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.