【Week 12】reflection: Another start of my life~

Before this semester, I was never considered deeply about the relationship between people and technology. I just always was amazed by the fantastic experience when I using emerging technology. Such as we can use social media communicate with our family and friends online and access to lots of interesting resources. What I usually do is just about using and learning from social media and finding more way to entertainment online. Besides, I also started to do a project about develop a mobile app about social media for a specific online game. For this purpose, I ‘m so interested in exploring different kind of information service environments. Since I’m an international student, I usually used some social media app which is just in china, and Facebook or YouTube are not available in my country. I look forward to learning and discovering from the online culture of Australia that may be different from my previews experience. So After I join the first lecture of IFN 612, I realized that it was a pretty good opportunity for me to explore emerging technology.

Although I had imaged what I want to do and how I could achieve my expectation, I still was given lots of surprises after I keep doing this unit. At the beginning of the units, when I find that all the information of this unit was posted on one teaching blog instead of the QUT blackboard, I realized that this unit is a special course that different from others. Most of the units that I have studied were related to programming and run in the similar modes: each week has one lecture and one tutorial, and in the whole semester students need completed two programming assignments and one final exam. And all the resources will be posted on the blackboard so they don’t need attend every class. But this also caused some problems. Two semester was gone, it seems that I was not improving my communication skills since in most cases I just browsed the lecture slides and work with my laptop. I was not always engage in classes and express myself when I learning. However, this unit gave me a totally different experience and I always feel I was part of our learning community~ I created my first blog and tried to join in our google+ community, each week is not just about learning from lecture or tutorial, also it promoted me to connect with my classmates, share what we have learned and more interesting things on the online group.

I still could not attend every lecture or workshop, but now there are more flexible ways that would assist me to join in the class. For example, I can join in our classes by using adobe connect session, which not only is a record about what’s going on in each week, but also run as an online session that students could truly join in class online at the same time and make some interaction with other classmates or teacher. There are also some interesting online workshops that help us solve problems and work together. It not always created by Kathleen, some of them from others’ share. Besides, our online community gives each of us the opportunity to learn with each other anytime and anywhere. I do not need worried about I have no interaction with my classmates and maybe some time misunderstand the meaning of our task. I have learned lots of new idea from others post. For the same topic, it is interested that I could find different altitudes which maybe because the cultural diversity or various experience back to each person. What’s more, because this is a compulsory unit with credits rather than just an online learning environment, it still needs some assessment to evaluate the learning outcome and stimulate all the participants keep working on this unit. On my previews experience, sometime it is hard for me to take part in one unit continually, like completed the task within each week. I would be so anxiety before each due date of assignment since I need review all the lecture slides and tutorial just in one week or even less. I know this is truly a bad learning habit, but when I try to change, I still cannot stick to do that more than 3 week…: (However, this unit forced me to always follow the schedule of our courses and tried to reflect what I have learned twice a week. Though not all the posts will be marked, but I still want to try my best to finish each play and reflection because they will be published in our community group~ I’m not good at writing so it always cost lots of time, but when I posted my work and received the comments from my classmates and Kathleen, who support my idea or were going to discuss some issues of my blog with me, I got a strong sense of presence in this online community, I just felt I was the part of this unit and have the responsibility to contribute in and make it more prosperous! So when I did the persona and final report, I have lots of idea from previews learning experience instead of confused a lot what I have done, this make me confirm that follow a clear plan will improve my learning efficiency and outcome. Thanks to this unit.

The most interesting weekly activities for me is “Create an app” in week 4. The topic of that week is about ubiquitous technology. It seems that no one could escape from technology in this age of the internet. Most of the People respect and admire technology because it will benefit them. Almost every people have their mobile, and a successful mobile app would truly help people access to technology. Actually, this is not the first time I work for an app. I have studied one unit named mobile application last semester, my impression about creating an app is that it is truly a pretty difficult task and I need learn how to use one certain programming language and developed on the mobile app platform. Our group cost whole semester to finish one iOS app, which is still have lots of unsolved problems. So I was surprised at first because this activity asked we build an app in such a short time. Then after I browsed all the resources from the teaching blog, I realized it introduced to us some amazing tools to assist people build their app even they do not have programming background. I explored most of the mobile app makers which listed on that blog; they all were easy to use and provided lots of interesting templates. People just need pick the type of their app, design it and put their own information on it, which is just as simple as creating their blog.

This is a perfect example that suggests technology is not the issues only for scientists or software engineering, almost every one could use technology to come true their idea. As Darsh Thanki argued in his 2011 blog, technology have significant influence on human’s life, it changes the way that people live, it changes our understanding of the way things work and changes the way we interact with others. Although most of the innovation of technology was started by people who have the high level skills in a certain area, the meaning of a successful technology is that how to use it create more value for most of the people. So scientists always try to reduce the gap between technology and common people, now an increasing number of them could benefit from the usage of internet, personal computer, and mobile app! We would not be restricted by hardware devices anymore, the creative idea and big data become the most prevalent topic in today’s world.

