Week 6 Weekly Report and Reflection

This week we were assigned to, amongst other things, create an Evernote notebook for our research project. My topic for that project is digital security. One of the things that I liked about Evernote, is that it really helps organize your research. Over the years of doing essays and projects it was always hard to keep track of which sites I used for what quotes, or whatever it may be, and Evernote is a tool that will help fix that problem. Evernote allows you to create a notebook for any topic that you will be researching and put all the videos, websites, book clippings, quotes, etc. that you find in to one easy to maneuver place. The best part however is that you can tag each of the notes with the important themes of it, which would allow one to search their notebooks for it in the future, if you find a need for that site again. This will allow you to keep the best, and most useful sources that you find for years into the future on an easy to navigate database.

Another useful part of Evernote is the web clipping tool that we had to use. This tool allows you to highlight certain sentences, paragraphs, or even entire articles that you deem necessary to keep in your Evernote notebook. It is just an easier way, when surfing the web, to easily organize any useful information you find. You can do most of the same things through this tool that you can on the site, such as tagging your articles, and putting them in the appropriate notebooks.

If I were to put this in my PLE I would put in in the applications section rather than the gathering of information section. I believe this because it is an application that I would use to SORT information that I have found as opposed to GATHERING information.

An item of interest from my Feedly this week comes from the Brock News. It is an article about students on exchange entitled Student Exchange Creates 'Experience of a Lifetime'. This interests me because I would have an interest in doing the exchange program, and seeing how other people are doing it, and enjoying it so much, only makes me want to do it more. It is also interesting to Brock students talk about the differences in schooling here, and wherever there exchange takes them.

Week 5 Weekly Report and Reflection

Biderman, A (CC) 2013

This week we were assigned to, among other things, create a Twitter account. Twitter is a great tool, in my opinion for a number of reasons. First off, Twitter is used as a social networking site and allows for individuals to connect with people all over the world through 140 character messages. This is the reason why Twitter was already apart of my PLE, under the "connecting" branch. Not only can you connect with your friends, but you can also connect with people with similar interests to you. For example, as an avid sports fan, twitter allows me to connect with other fans of the same teams, and talk to them about the sport.

Twitter, 2013

One other aspect that is useful about Twitter, that I did not think about while creating my PLE was the information that is shared via twitter. Information on a larger variety of topics is shared through twitter ranging from sports to politics. Not only can Twitter give you the information directly, but it also allows for you to follow your favourite writers, who tweet the links to their articles allowing you an easy way to know when they have posted something new. If I was re-doing my PLE, I may also consider putting Twitter in the "Gathering of information" branch.

Building off the idea that you can gather information through Twitter, lists are also a useful tool on the site. A list on twitter allows you to group a number of users in to one area based on a similarity in the topics they tweet about. For example, I could group all the writers for the Green Bay Packers (my favourite football team), into one list, and then when I wanted to read about them all the tweets by them would be sorted neatly away from the rest of my timeline.

Week 4 Weekly Report and Reflection

This week we were assigned to learn about bookmarking tools and how to use them for our benefit. Bookmarks are useful in a similar way to how a RSS feed is useful. The tool that I used when gathering my bookmarks was, Diigo. Diigo is a site that allows you not only to just bookmark a site in the classic way, but also allows for the user to highlight important phrases, or paragraphs. By using Diggo, one can also write an annotation about the site so that if you go back to it later, you can see what you wrote about the site. A tool like this is extremely useful for people with busy lives like a student. This is because, it allows for you to choose which sites you find reliable, and only read content of those sites. By doing this, you do not waste your time on sites with questionable facts, and sources, and actually learn the truth as to what is happening.

Diigo (2013)

This session we also had to use an online curation tool. The one I chose to use is called Storify. This online tool is used to tell a story about what ever it is that you choose to tell about. Storify allows for you to put a bunch of links, videos, pictures, quotes, etc. on to one page so it tells the "story" that you are going for. This tool is useful if you want to show someone, or a group of people a lot of information on a topic in a very user friendly, and easy to navigate way.

There were a number of interesting articles on my RSS feed this week. One that I chose to read was interesting because it talks about the way that marketing is leaning. The article is titled: What Can Be Sold in 140 Characters? That’s Now the Challenge for Twitter. The article talks about the direction that marketing is going and since live TV isn't watched as much, what marketers need to do to adjust.