Review of Week 7

This week, the discussion questions got me thinking of ideas for the remainder of the semester, for the remaining upcoming assignments – the Personal Learning Network (PLN) assignment and the Produsage Project. For a learner network or group, I’m intrigued to look into more things, but Youtube I feel is a good starting point for groups and gathering interest. Students would need to access the internet to share and view content online, and report back to the course with any findings. For the design of ideas and tools, in one of my other posts, I mentioned the idea of using inoreader for blog posts and other posts, GoodReads to utilize reading resources for the course, and Piazza could be utilized as a platform for students to brainstorm ideas off of one another.

Looking forward to seeing what else everyone thinks.

Lauren Horne, MSTop of FormBottom of Form

Knowledge Networking Tools for Ideas

For one of the discussion topics this week, I liked the question of whether you get ideas from tools, or choose tools to help execute your ideas? For me, I find that I use tools to help execute my ideas. I like to get familiar with a tool and then can play more with it to figure things out. With the tools, I can more easily determine what ideas I would like to propose. To help support learning activities, and I’m looking forward to learning more as I go along, but some of the ideas I have would be to utilize a variety of toolkit options for students to utilize for their assignments, readings, and lessons. One of the tools I’ve especially gravitated towards is inoreader for the blog posts. For me, I like it as I can keep everyone’s blog posts together on one page. As they come in, I can read them and can star them for ones I want to go back to at a later date. This could be valuable in a similar fashion to the weekly discussion threads in canvas, where things are held together in a single place that others students could more readily contribute to. For tools like Goodreads, I like the idea of having a more ‘general’ chat that students could post what they are reading for fun to unwind, and what readings they are finding more informative, and could post if they have specific questions to help facilitate a conversation. For a newer tool for the toolkit, Piazza can provide more of a ‘real-time’ experience with posts and questions from the professor and other students able to be asked and answered in one convenient place. I would use this as a means for students to bounce ideas off of each other and ask more pressing questions that they seek the answers to from other students and the professor. I look forward to thinking of other ideas as the rest of the semester progresses.

Let me know what you all think!

Lauren Horne, MS

Piazza Review

With the introduction of Piazza this week, I wanted to poke around with the system and see how things worked for this tool. I enjoyed that everything appeared to be located in one single location for the course group in a single main page. I don’t know if this is the way that it appears with everyone else, but on the main page of the EME 6414 Piazza group, I can see the header at the top of the page and the new post button are highlighted in a bright deep blue color that draws the eye. The rest of the page is white. If I click on a specific post, it highlights it in yellow, which is helpful if you have to navigate away to another browser tab and need to remember where you were. Also, if you have any unread posts, it will show an alert in the post area with a gray box showing how many posts and replies there are to read in the group. I like how interactive the tool is, and with multiple classmates bouncing items off of each other, it can help topics move and get more exposure!

Let me know what you all think!

Lauren Horne, MS

Review of Week 6 & Upcoming Assignment

As a review of week 6, I had some time off and enjoyed a nice staycation. Looking forward to digging back into the course this week. Several students started discussing the upcoming assignment, and one of the posts by Lauren C was really interesting, the idea of collection versus curation. I’ll be looking into this more closely as we go through this week and the next as we get closer to the next deadline date. As what I am more aware of, collection would be gathering a group of objects that have some type of theme together, where curation would be isolating specific elements from the overall materials based on predetermined characteristics. For the upcoming Knowledge Sharing project, I would like to incorporate my love of books into the project in some manner, and I will investigate a few options for the project with the upcoming readings.

Review of EME 6414 Toolbox

I was reviewing the blog posts from my fellow classmates this week, and one caught my attention from CRS 6414 about discussing the tools we’ve been exposed to so far this semester, and the ones that I have used so far. For me, there have been a few so far that I’ve tried, and more that I would like to try.

The tools I have tried so far/am more familiar with

-        Twitter – I haven’t taken the plunge yet to post anything on twitter for the course. Hoping to soon (lurker at heart here!) I have mainly used it in the past to follow various media and entertainment platforms where it was easiest to connect for the latest news. Hoping to get involved with the class. I don’t know why I’m so shy about it, but I feel like I’ve made some strides already with the course, and I’m hoping to make more.

-        Linkedin – I’ve used this platform a lot before at work when I need to check on the various credentials of a contact that I cannot readily find on a simple google search. Linkedin is a valuable resource for networking, and I’m looking forward to using it more.

-     Reddit – I am more familiar with reddit as I have used it previously for various reasons (keeping tabs on favorite TV shows, book series, and fandoms in general). I’m looking to become more active in posting to the course reddit page for the rest of the semester.

-        Goodreads – This is one resource I have used the most as I have followed numerous literature podcasts that provide community opportunities for their listeners to provide their own reading suggestions based on the specific genre and interest of the individual. I’m hoping to be more active here throughout the rest of the semester.

-        Youtube – Like Twitter, Reddit, and Goodreads, I have mainly used this tool as a means to keep abreast of various fandoms, media, and some college friends that I don’t have as easily a point of contact with as they do not readily use other Social Media Channels. I have to remind myself to look into the EME 6414 youtube channel and various other resources available there.

Tool I want to try

-        Badgelist – I’ve been interested in using badges in developing a curriculum for future students. Little things that students can work towards to help them if they are struggling. For a more scientific and research focused area of study, students could earn a badge if they find a tool that works best for their learning style, or if they contribute a certain amount in a specific time period. I want to look into more about badges going forward.

