Exercise 1.1: What is Social Networking? How does it compare with my ideas about online communities?
What I know: I use Facebook occasionally to interact with friends. I use it to chat, find out what people are up to, and look at photos. People can send each other games and quizzes, and join groups of interest. However, I tend to ignore these because I found I was using them to procrastinate – to avoid doing whatever I was meant to be doing!
I hope studying online communities and social networks will change my professional practice by allowing me to incorporate these into my classroom and school environment. I would like to be able to create a safe online community for my students to be able to interact with each other, students from other schools, and with myself.
My students currently use Superclubs Plus to email and chat with each other. I would like to be able to share timetable, homework and other schedules and information with them online. I would also like to learn more about the difference between wikis and blogs, and how to create them.
Social Networking is a social structure of relationships and links which allow people to interact over the internet. People are able to interact and chat through forums, generally with common interests. Examples of Social Networking sites include Facebook, My Space and Twitter. Fatpublisher: http://www.fatpublisher.com.au/resources.php?topic=6&article=14&page=1
Online communities are groups of people with a shared or common interest who interact and share information using an online forum or website. TAFE NSW: http://www.icvet.tafensw.edu.au/resources/online_communities.htm . Vet.edna.edu.au: http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/vet/themes/pid/3189
Exercise 1.2: Social Networking Taxonomy
Some definitions of folksonomy that I found on the Interent:
A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomies
The spontaneous cooperation of a group of people to organize information into categories; a user-generated taxonomy. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/folksonomy
A folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve Web pages, photographs, Web links and other web content using open ended labels called tags. www.enterprisesocialsoftware.info/glossary&
Some examples of folksonomies include:
Flickr is an photo and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr ). http://www.flickr.com/.
Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms, generating a kind of folksonomy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_ ) http://delicious.com/
Exercise 1.3: An Heuristic Experience
Following the links in the reading, I downloaded a folder full of files but couldn't work out how to use them. Thankfully Lesley sent this link, which I was able to use easily: http://oldwww.acm.org/perlman/question.cgi Anyway, I decided to evaluate the Victorian Teachers Credit Union website because I use it frequently to complete online banking transactions and pay bills.
system=http://www.victeach.com.au/
date=2009-08-15 05:37:56
comment=I am evaluating the Victorian Teachers Credit Union website because I use it regularly to do all of my banking.
q1=6 c1=The system is easy to use. It has menus and categories which clearly indicate where you are in the website
q2=6 c2=as above
q3=N/A
q4=N/A
q5=N/A
q6=6 c6=I have been using this system for a number of years to do online banking, and am comfortable using it
q7=6 c7=The system was easy to learn because of the easy to use menu system
q8= N/A q9=5 c9=I haven't had too many errors when using the site, but if put in wrong password, it tells you and sends you back to log in page to re-enter
q10=6
q11=4 c11=On screen messages in form when the system will be closed for maintenance. I could not find any online help, but I have never needed it.
q12=6
q13=6
q14=N/A
q15=6 c15=The menu system is very clear and easy to navigate
q16=5 c16=The interface is consistant, simple to use, with no "Whizz Bang" which can be distracting
q17=4
q18=5
q19=6
negative1=The log in system to access accounts - have to enter password using an onscreen keyboard, which for me is a lot slower than using my normal keyboard.
negative2=When adding new Payee to Bpay, have to wait for security code to be text to mobile which is annoying
positive1=Easy to use and navigate
positive2=Good security, even if a bit annoying
positive3=Efficient way to conduct banking transactions and pay bills
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