I was so happy that after week 4 I could learn more about gather information and open data. I experienced MOOC and explored more about open data, open education, and data retention in Australia. I realized that I have learned before about open data was just like the top parts of the iceberg, which is just the most superficial level. The openness of open data means the data must be available and accessible, be provided under terms that permit re-use and redistribution, and be able to open to everyone without any discrimination (Richard,2010). So the main practical benefits of “openness” would be improving the ability about combine different datasets together and therefore to develop more and better products and services. Whatever open data, open education, it’s all about share, combine and create more. Learners share their resources, absorb other knowledge, and then create their own learning outcome. The companies gather user information from social media and then do comprehensive marketing for their products or service to cater for the user needs and improve their profits. However, technology always comes with problems. It is no doubt that open data also will result in lots of trouble like privacy issues, ethic issues and accessibility. Dose everyone would like to exposure him or her on public? Who own the data? Can organization sell the huge data that they have for money? To what degree people want to sticky to the information? Well, I still not clear how can we resolve these problems, but I could make sure that big data is something that have happened and will continue changing our life in the future.

What I want to suggested to this unit is that please keep update the contents of the unit with latest technology. Because it is about emerging technology, so I believe almost all the students want to realize and discover what’s going on now in this world. I think this unit has done a very good job in this parts, it opened my mind and promote me to think deeply about some new concepts about the technology. But technology always change fast, may be next year something new will emerge and replace the outdated technology. Although sometimes the core concept of some technology not always change, such as the theory of open data actually was presented as early as several decades ago(Chignard,2013). It still will be better if the team of the unit will add some latest news or research to our online community which related to our topic. I hope this unit will not only help participants gain skills and knowledge related to certain application and concepts, but also assist students to expand their views, change their thinking pattern and be more close to the real world. Well, it is maybe not an advice, just a nice wish:)

In general, I was so enjoyed in this unit. This post is not the end, just another start of my life…

Reference:

Thanki, D. (2011). Essay: What effect does technology have on us humans? https://darshthanki.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/essay-what-effect-does-technology-have-on-us-humans/

Richard, A. (2010). What is open data? http://opendatahandbook.org/guide/en/what-is-open-data/

Chignard,S. (2013). A brief history of Open Data.http://www.paristechreview.com/2013/03/29/brief-history-open-data/

Image source:

Nguyen, S. (2009). Welcoming a fresh start to 2010.

http://workplacepsychology.net/2009/12/29/welcoming-a-fresh-start-to-2010/

[WEEK 10]Reflection: Technology and community

An increasing number of people have found a link between technology and larger groups of people who have their common goals. It seems that all of us are in the throes of a revolution. Technology is changing how we do business, discuss some certain topic, chat with each other, participate in government, organize our workplaces and conduct our schooling. (Wahl, Jeffers,2000) Such as blog, Yammer, Instagram, Facebook group and google+ community, to name a few. Actually, it is altering our concepts of time and space. It feels like no one could escape from the change and most of the communities start to consider that what role technology should play in their work or in their communities, and how to create a successful community by using their resources. Some negative impact of the change from technology also will be a challenge as well.

To start with, identify the goals of community clearly is the most significant issue when community-based organizations are going to build their communities by using technology. The makers should think deeply about what is the purpose for using technology and to what degree the technology issues effect people in their community. For example, if someone would like to create an online schooling community, the purpose probably will be improving the learning efficiency. They may be would consider the technology, such as google+ community, will help to provide more learning resources, motivate students get to share with each other and also participate and contribute in it. If the makers define their purpose for connecting with others, people will find their community and join in if they have contents that are accurate, clear, and unpredictable. (Seymour, 2014)

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In addition, it is also important to think about who will participate in the community and what they might want to get involved in. the maker maybe need make their community member feel at home. Because some people perhaps will feel they don’t understand technology well enough to make reasonable judgments or decisions. They would worry about it will not make any positive effects when they study in a community with technology.  The makers maybe would educate different sectors of the community about the issues of technology access and provide some online support for sharing these insights and implications across groups (Wahl & Jeffers ,2000 ). Besides, putting out the welcome mat to create safe, open and fulfilling environments would be another good choice (Cohen,2008). The community should not always sending too much email notifications, maybe make people feel safe and allow them pick their own preferences would make them feel more comfortable. Since the community based on people, the manager should more focus on how to make technology benefit all of the members, instead of just using technology.

