Practical 8&9 - My Dream Holiday

I have chosen Venice as my dream holiday destination because it's a beautiful city, where streets are paved with water. Who wouldn't love such a beautiful place?

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The multimedia website that showcases my dream holiday destination is ItalyGuides.

The 2 most important criteria are "Accuracy" and "Presentation and Arrangements".

Accuracy
The photos featured on the website are actual shots of the city. This website had been "talked about" by these various famous websites:

• BBC
• El Pais
• World Heritage Convention
• Yahoo! and many more.

Furthermore, ItalyGuides is part of the company ComPart Multimedia S.r.l. and can be contacted at this page.

Presentation and Arrangements
The website is well-organized with clear headings such as "Photo Gallery", "Hotel Reservations", "Contact Us", etc. The texts are in uniformed size, easy to read and professionally-written. There are also buttons to translate the website to either English or Italian. All in all, the website has good presentation and arrangements.

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This is the Venice I visited in SecondLife. The destination place name is "Venice Passion". The place was filled with beautiful music, water and streets. Although it looked almost like Venice, it is not Venice. It will not satisfy our desire of traveling to our dream destination in real life. The atmosphere, the people, the festival, the sound of water, the air; virtual world is totally different from real life.

Practical 7 - Evaluation of Citizen Journalism

My group evaluated STOMP with the criteria "Authority" and "Accuracy".


For Authority, we have to check for these few things:

• Reputation of the creator - subject expert or by an institution with recognized knowledge and expertise
• Reputation of the publisher, sponsors or funding agencies
• Authority and reputation can be verified
• Author can be contacted for clarification
• Sources of information clearly stated
• Reviews are available
• Counter on the site that reflects the popularity of a source

While for Accuracy, we have to check for these few things:

• Factual accuracy (or opinion)
• Research basis
• Contents with political, ideological, or biasness
• Cited references
• Evidence of quality control e.g. refereeing or editing
• Source of information e.g. an independent piece or an abstract from another source
• Grammatical, spelling and typographical errors

From today's activity, we learnt that STOMP is both a biased and unbiased website. Some articles were posted up by normal citizens, while some others were by professionals.

To recap, my research topic was "Discuss the trends and developments on animation industry in Japan". If I were to create my own version of STOMP regarding to my topic, I would allow the public only to leave their views in the comments section. However the articles posted would have to be by professionals with source of information, references, etc.

To facilitate teaching and learning, I would include topics which are from recent news/articles from the internet. This is just so people could keep in touch with the Anime industry.

Practical 4 & 5

a. What benefits do you get when using different search facilities to search for resources related to your topic?

Each different search facilities will give different results. Therefore using different search engines to search could help me get more relevant resources for my topic.


b. How do you feel about using site feeds in your blog?

By using site feeds, I could easily access to my friends' blogs. And also, I could be notified whenever they updated their blogs.


c. What do you like best about collaborating on Wiki with other students who share similar research topic as you?

I could easily get more information about my topic and compile those information into the report.