Wiki Experience

I am being assigned to from a group to research on a topic then to share it in the WIKI.

Our class have been assigned a story called 'Google being Investigate' and the topic that my group is to research on is about internet security.

Ever since i came into this class, i have rarely spoke to anyone in the class thus we are total strangers to everyone. During the first few minutes of the discussion, there is something like an awkward silence in the group as i assume most of us are shy. However, we soon started to talk and discuss about the topics that we are being assigned and we also start to open ourselves to one another.

We started discussing and contribution idea and smaller topics that are related to the topic given to us. We then split up the work that we are supposed to do and we put to use what we have learnt from the pass few lessons and started to do our research on our topics then gathered them together and present it to our group leader. Our group leader then consolidate them together and posted it on the wiki itself.

In this wiki sharing experience, i have learnt that working in a group will introduce more ideas and opinions on the related topics which will help improve the quality of the work. Individually, i felt that being shy or quiet would not help much in this circumstance and by speaking up and sharing would benefit everyone.

The most challenging part of this experience is to be able to understand other group mates idea on a very short time as everyone have a different way of expressing themselves from their ideas thus making it difficult to understand but it became clear when they explain it slowly and properly.

The advise to the other batch of students is to ensure that they start talking to one another when they first come in to this class so as to be familiar with one another so when there is a group work, they would not be shy and to wait there till someone broke the ice and introduce themselves.

I would definitely use wiki for my own research in my own diploma as my course requires me to be updated and to do constant research for my project due to the rapid change in the society. Wiki is also something which everyone can use to update and share information thus having many different point of views from other people 

Twitter

Twitter...

I am very sure most of the people knows about twitter in todays society.

I find that twitter is a good way to communicate with people and to express ones feeling. Since it only allows one to type up to only 140 characters, it make the message short and sweet or direct where there is no intro or anything just to the point. This would allow information sharing very good as there isn't any finding but to just look at it.

It the tweets are also displayed in a chronological order such that the latest post would be at the top and since twitter can also be a conversation starter, it can become a micro-IM too.

In EIR, we are also following our teachers twitter thus it also allows us to ask question from our twitter which is also better than emailing as twitter allows us to make short post. twitter is also compatible on phones thus it can also be seen as a SMS.

Thus this clearly distinguish the difference between a Blog and a Tweet. A blog is leaning more towards a personal diary or journal while Tweeter although call micro-blogging, is more of a platform where people are allowed to express their feelings or to share information that are currently on their mind at that instance. Therefore, i find twitter is much more instantaneous ways of conversing your idea and feelings without saying it out while blogging is something where you write in excruciating details of what you want to say about your idea or feelings.

Twitter and blogspot can still be used for research purpose as one might use both of this and can use twitter as a way to inform people about something and lead them to their blog for more information. So twitter can be a platform for getting attention from people and leading them to their blog, something like an advertisement.

My Dream Hoilday

Hi,

Today, i am going to write about my dream holiday. My dream holiday is to travel to France, Paris.
The reason why i want to travel to France is because there is a place where the city is very beautiful at night and it is also a place where there are many famous chef. I enjoy eating a lot thus France is also a good place for me to visit as it is a place for famous food and the michelin star chefs.

The above picture is the Eiffel Tower.

This is the famous landmark of Paris. This is also the place where i have wanted to visit for a long time. From up there, i would be also to see the city skyline of Paris.

The above is The Louvre Museum also located in Paris
This is the museum where the famous painting of Mona Lisa is located. This is one of the most famous museum in the world where majority of the works are paintings.

The criteria that i have used to evaluate the site is the purpose. This is because this site i have went to have many purpose. It is all about France and the purpose varies from the different places in France to the Culture, Education and Business in France. They are all categorized neatly and each of them links to another page where more details are shown to meet the purpose of you visiting the website. 

In Second Life, tourism there can be quite fun to a certain extend as we are allowed to travel everywhere freely without fear. However, it is also quite boring as there are only the famous landmarks and nothing else so the only good point is that we are allowed to see the country briefly.

