribs to chapter content include entries on restrictions to surveillance, aspects of privacy, and the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act, and the Protection of Freedoms Act (2012). Some useful signposting to other parts of the chapter help to link some of the different sections together (in the form of interwiki links). Much of this work is description, not analysis, and it seems quite basic for this level, with some information offered going uncited. Contribution is comparatively small in terms of actual word count, and are restricted to the closing days of the project.

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, 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) 14:59, 3 May 2016 (UTC)