What’s more, a successful community still need  a few ground rules to help to establish a  well-organized communication platform. They would never set a hard rule if a guideline will suffice. They need allow people to speak freely, but not just approving every post or stifles conversations. Setting clear standards of conduct up front is important. For example, maybe the manager could not consider all of the legal and free speech considerations here, but in particular, be sure that community has clear standards for when messages are to be deleted — such as use of profanity, slander, and breach of privacy, copyright violations, or inappropriate promotions. (Cohen, 2008)When users do breach protocol, correct them immediately and firmly, but kindly. Also, users always value communities by whether it’s easy to separate the highly useful from less useful postings. More feature-rich community could empower people themselves with voting rights to help make message moderate. Such as rewarding good postings and reporting “inappropriate” postings. If the community is large and have lots of uncontrollable factors like “moderators” cannot catch all of the bad behaviors, voting will be a useful approach.

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By the way, there are several roles that represent people who have different behavior when they participate to the community. The maker should choose the technology that allow varied permission levels  for all sorts of types of participants. For instance, community maybe have a small ,active, group of “Super-Users”: people who login daily and account for the vast majority of community activities — writing, commenting, adding events, posting photos, voting, etc. There are also some people mostly read or do not even register, who would be lurkers or browsers. Actually, most of the community member would fall between the Super User and Lurkers. (Cohen ,2008)Because these varied levels of participation, the community could make clear the additional benefits if the members are more active, which will result in them more enjoy at high level of engagement and more contribute in their community. Such as CSDN.Net always give their members who always share their resources with others lots of additional privileges.

To sum up, the impact that technology has had on modern-day communities can clearly be seen: it has made things faster, more efficient, more accessible and more comfortable and has provided many new options and ways of doing things.(@SkwirkOnline, 2011) However, it also seems like the makers have little control over the direction or impact of the changes from new technology on  community. Therefore, we need clearly identify the role of technology and try to make the best use of these new tools.

Reference: 

Wahl, E. & Jeffers, L. (2000). Getting Communities Involved in Addressing Technology Access, http://cct.edc.org/publications/getting-communities-involved-addressing-technology-access

@SkwirkOnline, (2011). Technology and the community,

http://www.skwirk.com/p-c_s-11_u-52_t-66_c-237/technology-and-the-community/nsw/technology-and-the-community/the-best-place-to-live/how-communities-satisfy-group-needs

Seymour, K. (2014). How to use Technology to Create a Real Community http://www.kurryseymour.com/how-to-use-technology-to-create-a-real-community/

Cohen, A. (2008). Characteristics of Successful Online Communities , http://www.idealware.org/articles/characteristics-successful-online-communities

Featured Image Reference:

http://www.exacttarget.com/blog/wp-content

 

Image Reference:

Image 1: http://tech2ipo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/TNW_community.jpg

Image 2: http://media.nngroup.com/media/editor/alertbox/community-participation-pyramid.gif

 

 

[WEEK 10] Play: FaceBook group

I had joined some fan pages or some special interest groups but in most cases just for entertainment. However,  I had never  studied with my tutor and classmates by using  some online community.

In this semester, I ‘m glad to have a chance to experience several English online community since the units that I choose required all the students should use that to communicate and collaborate with each other. Of course one of these units is IFN 612~it is the first time I experienced  google+ community and I think this online group make the interaction among  tutor and students become very interesting and convenience. This week I am going to talk about the community of another units, which also have significant impact to improve my ability to engage in the teamwork of programming  project.

We have 14 people in our Facebook group and the topic is a programming project. We are going to develop a compiler before the end of this unit. At the start of this project, actually almost all of us confused about what is the compiler and how is worked. Although our tutor always encourage our team try to work together and solve  problems within our group, we still feel  it is difficult to keep going on our project.

we have already have our Facebook group for our whole unit actually,  after week 1 and week 2, the number of the member of our team was fixed, and  also we realised our task will be pretty tough, so we decided to create our own Facebook group to engage us work together.

To begin with, our team member would post some material about our topic which will help us make more sense about the concept of compiler. we would share our understanding timely，and if someone absent from lecture, he could seek help from our Facebook group, of course any problems within our team would be posted online and discussed by us. well, actually, it is not enough for a IT project team. Because we need collaborate with each other and work for a real project, not just discuss the topic and ask question. Therefore, after week 3, tutor start to promote us try to divide the large and complex task to some small and simple job and assign the small parts to individual. Our Facebook group is a useful platform for this purpose. Firstly, we will decide our meeting time online ,and after every meeting, one of our team member would post a meeting summary, which about what we have done and what we will do, also include the difficulty we have meet with as well. This would be really helpful, since sometimes not all team member will come to our meeting, this summary will stimulate us to communicate more efficiently. Secondly, we still need other tools to help us manage our task and do some source control. such as Trello and GitHub.

Trello is a free web-based project management application(Pryor,2014)

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GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM).(Williams,2012)

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the team leader would assign our task first and then post the link on our Facebook group.What’s more, when some one committee new code on gitHub, he/she would post what he/she have done so all team member would be noticed this new change. Then every one could learn what’s going on in our project and try to catch up with our team’s work.

Although our final product of this units still not finished, all of us really enjoy working in this Facebook group. For me, this experience make me realized how to communicate and collaborate  with my team by using the online community. Before this semester, I always think the online group was just suitable for people who would like to play or chat together.But now, what I deeply felt is that the community that created by technology would improve our work efficiency and make team work together easily, especially for IT project team!

Reference:

Pryor, M. (2014) A Special Announcement: Trello is now part of Trello, Inc. Retrieved July 24, 2014. http://blog.trello.com/trello-is-now-trello-inc/

Williams, A. (2012). GitHub Pours Energies into Enterprise – Raises $100 Million From Power VC Andreessen Horowitz http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/github-pours-energies-into-enterprise-raises-100-million-from-power-vc-andreesen-horowitz/

Image Reference:

Image1: http://imagens.tiespecialistas.com.br/2015/03/trello.png

Image2: http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/github-social-coding.jpg

[Week 8] Play & Reflection : Fans of Data retention

This week our topic is the relationship between privacy and technology. For me, actually I don’t mind if some of my personal information be public. Because I just think I could get more services which cater for my interests. Also, I’m so  curious about what will be listed on the search engine  if I type my name on google.

My real given name is Qian, family name is Fu. It’s a Chinese name. And because in western country people are used to putting  their family name after their given name. So I just type Qian Fu in the Google.

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Interestingly, The first result in the google not about me, it is a Chinese TV series and just because the spell of it’s name as same as my name’s spell. But actually the meaning of that name of Chinese TV is totally different with my name. “潜伏” is the Chinese character and the “Qian fu” is just like it’s Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, which means “Lurk”. This TV series was pretty famous and I have never considered it have such a relationship with my name. That’s the ambiguity of the technology. When one search engine covered lots of different countries, it can’t  match the words just like human who could learn the real meaning of the words.Software only could follow the  procedure which made by human.If it meet some  ambiguous words just like same spell but different meaning, search engine would give the user some “surprise”.;)

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However, there are still some foot-print of me in the google. After I came to Australia, I just started to using some other english website such as google more and more. I created my google+ account , Facebook for studying and collaborate, and I leaved  lots of my personal information in social media.  So I can find my google+ homepage link on the first page when I search myself in google.I don’t think  it’s a big deal , and it’s not about privacy disclosure, I know the google+ is a social media so when I created my google+ and post my real name and photo,I agree to open my personal information at the same time.

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Besides, I also try to use pipl, which recommend  by  our tutor~  I have never heard about this name before I study this unit. pipls is a famous people search engine, it could be used to find people by using his/her name or location.At first, I just think it’s interesting and try to find myself on it.

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As you can see, I can’t find myself on pipl actually, and it also considered “QianFu” is the name of a boy lol. Then I just change my location to china. I also found on the left of the web page, there are more options to help user find certain people. then I type my email, then try to find more information:

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Well, now I found myself lol, but it’s just the google+ page…Then I try to type my Chinese name in it, but it not support Chinese…Therefore, I think I could understand why I just could find a little personal information from pipl. It is a kind of search engine based English, and my tech foot-print  still not a lot in English webpages.

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My reflection

After I finished the play of this week,I think of my experience when I do one project recently,  we were going to start a project about restaurant and food.  we wanted to create an mobile app to help restaurant create their menu and advertise themselves. To do this, we need collect  the name of different meals and lots of detail about restaurants. We realised that how data was important for IT project.and also Data will be the most valuable things in the future.

Social media is one of the most powerful platform to gather massive personal information of people around the world.In February, Facebook announced a deal with Acxiom and other data brokers to merge their data, linking real-world activities to those on the Web.(Jessica Leber ,2013) The massive data about personal information,such as name, email, photos, hobbits,even things they liked will have significant meaning for marketing. The same things also happened on WeChat. Because there are almost 7 hundred million users from WeChat, lots of pioneers have found the huge value behind this social media.They utilised WeChat develop their business and expand it by finding more people who are interested in some certain topic.In addition, The company of WeChat also realised the value of data from that social media. Now they will some time push some advertisements on it,but these ads are optional, if you choose that you don’t interested in  these kind of ads, then it will not appear next time.What’s more, the ads, in most cases, will be show to the people who are truly interested in it. Because the procedure will analyse every user’s personal information, such as their message history, keywords, their moments. then decide which kind of ads will match their needs.

For me, I am not really care about if my personal information open.Because I could get more things that I liked. I also think the data retention is a meaningful issue for all people. Although there are still some problems need be solved,since not all the people are willing to “open” themselves to the public, and also it will put a user’s security at risk. How to balance these problems and the benefits from data retention will be a big challenge.

Reference:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514351/has-big-data-made-anonymity-impossible/