Above is my avatar in the city of Paris where the Eiffel Tower is right in front.

This is a picture of my avatar on the Eiffel Tower.
In this level of the Eiffel Tower, it is supposed to be a restaurant. However in Second Life it is a shop.

The pictures are taken from http://www.justfrance.org/france/paris/photos/

Citizen Journalism

Hi,

This post would be on Citizen Journalism. The criteria that i have used to evaluate Stomp are purpose, Coverage, Authority and Accuracy.

I have chose all of these as i think these are much more crucial if i were to judge if the site that i am searching is reliable and useful. In this way, information can be search more effectively as if the site is does not score well in these few ratings, the information might not be very useful or redundant.

What i have learnt are that when evaluating a site, i can think what is the purpose of this site, is it to educate, share, gossip or entertain. While coverage will show what will the site cover or what does the site have. Authority is about who is the author of these information, as information that comes from different people may vary and lastly accuracy is if whether the information on the site can be trusted or not which is also somewhat dependent on Authority.

So if i were to create my own version of Stomp, the thing that i would do differently is to set a filter on the site so that explicit content will be removed and not posted on the site and also to sometime post up a picture and ask for opinion about it. Next is to also post different things on the site that might also increase the general knowledge of the general public and also to educate them. I also think that it is very important to get more teenagers to frequent these sites so as to participate and to know more about the society as sites like these also provides information to people besides reading the news.

Invisible web / Database

Hi,

Today i have search the database on my research topic on the TP library website.

So most of the database requires the user to pay for the use of the database to search for information. However, TP have paid some of these databases for us, TP students to use to search for information. Some of the the databases available on TP website are EBSCOhost, Factiva, LexisNexis Butterworth, Newslink and more.

I have used 2 of those databases. One of them is EBSCOhost.
EBSCOhost is a database that offer lots of general features and also support boolean operators. I am able to search for articles and much more. It also provides me with the citation and also highlight the keywords that i am looking for. Besides that, it also have a bar where by it measures the relevance to the search topic.

The other one that i have used is Factiva.
Factiva is also another database but it offers much less general features than EBSCOhost and it does not support boolean operators. The search is also quite difficult as if the search topic is too long, there would not be any results. However, it is similar to EBSCOhost in the way that it also highlight and bold the keywords of the search topic.

Both of these databases gives very few results that are less than 10 for my search topic. Some of the results are also not very relevant to the search topic. However, it provide sources as to where i can get these infomations.

I would use these databases for my research on my own diploma as there is another database call Newslink, where i can search the databases for news which my research for my diploma's project is needed. Therefore, i would find this database most useful.

As for what i have learnt from the wiki experience, i find that most of the things that i know about GM Food are quite general, however most of them are quite similar to the search results but still not sufficient. From the wiki sharing, i am able to learnt more about these GM Foods and how the society are perceiving them.

Meta search engine? Search Directory?

Hi everyone

In this post, i am going to introduce 2 different search engine. So what are the other search engine do you know that are available other than Google and Yahoo? Some of you might say Bing. Well what else besides that? Anyone know?

I am going to show you what is call a meta search engine. I am not sure if you have heard about it before but i would like to call it the "Power search engine" as it is a search engine which searches the search engine. what you i mean by that you might ask. Meta search engine is a search engine where by you input your search topic into the search bar and it will search other search engine and compile it together. 1 example of a meta search engine is MetaCrawler.

 The above picture is the home page of a Meta search engine from metacrawler.com. However, this search engine does not allow you to search it specifically like what i have posted last week about how to search the search engine specifically by using AND/ OR and also brackets.

Next search engine that i am going to introduce is called the Search Directory. As the name speaks for itself, the website have it's own directory where by it separates you search into more specific type like sport, world, game and many more. so if you were to search about games, just click on games and it will specify on the different types of games. So for my topic on Genetically Modified Food, i would have to go to Science>Agriculture>Biotechnology> Genetically Modified Plant or Corn and Maize.

