The most important lesson in my UIR journey

The most important lesson learnt in my UIR journey is about how to use the Internet as a research tool. I will explain it by comparing Before and After I take UIR.

Before	After
Do not know about the usefulness of different types of search facilities. Only rely solely on Search Engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com) for my research work	Know about strength of different search facilities and can decide which facility to use for my research
Never used Boolean operators	Use Boolean operators to fine-tune my search results
Do not know how to evaluate websites	Learnt proper ways for website evaluation
Do not know proper steps to be taken to do online research	Know about the 8 steps of research strategy to be taken to search online more effectively and increase productivity

To sum up, taking UIR is a unique,interesting and very useful process. I enjoyed the whole learning journey. :)

Practical 8: TalkingCock.com

During Practical 8, we visited to TalkingCock.com which is a satirical feature site for Singaporeans.

Our group thought of how to react to the website if we were foreigners working / studying in Singapore.

The following is the summary:

The website is funny and the expressions in the posts are humorous. As a foreigner, he/she can also explore about local usage(Singlish) from the dictionary there. It is also a platform for Singaporeans to express their opinions and viewpoints about current issues in satirical manner.

Practical 7: E-learning Wiki Discussion

Practical 7 is e-learning. I summarized the findings about Internet social network services and posted on Wetpaint Wiki.


Introduction
Social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to
Construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system,
Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and
View and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

Summary about the developments of Internet social network service

The first recognizable social network site named SixDegrees.com was launched in 1997. It allowed users to create profiles, list their friends and in 1998, surf the Friends lists. It attracted millions of users but it failed to become a sustainable business.

Another popular website, Friendster was launched in 2002 and its primary target was to compete with Match.com, a popular online dating website by then. MySpace was begun in 2003 to compete with sites like Friendster, Xanga. Many indie music bands from the US started to put their profiles and songs on MySpace as an alternative way to reach out their fans. The iconic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former Friendster users.

In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a undergraduate studying at Harvard University founded Facebook which by that time only allowed Harvard students (i.e. students who have harvard.edu email address. Beginning from September 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students, professionals inside corporate networks and eventually everyone. Different from other SNSs, Facebook users are unable to make their full profiles public to all users. Unique feature of Facebook is the ability for outside developers to build "Applications" which allow users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, such as compare movie preferences and chart travel histories.

Evaluation of the website

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is a web-based, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Its focus is social science research on computer-mediated communication via the Internet, the World Wide Web, and wireless technologies. The journal is broadly interdisciplinary, publishing work by scholars in communication, business, education, political science, sociology, media studies, information science, and other disciplines. As the articles from the website were read and maintained by a strong team of editors from different departments of various universities in the U.S., there is credibility for the articles of the website.

It provides complete and extensive analysis about the nature, history and development of social network service websites using different approaches such as methodological techniques, theoretical traditions, and analytic approaches. It is a research paper leaded by two authors from University of California and Michigan State University.

It also provides the bibliography reference session at the end of the article. It is the acknowledgement of the source and also allows me to do further research and reading at the website links there.

Resource
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html


Reference
Boyd, D.M., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). "Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. Retrieved May 27, 2008 from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

What I have learnt
From the above resource, I learnt about the developments and rise and falls of different types of social network sites,as well as current trends.

Most importantly, I learnt about how to correctly evaluate the online resources. Referring to the evaluation criteria taught in previous practical, the followings are the main questions to ponder to evaluate the effective and usefulness of a website for research work:

Authority

• Is there an author? Is the page signed?
• Is the author qualified? An expert?

Accuracy

• Is the information reliable and error-free?
• Is there an editor or someone who verifies/checks the information?

Objectivity

• Does the information show a minimum of bias?
• Is the page designed to sway opinion?

Coverage

• What topics are covered?
• What does this page offer that is not found elsewhere?
• How in-depth is the material?

Currency

• Is the page dated?
• If so, when was the last update?
• How current are the links? Have some expired or moved?

My Dream Holiday

Kyoto

Nestled among mountains in Western Honshu, Kyoto has a reputation worldwide as Japan's most beautiful city. Kyoto, with its hundreds of temples and gardens, was the imperial capital between 794 and 1868, and remains the cultural centre of Japan.

Travel Website: Lonely Planet

Brief Evaluation of Lonely Planet Travel Website
It provides useful information about the many places around the world. The information is arranged under different sections. The overview section introduces brief information about Kyoto and Fast Facts such as population, currency, time zone, etc.

Most interestingly, it also shows multimedia such as photos, videos so I can know visually about the beauty of the place.

Other sections such as Activities and Events provides a glance on the culture and different events held over the year.

The website coverage is wide, covering different useful information for most of the places in the world.The information from the website is also free accessible for all users.

The most important criteria you used to get information about your Dream Holiday is the completeness. As I am searching for information about a place that I have few knowledge about, the information that I get from the website must be complete i.e. providing all important information such as location, History of place, Places to visit, where to eat, where to stay so that I can get the sense of knowing the place well so I will not spend much time figuring out to get information from searching from different websites online.

The reason why I want to go to Kyoto is as I am interested in photography I want to take landscape photos of its beautiful temples and gardens and also portrait photos of the people there to reflect the their lives and culture.

Let me end this post with some beautiful photos of Kyoto.

