Week 12 - Reflections and Conclusion

This is the last week of the semester and our last class of Social Computing and Media. The past twelve weeks of IS20110 have been overwhelming yet insightful. This module has been very demanding in terms of its continuous assessment and group project. I enjoyed the eLab's throughout the weeks as I learned how to create a Prezi, make Screencasts and Mashups which feel will be useful in the future.

The group project side was beneficial as it improved my team work and group collaboration skills. Despite the MIT App Inventor often being problematic, it was an excellent achievement to see our app come to life. We will be submitting it today, after we finish filming our video tutorial on how it works.

Week 11 - What's Trending Now?

We were given 3 questions at the start of the lecture this week:

1. Would monitoring employees at work via technology be ethical?

We thought that monitoring employees at work is ethical. You should be paid to do your job and if you are, you would have nothing to hide. If shop assistants and waiters are monitored by CCTV, monitoring employees at work via technology should be allowed. 

2. Under what circumstances is it ethical to use customer data of another company analysis?

It is ethical to use customer data of another company analysis as long as there is respect towards privacy and the protection of customers. The best way this would work was if the customers were fully aware that their data was being analysed.  

3. Is it ethical for Facebook to display News Feed stories to raise user moods on Facebook?

We believed that it wasn't ethical for Facebook to display news feed stories to raise the moods of its users. We thought that it was unnatural and dangerous that social media could have such a power over its users. It should not be able to manipulate the emotions of a user. 

                   

Week 10 - UCD Cinema Presentation

I was chosen by my group this week to give a presentation on our app - The UCD Cinema App. Each group was given two minutes to discuss the progress of our app. We formulated the idea by renting a room in the library each week and brainstormed ideas in the initial meetings. We wanted the app to be used by students and relate to UCD and the students on campus.

The name of the app is UCD Cinema and it will be used to provide students with movies and showtimes that are on in the cinema on the go. We faced difficulties picking an original idea as we were going to create a healthy eating app but saw that many other groups had chosen this idea in a previous lecture. We went to the Student Centre to talk to the cinema staff and they suggested to use coding to make it live. We then went to the Computer Science staff to ask for coding help but were re-directed several times and they were unresponsive. We overcame the difficulties by not making the app live and focussing on Blocks, Prezi and the Facebook page instead.

The app will work with approximately 3 to 4 screens. They will be

1. What's On
2. Coming Soon
3. About Us
4. Ticket Prices

The social media we will use to market the app are a Facebook page that has already been set up and a YouTube video that will demonstrate how to use the app connected to our Prezi. 

Week 9 - Guest Lecture on Social Computing for Business

Our guest lecturer this week was Lucie Bohmova from the University of Economics Prague. She discussesed the importance of social media for businesses and the four C's to be successful in this: Creativity, Creation, Community and Connection. The basics she mentioned was to not duplicate, start with friends, embrace your audience, use ofeten and keeping your social media personal, real and authentic. We then did a group task to create our own company and suggest how we could market that. We were also asked 'How will social media change by 2020?'. Our group said that it will develop further and wearable technology will be popular. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter will not be as popular as the users will move on to new sites.

Week 8 - Managing Visual Social Media

In Week 8, we were instructed to make a Flickr account for out eLab. This tied in well with the week's lecture: Managing Visual Social Media. I uploaded an album onto Flickr of a few photos I took when I was in New York earlier this year. I have embedded one picture below along with a link to my Flickr album.

Flickr album:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/132728002@N07/sets/72157649811923874/

Week 7 - Mashups

We learnt about Mashups in Week 7. During our face to face Lab on Friday we created a Mashup by making a Google map using data featured in the book 'Heritage Trees of Ireland' by Aubrey Fennell.

Week 6 - Video Communication

In this week’s lecture, we focused on different types of communication, video communication in particular. Synchronous communication is direct while asynchronous communication is without co-ordination.  Podcasts can be used for entertainment, business or news. We used this class to discuss the ways in which we could market the app for our group project. We looked at screencasts, which are digital movies where the setting is partially, or wholly a computer screen. The audio narration describes the actions on the screen. Examples given were Screencast-o-matic, Copernicus and Jing.

In the eLab, we had to make a Screencast and upload it on to YouTube. I decided to give a tutorial on how to make a Facebook account. Instead of the original task of searching for UCD on Google Images, I recorded my Screencast of creating a Facebook and uploaded it onto YouTube. I used the YouTube editing tools to add music to the video. The video of this is attached to my blogpost. 

