User talk:Sara Hamad El Niel

Hi, my name is Sara Hamad El Niel, and I'm currently pursuing my master's degree in Digital Media and Society at the University of Stirling. Sara Hamad El Niel (discuss • contribs) 19:14, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Annotated Bibliography
Hayles, N. K. (2012). How we think: Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

In this book, author N. Katherine Hayles explores the relationship between consumers and different technologies, claiming that we think with, alongside and through technologies and more specifically, how new media is affecting humanities and qualitative social sciences. Making the transition from traditionally print-based disciplines to digital media based disciplines to adhere to the arising digital era. In the first Chapter, the author provides a literature review of relevant research in the field to explore the many advantages and disadvantages these digital technologies are bringing to the professional field down to the consumers themselves. This chapter would be very helpful to my research as it explores the effects of digital media on a wider level and gives important insights on the cognitive affects as well as the practical effects. Moreover, the author explores the rise of Comparative Media Studies and the shifts that are taking place amongst scholars and the nature of the research itself.

Sara Hamad El Niel (discuss • contribs) 19:52, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

#BlackLivesMatter
There is no doubt that digital technologies have transformed the way we communicate, interact and how we think. Digital media has paved the way for a whole new world where users have the freedom to voice their opinions on public platform, reaching a broad audience simultaneously and catalyse social change. These platforms has given rise to a civil society that now has the power to change its future. By many, digital media is seen as a new form of democratic governance, distinct by the displacement of the public sphere model with a networked-citizen cantered perspective, connecting the private sphere of autonomous political identity to a multitude of political spaces. Over the past years, we have witnessed a huge number of digital media driven social movements that have melted geographical boundaries and created social change all over the world. And for this article, we will be taking a look at the Black Lives Matter social movement, a great example of political engagement on social media.

The Black Lives Matter movement started by activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, as a hashtag on Twitter in the summer of 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of the African American teenager Trayvon Martin, and since then, the hashtag erupted on a global scale. According to research carried out by Pew Research Center, the hashtag has been used nearly 30 million times from July 2013 until May 2018. This hashtag has become the voice of issues related to police violence and race for many years, it is also a great example of how social media can be used to promote personal and group identity construction online. Furthermore, According to independent educational UK charity Demos, in 2018, nearly two-thirds of young people (64%) see social media platforms as an essential part of achieving social change, and over half of 35-50 year olds agree (55%).



Social media has created a new form of access to the public sphere to engage many of those who wouldn’t have had access to the public sphere otherwise Traditionally, the public opinion originated from those who were informed, rather than from the lower classes who did not have neither the leisure nor opportunity to get concerned with such opinions beyond their reach. Furthermore, the constant 'connectedness' has made users integrate the public sphere into their daily lives, particularly for youth who were born right into this digital age, being very informed and socially driven.

Researcher Sebastian Valenzuela explored several links to the use of social media and the rise of protest behaviours in users. Furthermore, his researched found out that the increased political behaviour is attributed to three main explanations. Including a) the abundance of news on social media has a strong mobilizing potential – frequent news consumption enables political participation, b) exercising one’s political voice on social media involves critical information processing and depth of reasoning – which has been found to be conducive to political engagement and lastly c) social platforms enable otherwise disengaged users to join social causes – thus increasing the likelihood of being mobilized both online and offline. And overall, the researcher’s statistical analysis indicated that using social media frequently is positively and significantly related to political action..

Sara Hamad El Niel (discuss • contribs) 22:17, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

Collaborative Essay Critical Evaluation
According to Wikipedia, “wikibooks is a collaborative book authoring website, where users from all over the world work together to write textbooks and other types of instructional books on many topics.” Wikibooks provides a collaborative information sharing platform where users rely on each other for information needs and queries through contributions from each other. Furthermore, using this platform for research and writing a book may seem confusing and time consuming at first, but after using it for a while, it proved to be very useful. Using Wikibooks as a platform has made it very easy for people to work together and simultaneously, and the availability of a discussion page has made it very easy to communicate with one another, it has eliminated the need for the group members to meet face-to-face entirely, as everything was discussed on the platform itself.

