Practical 1: The Beginning

This is the very first practical lesson of UIR. Firstly, our lab tutor, Ms Faridah, briefed us about what we need to do for Portfolio. Before the lab starts, when I first read through the document describing about assessments and the portfolio, I was thinking "Portfolio" as a book of collection of photos which a photographer uses to showcase his works. After the teacher explained clearly about what we need to do, I know the real meaning of it. It is a compiled and binded book of the research and the blog posts. I got the chance to see 'A' graders' portfolios. They were interesting and well written with insightful thoughts and reflections.

Then, we were given a list of suggested topics to do research. I chose "Discuss the developments of Internet social network services" topic. I chose this topic because I was developing a facebook application during holidays and had read some articles (online/print) about the developments and effects of social network services. I am also interested to do more research on how Internet social network services affect the communication patterns among people.

After that, as part of Practical 1, I needed to find out information about social network services in discussion forum, electronic journal and www website. The following is what I found out:

Discussion forum: Classroom 2.0
URL: http://www.classroom20.com/forum/topic/show?id=649749%3ATopic%3A45491
Briefing description: Discussion thread about the use of Internet social network services to communicate between college and academic students

Electronic Journal: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication's (JCMC)
URL: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
Brief description: The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC) 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. Within that general purview, the journal is broadly interdisciplinary, publishing work by scholars in communication, business, education, political science, sociology, media studies, information science, and other disciplines.

WWW site: Answers.com
URL: http://www.answers.com/social+networking+services?cat=technology
Brief description: The explanation of what are social networking services, history and development of social networking services.

What I have learnt
After doing online search to get more info, I have learnt that although there are lots of resources on-line such as forums, news website, encyclopedias, finding the correct and most relevant information is not an easy task. I needed to use different search terms as well as different search engines to find most relevant results. I believe, in the upcoming UIR labs I will be learning about keywords and operators to refine the search to get more relevant results. Moreover, I also learnt that when I need to do research, I need to search information from different kinds of online resources such as blogs, forums, news website, and so on , in order to get much more comprehensive and complete research.

I shall end this post by sharing one of the photo of Singapore Flyer that I took about 2 months ago.