I was astonished to discover that we were only five people present for class, as I had gone through tremendous efforts to appear for said, last class of the course. Nonetheless, it was a quite interesting last peak into the world of digital culture. The topic that popped up this time was googling and many interesting aspects connected to it. A part of it evolved around the internet image of oneself, how to act online and how to be perceived - this especially considering the material that might pop up if someone googles your name. I wanted to argue that not all things appearing while googling a person is written by one's own account. Crawling was another topic we discussed; how long it takes for a results to appear when you type in something in search. In the beginning it was slow and it could take weeks before the newest updates to appear - something that only takes a few seconds nowadays.
We also learned about all the academically prestigious and practical sites, at which you could create your own CV, publish your papers and works and follow other scholars and researchers. Sites such as this were Academia.edu, which seemed very useful indeed. Another, more academic and "professional" version of facebook known as Linkedin - offering opportunities to exchange information, ideas and such for over 150 million professionals. At the moment it did not feel too relevant for me, in my current life situation, but I'm sure this will come quite handy later on in my studies. Pages such as Tuhat -service offered people active at Helsinki university a space for publishing bigger projects and works, in order to reach a bigger sphere of interest. The most important part in working on your own webpage or one designed for a certain purpose or theme (say e.g. a Museum), is the skill and talent to summarise the most important parts of the topic. Seriously, no one's going to want to read a lot of (especially if its boring) text page after page before coming to the actual point and purpose of the text, so better start practising now!
The lecturer did, however, also emphasise on the importance of Twitter as a source for useful, academic and internationally important informations, as the press with several actively tweeting journalists have taken over a big part of Twitter. I've never been exceptionally interested in following someone's Twitter or creating myself an account, but it was nice to know it's not all about useless, trivial daily updates of flimsy reason. A strong emphasis was also put on the access of information, and how much quicker new information reaches readers through Twitter than newspapers or other social media. Facebook, you have a challenger... Older and potentially important tweets could also apparently be archived onto Storify, which is useful for later references or just good jokes and useful and interesting pieces of information.
Despite being so few present, I think we managed to have a very nice lecture, with a nice and intimate atmosphere and time for more questions and interaction between students and lecturer. Still I'm brave enough to confess I don't feel bad about the course ending. It's been an experience, nonetheless.
~
Oh, and I apologise for the potentially very crappy English and general disinterest, but I'm onto my second week with this f*cking cold (just go away, will you >___<?!) and I'm under a lot of stress for my upcoming trip to Japan. My bad...
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti