Task 14 - New Interactive Environments

What is it you are going to take with you from this course, be it negative or positive experience, content-related or organisational aspects and so on? Write down your experiences, observations, reflections on your Weblog.

What I did gain from this course were some good articles to use for other courses, the concept of activity theory, I got to know about PLENK course and MOOCs in general and Flashmeeting application. So actually some interactive environments.

In general I was not satisfied with the organization of the course. It seemed like there were a lot of demands from the lecturers side but not so much effort spent. It felt like we were just given tasks just because something had to be given. The whole concept was vague and to admit it, did not motivate to give a 100% from my side either.

I would make some recommendations for the next year:

• The concept of the course should be really thought through and argumented
• The timeframe and expected results should be specified
• If it is not possible to give all the tasks at once, there should be a certain time when the students can expect the new tasks
• If the course starts in the middle of the semester and most of the students are from IMKE, it is not a very good idea to spend so much time on defining the term "interactivity" as it has been done in almost all the courses so far.
• It is useful to provide some new interesting knowledge regarding the topics of the course, even if they are not part of the tasks, they may be interesting to investigate by the students
• Maybe there could be some interactive environments tested and reviewed by the students, which would make the tasks more practical

Things that I liked:

• The assessment process was clear and easily followable
• The reflections of the tasks by Terje
• The task of comparing Plenk10 and NIE course
• The different tools used in the process of the course as some of them were new to me

Task 13 - New Interactive Environments

Describe your activity and explain how would you redesign it, re-instrumentalise it and re-organised it to be more efficient, enjoyable, etc.

The activity that I am analyzing is workout. Working out has become an activity of itself, not a necessity for getting things done, but rather a thing we have to do to stay healthy and fit. Computers have helped in a sense that it is now possible to monitor the efficiency of our workout, to calculate calories, distance heart rate etc. It is a kind of motivator. In the other hand, computers are the reasons people are not moving naturally as much as they had to before these technological developments.

But how can digital technology help people be fit and at the same time make up for its guilt of turning people into office-slaves? One thing that I thought about was how technology can help to gain more from people, who are spending their time and energy working out. For example, people are going to gyms, spending hours in a week on exercise machines, spending energy and letting it all go to waste. But all this work could actually do something more than just burn fat or build muscle. The energy which is created on the exercise machine could be collected and used for example for the gym's lighting. Fortunately there are more and more gyms, which are starting to use the energy from exercise machines and therefore saving up from their electricity bills. This is one example but there should be much much more.

Because if to think about it, the gyms are not a necessity for people. It is possible to jog or lift weights or dance in a group everywhere. Instead, people spend money to go to one room with many people to sweat and suffer together. At least in the earlier days, this meant that something would come out of the sweating and suffering, such as a building for example :) Physical work was done for some purpose.

Digital technology together with science could take more advantage of people just jogging around or going to group exercises, dancing or boxing. There should be some kind of energy collectors used on the hands and feet of the people in action. Every movement could be transformed into energy and from there to electricity. Then why not go together to the gym and do good for the Earth. This is something to think about to the scientists and technology developers. It should not be very difficult I guess.

Ethics and Law in New Media homework - Week 11

Analyse both free software and open source approach in your blog. If you prefer one, provide your arguments.

Free software is a kind of software, which can be used, copied, modified and shared for non-commercial purposes by anyone with no fees or purchases. Examples of free software that I have used are for example GIMP image editor and Openoffice text editor. These are quite quality software freely downloadable from the web. Both of them are also open source softwares.

Open source software is a software, which has an open source code for everyone to see. It enables to study the code and find out, how does the coding work in the specific software. But for that you have to be a pretty good programmer I guess. But still if you can see the code, copy and alter it as you wish, it is kind of similar to free software, with some limitations - you are not able to modify the original.

The difference between the two software versions still remains a little confusing to me. Probably it is more of a question of ethics. Free software is a kind of way of thinking while open source is waiting for some income. I would not know which software to choose, as I don't know programming and can't read code very well, therefore I could not modify the code anyway.

Introduction and Foundation of New Media - Essay reviews

In this post, I am going to review and comment three essays, written by Mehrnoosh, Kersti and Valeria.

Mehrnoosh wrote an interesting essay about image tagging and retrieval, comparing folksonomy and controlled vocabulary. She described different researches about how people retrieve images from the Internet. There was some interesting food for thought for me in that essay. For example that unlike for texts, while retrieving images, people do not focus much on the authority of the image but rather on the fact, that the image represents what they want. Another interesting thought was that often the searchers have a well-defined mental image of a potentially satisfying picture already in their mind. I found some recognition in those thoughts.

She went on by describing folksonomy, or in this context image tagging by the users opposed to controlled vocabularies. Mehrnoosh brought out the advantages and disadvantages of folksonomy in the image retrieval process. I liked that she had found quite a lot studies about the topic to back up the arguments of the both sides. The last paragraph brought out an example of the National Archive of UK and their plan to add their digital collection to Flickr. I liked that example in the end and maybe I would suggest to use more examples like it in the rest of the text as well, just to illustrate the essay.

Kersti's essay was about digital ecosystem and whether it is a fertile metaphor or the new type of ecosystem that uses ecological principles. She focused on the notions associated with the terms of "digital", "ecosystem", "new media" and "metaphor". She brought out a lot of interesting tangible examples to illustrate the essay. The way Kersti went through all the related terms and devoted a paragraph for each matter gave an overview of the thoughts in her mind about the topic. Although some of the arguments remained a bit confusing. For example equalling the term "digital" with "online" - this should maybe have been explained a little more.

Kersti's writing style for this essay was kind of philosophical and at the same time had a personal touch, which made it easy to read. In order to back up her arguments a little better, she should have used more references and citations in the text.

Valeria wrote her essay about online memes. I like the way Valeria can connect the topics of her every post to a lot of other examples from different fields. If to look at the first part of her essay, she starts with examples of Mona Lisa and some from Japanese culture. But all the examples work in the context of her essay.

Valeria's essay is very well structured and each chapter of the essay describes content relevant to the explanation of online memes and their phenomenon. There are many references made from different researchers and web sites, which gives her arguments a good backup. There aren't many suggestions to make for Valeria as I found the essay good, comprehensive and summarizing.