Reflection of Practical 8&9

My Dream Holiday

In the previous lecture notes that teacher had gone through with us, I learnt how to evaluate a website by using the evaluation criterias.

The first two printed screen images above are the two destinations I went to in Second Life, one is Arc de Triomphe in France, another one is the White House in USA. And they are the two places I want to visit the most. I really wish I will have chance to visit these two places one day, I don't mind travel from Asia to Europe to US, and if so, that will be my dream holiday. 

The two real-taken pictures below them are more vivid than the Second Life one, and actually they are very different. In Second Life, the two constructions are much smaller the the actural size. Moreover, the surroundings are also not the same.

Although in Second Life I can fly to anywhere quickly and free, and that was a quite good experience of travelling in virtual world, I still prefer to visit the actual places personally.

When I want to watch videos of my dream holiday destinations, I went to Youtube.

Youtube is a multimedia website, and the criteria I want to use to evaluate it are :
1. Purpose
2. Coverage
3. Authority
4. Accuracy
5. Currency

Of course Youtube is the most popular video website in the world. The purpose of it is obvious, it is to allow people to share videos online. For coverage, there's no doubt that Youtube covers almost everything, we can find any kind of videos on it. As a reputable website, the authority is incontrovertible. Since the videos on Youtube are uploaded by everyone, many of them contain unreal matters, so the accuracy may not be so good. Almost every 10 seconds there will be many new videos uploaded on Youtube, so they are very current.

Finally, I think the most important criteria to evaluate a multimedia website is accuracy and currency.

Why did I choose  Arc de Triomphe and the White House?
It is because I have not gone there before and both of them implicate significant and historical issues. These are the places that created heros and miracles.  I could not witness these, so I want to visit there to feel and see the magnificence of them.
 

EIR PRACTICAL 7 REFLECTION

Last week is the first week of EIR and other subjects after the term break. I believe many of us had not 100% felt like study, and still been distracted by many things. Portfolio part 1 was submitted during the class, and I really felt relaxed as if I just put down a 1000kg burdon, because as a foreign student, I have never wrote or typed so many English words before. Hope I can have a good score on that.

Teacher went through the Lecture note 7 with us. And we had started Topic 2: Evaluation of Internet Resources. I learnt the 9 Evaluation Criteria of this which are : purpose, coverage, authority, accuracy, currency, accessibility, Presentation and Arrangement, usability and Overall Quality. Citizen Journalism was another new word for me. It is a concept of people conrtibute information and commentary about new events every day.

We did a group activity of using the evaluation criteria to evaluate a the Stomp.com.sg website. That was also the first group activity in EIR. We formed a 5-people group, and the funny thing is that 4 of us are foreigners and only 1 Singaporean. I chose purpose, coverage, accuracy and currency as my criteria to evaluate the website. The purpose of the website is to post the new funny events to let people know, some people posted things and showed off themselves and some people were just to express their own opinions on a specific issue. Stomp covered things from Singapore mostly and few globle news. As I mentioned above, many of the post were the stompers' own opinions, so the information may not be accurate. The post on Stomp are definitely current because almost every 30 minutes or even less time period, there are new posts by the stompers.

My research topic is Development of Renewable Energy Resources in The World. If I was to create my own version of "Stomp", I will only allow the registered members to post on the website, and I will filter the articles or photos or videos because renewable energy is considered quite serious topic. Things that members posted should be linked to renewable energy, not everything. Of course, if the posts are funny but is related to the topic, that will be better.

EIR 4

The 4th EIR lesson was held on 24 Nov. I remember that day when I came into the lab with my friend, teacher asked us if we were in this class and if we were there for EIR. My another CDS-Japenese was after the EIR lesson and that day was my presentation day, so I am a little bit nervous , and during the EIR that day, I kept remerising the speech, which distract me a lot. So I m sorry for that. But I still did my practical_ 4&5.

In this lesson, teacher went through the lecture material with us. I learnt two more internet search facilities which were Meta search engines and Subject diretories. I 'd never heard about these two internet search facilities before, and I 'm quite curious about them.

Meta search engines transmit search terms simultaneously to several search engines. I tried MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com/) , and I typed my topic which is "Development of renewable energy sources in the world" on it. It displayed the results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and so on. I looked at the results, and I was not so satisfied with them. Almost all the results were just about renewable energy sources , but nothing about development. Moreover, lots of them were advertisments. So the results were not so relavent. Then I tried Kartoo(http://www.kartoo.com/). I typed the topic on it, and I am a little bit upset because what it displayed is"COMMING SOON: SORRY FOT THE INCONVENIENCE" and I didn't know what's going on...

Subject directories also known as catalogs. Topical lists arranged in hierachical way. I tried the Yahoo one.(http://dir.yahoo.com/?skw=yahoo+directory) As usual, I typed" Development of renewable sources in the world", and there were less then 500 results there. Under each result, category would be displayed. And I think it's very convient for me because sometimes I need to know what category the pages are. But the results were still not so relavent after all.

E-learning Activity

There's no class for EIR this week, and there's a E-learning activity instead. The E-learing task is to log into Second Life and to explore the shopping sites or shopping islands.

