Wikipedia is an online Encyclopaedia resource that I used to create a draft article about a ‘Woman in Red’ without an existing Wikipedia article. We also had a workshop with our University seminar time taught by a contributor to the site. From using the site and attending the workshop, I found Wikipedia to be a very useful resource to publish new content about an individual or subject as the means to do so are simple and using the five pillar system it gave a structure and the correct voice to pose the article in.

Another aspect I liked within the creation of a new article was that the general navigation of the Sandbox was very easy to pick up and I learnt all the basic techniques and skills within the first workshop. This made using such a large resource less stressful. A feature I found particularly helpful was the automatic creation of a contents box, done simply by making subheadings and the box being made for you. This took away a lot of stresses that could have come with coding in a contents box yourself.

Overall I found the first workshop to be extremely useful to the creation of my article but I did walk away with a few things still not secured in my knowledge. One of which is correct citing. After coming away from the workshop I had to ask my course-mates to help me with my citing as my knowledge after the workshop was very basic and some elements were incorrect. Had I been taught this properly then some weight would have been lifted.

On the whole though, Wikipedia worked well for the context of the project and using it as a graded artefact has been enjoyable. If the opportunity came up again to create another Wikipedia article I would most likely choose to do it as the content made is actually published to the internet and other users can use the resource created by you.

To curate the resources that I would use to write my Wikipedia article I used an extension tool called Diigo. Diigo allowed me to not only highlight text that would be useful to write about within the article but it also allowed me to annotate the highlighted text to create notes. I discovered this to be particularly useful when I found a smaller statement about the designer as I could then extend on from the point and use this as information to put into my article.

Diigo also allowed for Hashtags to be used for easy sharing within the group, this made passing a resource easy and efficient. Once you had shared an annotation of the text to the group, other members of that group could leave comments which I found helpful as I gained a second opinion on some of the articles I was curating. All of this could be done without need of a tutorial and I picked up the skill to do this particularly quickly which made using Diigo more enjoyable.

However there were some things within Diigo that I found not as practical as others. For instance on a few occasions I had to reinstall the Chrome extension as my computer thought I had stopped using it. Not only this but initially I had problems using Diigo on Safari and I had to switch over to Chrome as my browser of choice. Although these are not major difficulties they did cause me to become somewhat dissatisfied with the tool.

As a whole the Diigo website worked well for this project as it did not require a-lot of prior knowledge to make efficient use of the tool. Therefore I enjoyed using Diigo and would recommend it as a resource for others to use, not only this but I will also continue to use Diigo throughout university. 

The articles I curated on Diigo are the following:

CairoScene: From Paris to Montreal https://www.cairoscene.com/Fashion/Maram-Minimalist-Luxury-egyptian-fashion-paris

Class of 2013 – Paris College of Art https://www.paris.edu/class-of-13-maram-aboul-enein-nominated-for-the-canadian-arts-and-fashion-awards/

ABOUT – Maram Aboul Enein https://www.maramparis.com/about

Not Just a Label – MARAM https://www.notjustalabel.com/maram

Here is a link to my Twine Story on Itch.Io:

https://lewismantle.itch.io/twine-story

Twine is a tool used to plan out stories and allow you to insert links that will take you to the next passage. This tool allowed me to create a choose your own path story with the idea ‘Redecorating my house’. The user chooses the design options and at the end they get a photo of the finished room.

As a tool I found Twine to be very intuitive and not require many skills to operate. However if I did have a problem with anything I could either click the help option within Twine or watch a youtube video to solve the problem. This was possible as Twine is open source so there is a lot of information online about how to develop your knowledge of it. The most useful features that I found within Twine were the options to make some text unique, as within my work it allowed me to highlight the important parts of each paragraph for the story.

Within Twine I found that it didn’t actually have a lot of features. And those that it did have were relatively basic. The features such as basic text writing are extremely common on the types of tools. The other storytelling tools available have features such as being multimedia, having audio and video, none of which are features of Twine.

A challenge I had to overcome whilst using Twine was inserting images into the passages. This was not as easy as I had initially thought. The process of adding these images involved somewhat complex code which I had to search online to find. This took a while as many people used different techniques to insert images.

Overall, Twine worked well for the intended purpose of this project. The features built into Twine were useful as it allowed me to create a complex storyline with many different options for the user to choose. Not only this but allowing for pictures to be added within particularly helped bring my work to a higher standard. I would recommend the use of Twine for someone writing a very basic story but those in need of a more complex tool should try elsewhere.

This post is about my thoughts on a video of a TedTalk by Eli Pariser called Beware online “filter bubbles”. The video starts with Eli quoting Mark Zuckerburg when talking about newsfeeds “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests than people dying in Africa”. This made me think about how people nowadays prioritise their own lives over others that may need to seek help. And because of this the internet has progressed to cater for our tastes. Depending on what you click on (cookies), it edits out the search results to what you want to see not what the rest of the world wants to see.

An example used within the talk is when 2 different people Google Egypt, one gets results relating to the Egyptian Crisis and the other gets holiday recommendations. This further proves the fact that the internet moves to show what we want to see, not necessarily what we need to see. Because of this, a filter bubble is created. And within that bubble is all of your preferences, with one catch, you don’t get to decide what is within the bubble. But also, you don’t see what gets edited out either.

Both the speaker at the TedTalk and I believe this needs to be changed somehow. Google needs to show you what you like to see, but also what you may not like as much to try and encourage you to step out of your searching comfort-zone. A reason this previously didn’t work was because the algorithm works based of what you click on first (which is normally the cat videos). Ideally, the algorithm will take some responsibility and make you slightly uncomfortable in order to highlight this important information to you. With this taking place, the internet can become even more inclusive and informational.

As part of my university course, I have to both launch a blog and start writing blogposts about content within my course that I find exciting and will help me progress further with my knowledge. This WordPress blog is where I plan to do this. To start off with I will focus on Digital Citizenship and I may then move onto other modules within my course that are interesting to share.

I hope you enjoy.