Photo Credits: Bobak Ha'Eri, Retrieved from Wikipedia

Photo Credits: Wikipedia

Photo Credits: Chris Gladis, Retrieved via Wikipedia

Practical 4 & 5: Using Different Internet Search Facilities

In this practical, Ms Faridah introduced us about different types of search facilities. They are

• Search engine
• Meta search engine
• Subject directory

After that, I identified the keywords from my research topic and also their variations. The following is the list of keywords and variations:

Keyword	Keyword variations
development	improvement, growth, expansion, increase, maturity, advance
Internet	online
social	societal, community
network	group
service	-

The search phrase I used is

(development* OR growth* OR expansion* OR increase* OR maturity OR advance) AND (Internet OR online) AND social AND network AND service

I used Google, MetaCrawler and Yahoo! Directory as different kinds of search facilities.

The following is the summary of the search results:

Google (search engine)
Numbers of hits - 484000
Related resource - JCMC Online Journal
Comments
Results are ranked in order of the relevancy. Displayed different types of resources such as search results from Google Video, online journals, as well as pdf files. Therefore, I conclude that google search provides relevant search results ranked in their relevancy and also provides search from other types of media such as videos, scholar reports, and as well as online books.

MetaCrawler (Meta search engine)
Numbers of hits - 77
Related resource - Nil
Comments
The meta crawler provides search results from different types of search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and Windows Live. But the search results are not very relevant and it does not produce any relevant result about my research topic.

Yahoo! Directory (Subject directory)
Numbers of hits - 2068
Related resource - Nil
Comments
Most of the results only link to the home page of the websites and not the particular page that contains the search term. When performing search for my topic, could not find any relevant result. One useful thing is that I can browse through the different categories and sub-categories which allowed me to explore the list of web-sites which are related to the particular category.

After doing research, I noticed that there were similarities and differences among different types of search facilities.

All three search facilities arrange and display the search results in the similar format as follows.
Title of the web page (clickable, when user click on the title, it will leave the search result page and navigate to the web page of the web resource)
Excerpt of the text within the page which contains the search keywords (short description)
URL to the web resource

What I have learnt
After doing practical, I fully understood how to use search engine's operators such as boolean operators, truncation, etc. Before that I did not have knowledge about how to use them. I also learnt the strength of the use of appropriate keywords combined with operators to form a search phrase. It have much impact on the search result as they can limit the number of results to most relevant ones and can minimize the occurrences of unrelated links in search results list.

If I were to do research for my current topic before I took UIR, I would not use any boolean operators. I would use normal phrase such as "social network service". But it would result in millions of search results and most of them will be irrelevant. I will need to take much time looking for useful result. However, after I learnt about boolean operators, my search results are narrowed down significantly. Most importantly, they are much more relevant and useful information for my research topic.

E-Shopping Spree – If I have $500

If I have $500, I would buy Canon Speedlite 580EX II, flash light for my DSLR Camera.
I searched it on eBay. Price is USD 430.25.

I want to buy this item because it would be a very useful accessory for my current Canon DSLR. Currently, my camera built-in flash is not powerful enough to shoot objects from far and also cannot do manual controls. I will be able to use the above flash to explore more about Flash Photography such as flash bouncing, diffusion, etc. I can shoot indoors/night events that requires flash light. I can also shoot macro shots that requires flash light. Flash photography has always been a very difficult technique to master and I hope I can learn and explore more about it if I get the flash.

Practical 3: E-learning

Practical 3 is part of E-learning. No need to attend class physically.

First of all, the following is the my identification of four of the resources that I found online during Practical 1 and 2.

Resource 1: BBC Online
Purpose of resource: News
Reasons:
It provides information about the risks of personal information being stolen from popular social network website Facebook. It is an article written by Spencer Kelly as part of the BBC’s weekly technology programme, Click. The website is developed and maintained by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a major broadcast news company. It also provides facts and possible ways of personal information being stolen from Facebook. It educates the user about the danger of putting too much personal data and information on Facebook which can be stole by hackers to be used for data mining.

Resource 2: Personal Blog
Purpose of resource: Personal
Reasons:
The above website is a personal blog written by a single mother from US. It is a personal website because the author of the website shares her experiences of being a single mother, her thoughts and creating an internet social network and online community to reach out to other single moms and single dads.

Resource 3: Online Journal
Purpose of resource: Information
Reasons:
The website a web-based, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. It is broadly interdisciplinary, publishing work by scholars in communication, business, education, political science, sociology, media studies, information science, and other disciplines. This particular journal article provides insight description and information about the features of social network sites, and discussion about key changes and developments.

Resource 4: Wikipedia article
Purpose of resource: Information
Reasons:
Wikipedia is a popular Web 2.0 free content encyclopedia website. There are over 2.3 millions articles in English, all of which were written and contributed by netizens all over the world. Using different kinds of media such as photos, videos, quotes, facts and figures, maps, and links to related websites, Wikipedia provides comprehensive information on wide variety of interesting topics ranging from coffee to Cape Town to corals.

Secondly, I posted my views on how the Internet impacts my academic student life and comments about advocacy websites on the discussion forum.

What I have learnt
I have learnt about different types of websites and purpose of them. By reading the lecture notes, I knew that the following are the purposes of websites:

1. Information
2. Advocacy
3. Business/marketing
4. News
5. Personal
6. Entertainment

After doing my reflections on Practical 3, I going to post a photo taken using disposable film camera, titled "Reflection".