Final Reflection

When I look back to how I felt about this subject in week 1, I remember being excited to see that every week had such a variety of topics to learn, it seemed that it would never get boring or dry. I think that in the end this assumption turned out to be true as I really enjoyed myself with many of the tasks, and learnt a lot from the reflect tasks. 

The format of the learning and the assessment was certainly very different to what I am used to but in the end I really enjoyed it. I have a tendency to leave things to the last minute so being made to work on a bit every week to make deadlines forced me to spread my workload out more which has helped immensely with my stress levels and the quality of my work.

It is hard to pick which week’s activity was the most interesting or useful to me as they all contributed to my learning. I particularly enjoyed the play activities based on multimedia. The mash-up activity was particularly fun for me as it allowed me to be a little creative as well as learn about new technologies. While I don’t think I’ll be using instagram much in my personal life I did have fun playing around with it. 

After I graduate from the masters I would love to work in a public or state library setting so I think that the most interesting week in regards to this was week 4. I had only ever heard the names Bundlr and Storify before and knew nothing about them. They surprised me however in how useful they were for creating collections of media to cater for a specific community or interest. I particularly enjoyed using Bundlr as it was easy to use and allowed me to create a collection based on an interest of mine. It is easy to see how this could be used to create a collection that would coincide with an event at a library or even just a general collection that would be of interest to people in the community.

In terms of the actual content I really enjoyed the week on gamification as both the play and reflect activity allowed me to gain a better understanding of the topic. Again it allowed me to be creative and this engagement helped me with learning the topic. 

I actually quite enjoyed the ability to comment on people’s blogs as it allowed me to get a better understanding of the topic by reading other people’s views. Having people comment on my own blog was also useful because I could hear people’s insight into my own and gain a greater understanding of the topic. 

I think that overall the most useful thing about this class is that it has prompted me to give a large variety of social media tools a try. While I may not end up using all of them in my life or my future career being exposed to them gives me a greater understanding of how people interact online. It also gives me the skillsets to use the ones I do adopt.

Week 6 Reflect Activity

I do have a Google+ account but that is only so I can follow a class group for a subject I am doing. Aside from the people in my class I know only one person who uses Google+ regularly. In my experience it will not be a Facebook killer.

While Myspace was very popular amongst younger people, it never caught on with the older generations, whereas almost everybody seems to have a Facebook today; Myspace never had the sheer numbers that Facebook does. Having said that though, I do not think that Facebook will last forever. There are a large number of early teens that are not interested in Facebook. It seems that beyond the fact that kids don't like the idea that their parents are on Facebook, they are choosing not to participate due to the most complained about aspects of Facebook; inane status updates and people trying to create unnecessary online drama. Regardless of whether another social media site will replace Facebook or not remains to be seen, but I think we are already starting to see the beginning of the end for Facebook.

I personally believe that Twitter will come out even more popular than before. Even though Twitter can have it's share of inane posting, it does not seem to attract the same kind of drama that Facebook often does. Also if you are wanting to post pictures through instagram you don't have to worry about people tagging you, which was a concern voiced in the previously linked article. Twitter also seems a lot safer for people that are worried about their online privacy as less information is divulged in a Twitter profile.

One reason I personally still use Facebook is because it allows me to follow what is happening with movies or bands that I like; Twitter also allows this. For me at least I think Twitter will be the next big thing for social media. Judging from what is happening with Facebook already, I think that will be the same a for a lot of people as well.