Firstly, I felt that Second Life is very difficult to use, and the avatar is hard to control. It made me feel dizzy after half-an-hour play. However, it attracted me. Because I can chat with many people from different countries with different cultural background, and more or less learnt some new things from them. There was a girl from Taiwan Isand, she invited me to visit her when I go to Taiwan. That's interesting.

And then I went to the shopping places and islands. Surprisingly, there are many things offered for us to buy, but I found that most of them need money to buy, hard to find the free items. The virtual shopping malls are actually quite nice, no crowded people, that's what I want-- quietly walk around the shops alone and no one ask me to buy or give me some suggestions. Although all the items were hung or pasted on the walls, they looked vivid; Although the avatar is not easy to control, I still enjoy flying anywhere with fast speed.

"What do you like best about this virtual experience which you cannot get in real-life?"
I think tranquility and freedom are the best things that I like the best. That's because sometimes I want to have a walk alone and think a lot of things without any people interrupt me, which in real life is very difficult to achieve.  I can go anywhere without parents' permisson in Second Life. Furthermore, I can even fly to anywhere. That's awesome! That's what I want in the real life, but impossible.

These are some pictures from Second Life:

                                                                 Men's clothes

                                           Some ladys' boots... actually ladys' dressings are much easier to find.

                                               Nice but expensive.....

                                        Wow! I can buy jewellery for girls!!

EIR 3

The third lesson of EIR was on 10 Nov.  Sorry for updating this so late. But I still can remember the thing that I learnt from that lesson.

I remeber that day my friend and me were a little bit late for the EIR class because we went for the Micro-electronics talking, and it ended late. And then when I was seated, I could not remember the user name and the password, then need to ask someone.  Soon there's another guy ask tutor what the user name and password were, she said that we were not children already, these were the things that we should remember, this was one of our responsbilities. That's true!!! We should not every time wait for teacher tell us what they are, there's no excuse for this.

I was introduced another searching engine which is scholar.google.com. That was my first time using this website, and before this lesson, I didn't even know got this website exists. I found that this is a better searching website for articles and books. A lot of results are articles written by experts and university professors. And many are PDF documents. It is very convenient for us. I typed "Developments of renewable energy sources in the world" which is my topic on scholar.google.com and http://www.google.com/ respectively. Both of the two website have their pros and cons.

I have more than 14 million results on google.com and only 16 thousand for scholar.google.com. Surprisingly, I couldn't find wikipedia on the latter. Because I am so used to wikipedia. Google.com has many categories options such as image, books and news, and scholar.google.com does not have, which make me tend to like google.com more than scholar.google.com at the first time. But when I look through the results displayed on scholar.google.com, I found that many of them were in PDF form, and a lot of them are articles, which gave me many useful information on my topic.

And I also learnt how to make my search result more precisely and narrow the results, which can get rid of the unuseful information.

EIR 2

Last lesson of EIR, I just learnt that there are so many internet resources available for us, such as blogs & wikis, online forums and WWW sites which are quite familiar to me. Databases and electronic journals and magazines are those resources that I have never used for researching before. Every resource has its pros and cons, therefore, when we are doing a research, we should tend to appoach as many resources as possible, in order to help us get sufficient informations.

I chose topic 3 "Discuss the developments on renewal energy sources in the world" for my research topic. When I got my topic, google is the only thing that firstly came into my mind because I am so rely to it and that's the only website I would go to for researching before I learnt many more from EIR. During the last week class, I heard teacher and some classmates mentioned Yahoo, so I also use it as another searching website.

When I typed the yahoo website and pressed the Enter button, pictures and advertisements came into my eyes. I was surprised to see these because I thought it would be the same as Google. So, I used Yahoo first and then Google. I searched "Developments of renewable energy sourses in the world" on the two websites, both of them came out the Wikipedia first. Then I want the more specific options, and I found that on Yahoo, there are just four options--web, images, video and news, wheras there are 8 options available on Google. Finally I still chose Google as the main search facility.

There are many types of websites such as government website, blog, discussion forum and magzines. I found pdf documents about my topic on the government website and that is very useful. On the blogs, many people just gave us their own opinions and can hardly find useful informations. Articles in magzines are mostly written by the experts, so those are more reliable.



“E-Shopping Spree – If I have $500”


I want to buy the GENUINE APPLE IPOD IPHONE ORIGINAL EARPHONES HEADPHONES
which is S$10.29 for my mother because her headphone was damaged.

And I want to buy a wallet for my dad, because he lost his wallet recently.

Authentic MEN's GUCCI Guccissima Leather Wallet S$ 269.11

Finally, it's my turn. I just want to buy a iPhone4 casing because my iPhone does not have one.

White Iphone 4 4g Hard Snap On Case Casing Skin Cover
 S$ 10.25

Something about Me

Hi everyone, I'm Quan Jie, from China, you can also call me Jason. I've been studying in Singapore for 2 years. Now I am a 1.2-ENG student from ETCM course. My favourite past time is watching movies, and I'm fascinated in Chinese Calligraphy. Constant practice is the most important factor for learning calligraphy.  I like playing badminton very much. Watching basketball matches is one of my favourite past-times as well , especially the NBA games. Therefore, http://www.nba.com/video is my favourite website. I love Jay Chou and Taylor Swift's songs. Library and cinema are the two places that I like to go to with my friends. My life is simple, and I like simple life.