Knowledge Management

 I enjoyed learning about knowledge management this week. Within my institution and daily work, I have to do a lot of fact checking to ensure information entered on paperwork is correct and current. It is tricky at times to fully understand what is required of each person in the process, and trainings often come few and far between. Often, I learn the most by doing, and with trial and error learn what works and what doesn’t. Mainly, a large part of my job is completing the appropriate paperwork for two different organizations – the Tampa VA here in Florida, and the Open University in the United Kingdom. Both have their own unique sets of various paperwork that takes time to fully understand. Lately, I have been developing SOPs for the OU examination process for our PhD students. It is a helpful reminder to me to remember each step in the process, as there can be long stretches of time between the steps. So far it has been a big help, as I have been using it as a checklist, and I plan to continue developing additional SOPs so that they can be more easily be referred to for the OU for future students.

EME 6414 Review of Week 5

Wow! I agree with a few of the other classmates that this has been a hectic week! I didn’t have as much going on as some others, but I did have a very hectic work schedule that left me exhausted when I came home (as I’ve been working in an office since the pandemic began, I never left!) but determined as I worked to complete the first course assignment, review the readings and other students blog posts.

Looking forward to interacting more with everyone through the various course tools!

Exploring Tools - Goodreads

 This week, I got into reviewing the EME 6414 Goodreads group, and looking into interacting more with the various tools I’ve joined but not yet taken the plunge – twitter, reddit, and now the Goodreads group. I’m more of a lurker at heart, but I’m slowly trying to come out of my shell and interact more throughout the week with the variety of tools for the course. I’m a bookworm at heart too (based on the image at the bottom of my blog), and looking forward to using that tool more!

Looking into IP

 I was really interested this week in IP (as part of my job I frequently see efforts to actively protect IP through scientific publications that are being worked on and get closer to publishing and reviews), and I found Lauren C’s post about the article she posted about Disney preventing Mickey Mouse from becoming public domain after Walt Disney’s death very fascinating. It’s something I want to look into further based on what I am familiar with already, and what there still is to learn for the future!

Review of EME 6414 Week 4

This week has been an interesting one. There was a lot to learn and take in. One of the things I was most intrigued by was Crowdsourcing. I looked into the badges, but have been extra busy this week with a lot of personal things going on, so I reviewed some things but did not push any more this week, instead spending my energy on reviewing sources and articles for the concept paper. I wanted to dig into more of the “meat” of the readings, and wanted to research more about both Crowdsourcing and folksonomies. I feel each week I’m progressing further and learning more with each reading, whether its an article or a classmate’s blog or discussion post. I’m becoming more familiar with the various tools set out for us, and I’m hoping next week will continue the trend! Hoping everyone else’s week goes well too! Best of luck to everyone with our assignment!

Crowdsourcing Research

 From the work of Zhao and Zhu, one of the readings this week touched on crowdsourcing research, where it was currently and future directions. Crowdsourcing in one of the emerging Web 2.0 based phenomena, which can facilitate the connectivity and collaboration of people, organizations, and societies. I liked the emphasis they included for Crowdsourcing seeking to mobilize competence and expertise, which are distributed among the crowd and have various forms. The process of crowdsourcing works in the following way: 1) An organization identifies tasks and releases them online to a crowd of outsiders who are interested in performing these tasks on the organization’s behalf, for a stipulated fee or any other incentives. 2) A large number of individuals then offer to undertake the tasks individually or in a collaborative way. I also liked the mention that some crowdsourcing projects provide a clear format for compensating valuable contributors; while in other cases, such as Wikipedia or Dell’s Ideastorm, contributors are not compensated.

Reference

1)    Zhao, Y., & Zhu, Q. (2014). Evaluation on crowdsourcing research: Current status and future direction. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(3), 417-434.

Behavioral Research on Amazon Mechanical Turk

One of the readings this week that caught my attention, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website to conduct behavioral research. To those that are not aware of what Amazon Mechanical Turk is, it was designed by Amazon originally for human computation tasks. The idea was to build a platform for humans to do tasks that are very difficult or impossible for computers, such as extracting data from images, audio transcription, and filtering adult content. Additionally (shameless nerd moment here!), I loved the mention of the origins of the name. Mason and Suri discuss that the name “Mechanical Turk” came from a mechanical chess-playing automaton from the turn of the 18^th century, designed to look like a Turkish “sorcerer,” which was able to move pieces and beat many opponents.

            A valuable question then is, why Mechanical Turk? There are several benefits for using Mechanical Turk as a platform for running online experiments: 1) subject pool access; 2) subject pool diversity; and 3) low cost for running the platform itself. For the Turker community, much of it focuses on the reputation of requesters. Additionally, there are online forums such as Turker Nation and others that can allow people to monitor worker’s reactions to a study, which can provide insight into the individual’s methods or the overall focus of the research itself. The Mechanical Turk user interface allows workers to send the requester of a HIT a message (i.e. workers could contact requesters if part of their HIT is unclear or confusing). I found the article fascinating and am looking to learn more.

Reference

1)    Mason, W., & Suri, S. (2012). Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Behavior Research Methods, 44 (1), 1-23. doi: 10.3758/s13428-011-0124-6