Practical 10 - Metaphor

A book might seem boring because it's all words. It is kind of tiring to keep reading words and only words. However when look into it and start reading, one would realized and get interested what these words can give us. These words formed together can give us an interesting story, information or even encouragement. You might know some of the information the book gave you, but you cannot possibly know everything. The book can give useful information that you might not know.

It's the same when I took this module, Effective Internet Research. The first few lessons seemed rather boring to me. We had to write blogs and do research. Who wouldn't know how to do researching on the internet? However when we go in details throughout the module, I learnt useful ways to do internet research which I never knew – using Boolean to search. I've also learnt that not only Search Engines can be useful for researching; there is Meta Search Engines that is also rather useful.

Now EIR is ending soon and is in the last chapter, I am feeling happy and sad. Happy because we are finally finishing this book; Sad because all the thing we had gone through during this period time will become memories. It's just like life; we can only go through that moment for once, and whenever we want to be in that moment, all we can do is only access that particular memory. Memory is very different from experiencing that moment afterall.

Tutorial 5&6 - Reflection on Wiki Experience

1. What is the significant learning experience for you working in a group?
By working in a group, I can learn how to communicate and how to tolerate and exchange our ideas and experiences. And also, working in groups gives us the opportunity to improve our skills in different fields

2. As an individual contributor, what have you gained from this experience?
If we did the assignment individually, each of us would have to think and write up a lot of information. However if we did it in group, each of us would only have to come up with a sufficient amount of information, and adding all of it would be a large chunk of information.


3. What is the one most challenging experience you had?
Sometimes, it takes us awhile before we can agree on the same point.


4. What advice would you give to the next batch wiki groups as they start a similar project?
They should distribute workload properly. For example, some would do research, one would write up the information on wiki, and the rest would do editing.

5. Would you use Wiki for research in your own Diplomas? Why?
Yes. Wiki has lots of learning and researching information. Normally, these information are done by different people and taken from various sources. However while researching on wiki, we should always be wary of any one single source (in any medium — web, print, television or radio), or of multiple works that derive from a single source. This is because not every information on wiki might be accurate, unbiased or comprehension.

Tutorial 4&5 - Twitter vs. Blog

In my opinion, I would prefer blogs to twitter. Twitter is sometimes rather time-consuming than blogs. You might thought, "No!? One post will only take you at most a minute or less." Although blogging takes much longer time for each post, but in actuality, you might be taking more time if you read all of the people's tweets that you had followed. One person may not only tweet once a day, but several tweets per day. Not everyone would blog once or several times per day. So therefore for this point, blog is better than twitter in my opinion. To add on, twitter has a word limit, unlike blog. And also, blog provides more in-depth information for us.

However, twitter fits better for life of busy people. These busy people may not have the time to reflect and write up a detailed post. Twitter provides them a chance to tweet about what they are doing/thinking right now/just now when they are free for a few minutes or less.

Twitter vs. Blog, it is just a matter of personal preferences. :)