Moreover, being able to see changes being made in real-time and simultaneously gives visibility into who is working on which part, and gives a better indication to the flow of the research in real-time, rather than constant changes that are made offline and going back and forth with the research and who owns what. In addition, the platform also gave made it easy to edit the research accordingly, and edit the contributors’ additions collectively, eventually filtering all of the information  published to make one unified piece of research.



Furthermore, the rise of a digital era has given rise to an information society, one that is constantly outputting and receiving information. This form of information exchange is seen everywhere online, on social networks, blogs and wikis, and the rise of this information society has facilitated the growth of a collaborative community. This is already evident in the rise of collaborative consumption, entailing sharing, owning, renting and trading goods and services. . We are already witnessing this in our modern economy, with the rise of shared working spaces for entrepreneurs, shared living spaces and more, building an economy that thrives from the access of goods and services on shared platforms.

Ultimately, the collaborative nature of the Wikibooks platform empowers democracy and the freedom of speech. In the sense that users have control over the type of information they put out and they have the power to edit it accordingly and comment on pieces of information they do not see fit, which can be considered as a form of information democracy. Users have control over what information they publish and which information they digest, rather than ‘blindly’ accepting the information they are presented with in other online sources. All in all, such collaborative platforms facilitate collaborative research, people could contribute from all over the world, however they see fit, until a final consensus has been reached, eventually creating stronger research and much more filtered information.

Sara Hamad El Niel (discuss • contribs) 22:17, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

INSTRUCTOR FEEDBACK: ESSAY DISCUSSION PAGE
Students should be engaging at least once a day, for the duration of the project. The following points illustrate how this engagement was evaluated.

Evidence from contribs to both editing and discussion of content (i.e. volume and breadth of editorial activity as evidenced through ‘contribs’). These are primarily considered for quality rather than quantity, but as a broad guideline:
 * Each item on a contribs list that are 1000+ characters are deemed “substantial”: none
 * Items on a contribs list that are <1000 characters are important, and are considered in the round when evaluating contribs as a whole because of their aggregate value: a few of these, but certainly not for the duration of the project, and not near the level, standard, nor quantity advised in the wikilabs
 * It is expected that you will make at least one contrib per day, for the duration of the project: see above

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 12:40, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Instructor Feedback on Wiki Exercise Portfolio
Posts of this standard roughly correspond to the following grade descriptor. Depending on where your actual mark is in relation to the making criteria as outlined in the relevant documentation, it should give you an idea of strengths and weaknesses within the achieved grade band overall:


 * Merit. Among other things, merit entries will make a clear point in a clear way. They will relate concepts to original examples in a straightforward fashion. They will make effective use of the possibilities of the form (including links, as well as perhaps copyright-free videos and images, linked to from Wiki Commons). 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 be very clear.


 * This work is at the lower end of this grade band, so there’s some room for improvement here. I think in order to engage with the wiki exercises a bit more, it might be useful for you to take a closer look at the assessment brief to get more of an idea of how to hit those targets. Making more use of the wiki functionality and markup would have gone a long way to improving fluidity and functionality of posts, for example.

General: In addition to the common marking scheme, there are three broad criteria widely employed in the Division, which are used to help assessors evaluate your work in a more general sense:

Reading and research: is there evidence of critical engagement with set materials?; is there evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material? For this element, your work has been evaluated as: Satisfactory

Argument and analysis: Is argument well-articulated and well-supported?; is there evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position)?; is there evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections)?; is there evidence of independent critical ability? For this element, your work has been evaluated as: Merit

Presentation: academic writing style and structure, and organisational skills For this element, your work has been evaluated as: Satisfactory GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 14:26, 19 December 2019 (UTC)