Whats working or not working...

Well, we are finally half way through. Since I'm getting to this post late we are now actually more than half way through. I think this class is going well so far. Sometimes it's hard to keep up with all the assignments but I think I have developed a good system for myself to be successful. The one hard thing that I have not been successful with is just keeping up with the deadlines. Blogging is the hardest for me. I don't know why but I am not a big fan of it. It's extremely helpful to get topics every week to blog about. That makes it a lot easier for me. I just tend to put it off and I've just come to realize it's probably because I don't like to do it. However, I do think it is a good skill and blogging is a good way to reflect on what we are doing. So, whenever I think about that then I am able to get the motivation to complete my blogs. 

I am enjoying learning about different tools and being forced to use them. One tool that I used in work recently that I learned about from Dr. Bert was Powtoons. I used it to make a presentation with my faculty and even though I thought it wasn't good because I wasn't able to edit the video they thought it was the coolest thing they've ever seen. It made me feel really good to share something I've learned about in class. It also made me realize how much harder I critique myself compared to others. 

Learning

This week we watched TCCFX online. We had to tweet about topics during the conference. This was something I had never done before. As I was tweeting about topics during the conference I realized that Twitter is much more of an information source for people to share about compared to Facebook which is more of a personal place for people to share about what is going on in their lives. Since you have a limit of characters on Twitter it doesn't allow for people to go on and on about things. I feel like it even forms it's own language by people having to abbreviate words to fit everything in their tweet.

I also learned about social media network awareness. This was really interesting because I never thought about how much of an affect it has on people. Social media has really created a new avenue for events to be released to the public. Since my husband doesn't really use social media I am often times more informed than he is if he hasn't gone online for a while. Since I get alerts and am online frequently I am immediately informed about what is going on in the world. We are always learning!

Social Capital

The article I read was 

Steinfield, C., Ellison, N., Lampe, C. & Vitak, J. (2012). Online social network sites and the concept of social capital. Frontiers in New Media Research, New York: Routledge, pp.115-131. Retrieved fromhttps://www.msu.edu/~steinfie/Steinfield_Internetat40.pdf

As far as making connections with others online I think it has increased for me in the past couple of years. Others have exposed me to educational topics or articles relating to my job or current events going on in the world. I feel like I am more of a gainer than a sharer. I tend to not share much because I don't really think about it. I enjoy reading articles that people post but I don't ever have the desire to go out research articles to share. I guess I just feel like if people want to know something then they will research it themselves. Sometimes I share what others have shared because I thought it was a good read or pertaining to something I am working on at work or in school. In the article one of the points it made was that those who posted often engaged in direct communication with friends had a higher bonding social capital. Since I don't post much I think my social capital is not as large as it could be. For what ever reason I try not to get too involved online because I don't want it to take over my life. I like to separate myself from it during the day so that I'm not looking at social media all day long. This is always my battle because it's my source of current events and information but I also don't want to be rude to people when I am socializing. 

Another point made in the article was that the key to bridging and bonding social capital is actually personal information disclosures on social networks. By sharing about yourself as much as possible it helps facilitate the start of relationships, development, and maintenance that keeps the social capital going strong. This made a lot of sense to me because when people know more about who you are, it brings their guard down. I'm torn with this idea because as much as I want to be open to people I feel like it makes me so vulnerable on the internet and I always have "identity theft" in the back of my head. I guess eventually I will have to get passed that if I want to continue using social media to it's highest potential. 

TCCfx 2014

This was my first time tweeting during a conference. At first, I didn't really understand that people do this all the time to expand on the topic during a conference. I have to say, initially when watching TCC I didn't know what to tweet about. Then, as I listened to the topics being discussed I decided to start searching for relevant articles to post. It was actually fun and made me think about the topic a little bit more in depth. However, it did cause me to multi task which now I know is extremely bad for you. 

When they were talking about IRB during the conference I had a hard time paying attention as this topic is not very interesting. If I wasn't graduating this semester I probably wouldn't have known what IRB was all about. I was able to relate to the inter cultural project with the Japanese students because we are currently completing this project. I agreed with pretty much everything they said. Having video to communicate with our group members is very helpful as well as meeting at least once a week. Meeting this much really helps keep us on track and stay in contact with our group members. 

While watching the conference I had a hard time with my sound. For some reason when I would click on some of the tracks it would start playing and then I would lose sound and have to start the track over again. This was a bit frustrating but I was eventually able to get through the TCC sessions. I wonder if anyone else had problems with sound?