The above search directory is from google.

So if i were to select a search engine among the 2 that i have just introduced, i would definitely go for the meta search engine. It not just gives small results, it also give me relevant results from different search engine and it saves lots of time as i only have to search it once on the meta search engine rather than to go all the search engine to search for the same topic.

SecondLife

Hi

Today i have when online to second life, a virtual world. I am supposed to do some virtual online shopping, using the list of shopping places/islands and the one place that i chose was MIA (Men In Action). At the start, i find it very difficult to control the avatar and to move around the island and the places like using the world map. However after a while i got used to it and found it quite good as it is very user friendly and almost life real-life. Although it lags a lot and causes the building in the screen to seem like a patch here and there and causes the avatar to walk or fly without controlling it, i still think that it is still very good as it provides with with all our basic needs like clothes and others.

Firstly i visited a shop in MIA called A Wild Hair. This shop provide a lot of hair styles for my avatar and most of the hair styles are the types that i wanted to style my hair with. I am very happy with it as it could happen to my avatar but not for me in reality as i am not able to style my hair in that way as it is either too short or my hair is to oily with mean that no matter how much hair wax i use it would not work.

Sadly, for this to happen to my avatar, it would cost me L$ 699 or some would say 699 linden dollars. Which would mean it cost about US$3.03 .

Next, i walked around MIA, i came across this sign and it says that there is a new free shop and i right clicked on it to teleport to that area. Speaking of teleport, i find that the teleport function in Second Life is very useful as we do not have to walk or fly to the area or even click on a icon to get to the area we desire. The teleport function becomes personal and not share which would have chances of the server to lag.

After teleporting to the free shop, i was quite surprised with the variety of things that they have there and it is all for free. Firstly i brought thing dragon arm chair found on the ground floor of the area. It looks very stylish yet old, somewhat like an antique.

Next i went into a shop where it is also located at the free shop area. Sadly it does not have a shop name but at the front it says MIA Island.

Inside there, there are even more things that are very attractive although the environment in there looks very rundown or like what we know as a multi-storey carpark.

 Inside there, they sell stylish clothes and lots more like cars, furniture and more.

Like the picture below, they have clothes like business tuxedo or leather pants for sales and it is free of charge.

 Next, we have the car.

The above shows the cars that are for sale that are also free of charge like the first picture is a manual drive convertible and on the second picture is a Cadillac and a Nissan GTR.

Then on my way out, i managed to meet this woman who is from New York. She is also about the same age group as in exploring the virtual world. I am excited that with this Second Life Virtual World, i am able to connect with people from other country which makes this world smaller. I am happy to be able to make friends with people online such as this virtual reality world.

This virtual shopping is much better than the E-shopping spree as in this virtual world, i am able to buy much more things and some of it are free although i am not able to use it in reality but however, in this virtual world, i means non-stop shopping for me and with the same amount of money in reality that i spend, i am about to buy much more in this virtual world than i can i reality. This is an experience which is very good in my own opinion.

EIR Practical 3

Hi

I am really glad that i have attended this lesson as i felt that the lesson that i have learnt today would most probably be the best that i could have learnt in EIR as in today's lesson, i learnt about bibliography and also internet search.

When i say internet search, it doesn't mean that typing the word in the search bar and hitting the enter/search button. i meant that how to search the internet more specifically on the topic that you are looking for. For example, my topic is <Discuss the trends and developments of the genetically modified food industry.>. If i were to put the whole question into the search bar, it would give me a lot of results and at least 50% of them are irrelevant. So to scale down the search results to make it more accurate, i was taught how to substitute words to and to use inverted commas to group the words together so as to make the search more accurate and to make it accurate. So my search would look like this < Trends AND development AND "GM food" AND industry> or < (Trends OR Pattern) AND (development OR future) AND "GM food" AND (industry OR society). So in this way, my search in Google that might initially be 150million results would be scaled down to maybe 5million results.