Week 5 - Designing and Presenting Content via Social Media

We looked at how information can be designed and presented on social media. Techniques of presenting are chunking, hyberlink, bread crumbing, hooks and navigation aids. We were shown info graphics and tools such as taggalaxy.de, easel.ly, present.me and hashtagify.me. Prezi is a zooming interface and is free to students. Powtoon is used for creating animated videos. 

We did not have a team meeting this week as there were scheduling conflicts with all our timetables. We have kept up communication on Facebook and are researching our potential ideas from last week. 

In the lab, we were given instructions on how to sign up for Prezi. We then had to make a Prezi presentation on a topic of our choice. I chose Facebook and I've embedded the Prezi onto my blog post below.  


My Prezi on Facebook

Week 4 - Social Bookmarking and Tagging & Pinterest

We looked at the Wisdom of Crowds and Social Bookmarking in this week's lecture. We used polleverywhere.com to collect information from the students in the lecture in an efficient way. Firstly, we had to submit our team app ideas on the website so there was a live feed of the potential app ideas of different teams. Then we used it to guess how many people were in a picture, highlighting the wisdom of crowds idea. Social bookmarking is the use of bookmarks accompanied by metadata descriptions. Examples given were Delicious, Digg, Diego and Citeulilke. 

          

As mentioned, in the lecture we saw the ideas of other teams in the polleverywhere feed. In our team meeting, we discussed how our original idea of a food and health app directed towards UCD students was very popular among other teams. We decided to change our idea and looked at other possible app options such as a UCD cinema app, a UCD bus times app and a music app. We will research these apps this week. 

For this week's e-Lab we had to create a Pinterest and Diigo page. I've always wanted to see how Pinterest works so I was excited for the task. As I am going Interrailing this summer, I made a board for potential itinerary ideas for the holiday. I took some screen shots shown below: 

I joined Diigo and was able to use the Diigolet button on my browser to bookmark a few recipe pages. 

Week 3 - Collaborative Information Generation

In the third lecture, we sat with our teams and discussed, in pairs, our experiences with online reviews. My partner and I both found that we do not post reviews for many reasons. On many websites, you are required to create an account in order to post a review. We found that this was too time consuming. We also didn't want it to interfere with our online privacy. Although I do not post reviews, I find them very useful and often read the reviews of others. Most reviews generally tend to be either very positive or very negative. People tend not to post reviews if they are neutral to the subject matter. In this lecture, we mainly discussed user generated content (UGC) and collaboration. 

In our lab, we created a Magic 8 Ball app on MIT App Inventor. I began to understand how to use the Blocks section. Here is a screenshot of the progress I made on the app:

Designer

Blocks

We had a full group meeting in Week 3. We discussed various app ideas catered to UCD students such as a UCD registration app and a price comparison app for restaurants on campus. These are all problems that many of our team members have encountered. Our meetings will be at 2pm on Thursdays. 

Week 2 - Social Experience

This week, we looked at the different forms of communication such as traditional, semi-traditional and social media. Traditional is communication in its basic, conventional form such as face-to-face, telephone and letter. Semi-traditional shows how technology has influenced communication as email, mobile and online forms became more popular. Social media is the newest form, which includes web conferencing and social media sites such as Facebook. We also looked at issues on information content such as gender/demographic/bias, spamming and flaming.

We had our first team meeting this week. We set up a Facebook group to communicate with each other and also created a Doodle so we could arrange a time to meet up during the week that suited all of us. I booked a room in the library and we brainstormed ideas in our first meeting. Although a few members of our team could not make it, we were able to keep them updated on the Facebook group. 

We were given the challenge to go without social media for a day as an experiment for this module. I chose to do this on Friday and found it extremely difficult. I was able to stay off it during college time, using texts to contact my friends. I found it hard not being able to keep up with others using mediums such as Twitter and Facebook, constantly feeling left out. I managed to be successful in this experiment until I finished my shift at work. There was no reception on my phone and I needed to use WhatsApp to contact my dad as he was collecting me from work and I didn't know where he was. Overall, I think social media has become too important in our lives for us to live without. 

Friday was also our first lab in the Newstead building. We familiarised ourselves with MIT App Inventor so that we would know how to use it when creating our own app. Below is a screenshot of my work with the HelloPurr app. 

Week 1 - Introduction

I decided to pick Social Computing and Media this semester because of my strong interest in social media. I wanted to familiarise myself with social media apps and how they work. The behaviour of people online also strongly interested me, as well as the ethical issues surrounding social computing.

In our first lecture, we were told that we would have to create our own app as part of our assessment. The groups that we would create this app with had already been chosen. We will also be assessed through quizzes and our portfolio. In the lecture, we also looked at the development of the Web (Web 1.0, 2.0 and the Semantic Web).

This blog will act as a diary, updated with all the IS20110 projects that I have been doing each week.