Next is bibliography. Another word for bibliography is citation. It is very important to cite where you get your information from, who, and also when. Without doing so, you might be deemed as plagiarism. So in today's lesson i am also taught how to do a bibliography. There are also certain ways in doing this citation and not just stating the website on where you get your information from. In bibliography, we have to cite the author's name, date of publication, retrieved date and the url. And all of them have to be in order and if there are multiple citations, it also have to be in alphabetical order.

E-shopping Spree~~IF i have $500.

If i have $500, i would like to buy myself some branded clothes from Hugo Boss.

 This is one of their T-shirts that i would like to buy. It cost about $50gbp which is about $100 sgd. This T-shirt is made of 100% cotton and it is a V-neck tee.
Another thing that i would like to buy is a pair of shoes which looks like this.

This pair of shoes is also from Hugo Boss. This pair of shoe cost about $110gbp which is also about $225sgd. This pair of shoe only comes in one colour and it is made of leather. It have a combination of shiny leather which are also soft.

I would also like to buy another watch from Casiao Edifice. This is the model EF-539D. This watch only cost $99 and it looks stylish and sporty. It have a one second stopwatch capable of measuring to 11'59'59. It is also water resistant.

I think that the purpose of the website that i have visited are that the internet not only provides us with information, we can also buy things online or to check out the things that we want to buy online. Not only that, we can also use various ways to look for all of the things that we want to buy and to search different sites to look for the things that we want that might be similar but cheaper.

What i have learn

Hi everyone,

In class today, the topic that i have selected to do my research on is < Discuss the trends and developments of the genetically modified food industry >.

I have learnt that during internet research, information can be found everywhere. I learnt that information can not only be found on wiki but in a lot more websites on the internet rather than the usual input of question on the google search bar and click on the first link which usually leads to wiki.

Information could be found on organizational websites like the government sites or even in blogs where people can put in their own opinion backing it up with their research. EIR also taught me that despite that there are so make places to get information, not necessary that all the websites that we go to, the information are always relevant to our research or in simple words rubbish/junk.

Information from organizational websites are more informative in answer what it is and what is it about about GM food. However, for blogs or journal, it is more about personal opinion like criticism or what is so good about them that they dislike or like about them back up by some of their research. Wikipedia is another source of information but i personally think that the information used from there should be used carefully as it might be biased as it is a place where people can edit and add information to it.

That is all for my second post. ^^

Here are some links about lifesaving competition

I am the EXPERT

Hi everyone,

The one hobby that i am passionate about is swimming - Lifesaving. Swimming is a very interesting sports as swimming is somewhat like a basic or a foundation of a water sports as once you have learnt swimming, you are then able to play other water sports like water polo or to a new discipline like lifesaving. Lifesaving is an entirely different discipline as it does only require a swimming background, it also requires lots of methods and technique. Thus in a lifesaving competition, it doesn't matter if you swim fast or slow because even if the fastest swimmer does the technique wrongly or slowly, he could lose the competition.

The tip to doing this is to train hard and patiently as it requires lots of time to get the technique right and also not to allow the manikin to sink to the bottom of the pool.

All About Me

Hi,

I am Edwin Yeo from Temasek Engineering School. I am in Integrated Facilities Management also know as FDM. I don't really have a nickname but if you can think of any nice one, you may put it in the comment section below.

My favourite past time activities are watching sitcoms like <How I Met Your Mother> , <Big Bang Theory> . Other favourite past time activities is to do sports and cooking. The sports that i do are swimming, basketball and play golf occasionally.

The TV programme that i like are sitcoms like mentioned above. I enjoy watching them as they are very funny and also a very good way to relief stress without spending a lot of time. I cannot remember who is my favourite singer however i have a favourite band like The Beatles or group like Big Bang and SNSD also known as Girls Generation.

I enjoy going out especially going to town areas like Orchard roads or even to Bugis. I would usually walk around the shopping center then go to a cafe to relax. My favourite internet sites are Facebook and YouTube as they provide me with lots of entertainment like connecting with my friends and to go to YouTube to check out the latest Music Video from my favourite bands and groups.