End of EIR

Today's the last day that I will be working on EIR.
It has been a good module! I personally felt that I had a lot of fun, and the lessons were definitely interesting. I am a big fan of web culture and web 2.0, so I understood fast and I really enjoyed most of the curriculum. I really enjoy learning more about how to use the web structures that I have constantly have been using the past few years.

One important skill I took back is the use of a good set of booleans. I knew and understood booleans, but never really used them until this class. I always had too little time, or just didn't sit down to construct a proper set of boolean operators to get my exact search topic. I really appreciate relearning this very crucial tool. A difference of a few million results just because of the good use of operators really show how well boolean operators help a serach.

Overall, I had a really great time learning how best to apply web technology into resaerch and its something that I will be able to use in all aspects of my work. =)

Dream Holiday

My dream holiday is in Hawaii. I've been there once, and I want to go again, because it really is a great place to stay at. I would describe the weather as being cooler than Singapore by a lot, but not as cold as Australia.

I picked Hawaii because I love beaches, I love cold weather, I love Japanese food and American food, I love driving holidays, and I love having small town experiences. I would have picked Australia prior going to Hawaii, but after being there, it holds all of Australia together. For example, Surfer's Paradise is almost exactly like Waikiki Beach in Hawaii. The only thing is that Hawaii has japanese has really great japanese food that australia doesnt have. This is because of the high amount of Japanese living and visiting Hawaii. Most of the the city areas have two languages, English and Japanese.

So, I would pick Hawaii!

Learning how to evaluate a website

We visited talkingcock.com to learn how to evaluate a website, based on things like its purpose, coverage, accuracy, and accessibility.

I assumed the role of a foreign worker visiting talkingcock.com and I personally would say that I wouldn't understand anything if I were a foreigner. There was a lot of hokkein, and other local jokes that foreigners would not understand. Whether they would need to understand it would be a different thing because some of the jokes were old, or were just funny at that point in time. 

On my own, I do enjoy talkingcock.com because I feel it gives me a little bit of a laugh and some insight into the local news that I might have missed. Like the blog wars between Xiaxue and DawnYang, I only knew after I saw it there. I also bought talkingcock the movie when it came out years ago, and had a few good laughs with it. 

Another person has replied me on the forums! The person says that "in the internet you CAN bury your head under the sand", pointing out that you dont need to listen to what everyone says to you on the internet, and its a matter of standing up for yourself and not caring if people don't agree with you.

Pre Test

Today Ms Faridah went through our blogs, and our reports to make sure that we were on the right track, and I found that I was a little bit off.

Some corrections that I found interesting was my use of boolean operators. I had very interesting results when I added more boolean operators to my search keywords. From cyber bully* impact, to (cyber OR internet) and (bully* OR intimidate*) and (impact* OR effect*), I had about 10 times more results. With the first search query I had about 200,000 (rounded up), and now I have about 1,990,000. Its almost a good 10 times more, and thats a very interesting change.

I also found better resources; Thank goodness I changed my search query!


Still no reply on the forums! I might need to try even more soon. wish me luck!

Lesson 5

For lecture 5, Ms Faridah taught us how to look through the databases that are available to us. I had gone through one of the library workshop lessons to go through this already so I already knew how to use them.

I actually really like to use the schools' databases, because the information there is so rich and it gives me such a good range of choices to pick from. But dealing with my topic of cyberbullies, I felt that I would get the best answers from the online users themselves.

Im still waiting for replies for my posts on the discussion forums. I posted one on the facebook forums, and another on the about.com advice forums. Hopefully, I'll get a good response soon!

Lecture 3

For this lesson we went through the use of the different search facilities. I tried something new, the meta search engines. The meta searches scan the search engine results, and give you a shorter number of results. This seems a bit confusing but after trying, it seemed to give me results that made more sense. Im not sure about using it all the time, but it seems to be good if im searching for a very broad-titled topic and I want to narrow down, and get the most similar/real answers.

Anyway, while researching on cyberbullying, my chosen topic for EIR, I've been reading many different cases about bullying as well. Seeing bullying as the lead up to cyber bullying, I understand better how much emotional scarring occurs mentally when someone is bullied. Most of the time the bullying occurs over a long period of time. This also prolongs the torment the victim feels. I was wondering if in cyberbullying if happens over a long period of time as well, but then I recalled Megan Meier's case, where it was over a long period of time.

For your reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Meier_suicide_controversy

Even though its from wikipedia, it gives a very good background and description of what happened. For some reason, I feel that cyberbullying will be best explained by web 2.0 sites like wikipedia, and others.

Definition of cyber bullying by stopcyberbullying.org, the top search result whenever searching for cyberbullying,
"a situation when a child, tween or teen is repeatedly “tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted” by another child, tween or teen using text messaging, email, instant messaging or any other type of digital technology."




I picked cyberbullying, not because I was cyberbullied before, or anything like that. When I read about Megan Meier's case last year, I didn't believe that someone would commit suicide just because of what someone said to them online. After reading and researching the past week, I'm seeing that its not just because of what someone said to them online, its also because of how they've been viewing themselves the whole time, their own self perspective. I realise that its a lot of low self confidence already brought in by normal life, then coupled with strangers that just "randomly" insult and threaten, it is indeed very traumatic.

I've never really cared too much about what people said to me online, because its online, and real life is where it counts most. So this project is making me see that the virtual world plays a much larger part in some people's lives, and I should be aware of how I treat others online. Not that I am a cyberbully. Im actually a cyber anti-social, so I don't bother anyone else.



Am still finding a good forum to post in about cyber bullying, will update when I've found one!

Reflection on Comparing Different Search Engines

I personally felt that this lesson made me revise a lot of things I had previously used but forgotten. I used to be very adept at using the different booleans to get to specific sites that I want to read on, but I haven't been using these for awhile. Very good refresher to get me back on easier searches!

Last year, during the September holidays, I was playing this online html based quiz game, weffriddles.com. It made me fully maximise all I knew about google searching, plus most of my brain, in order to solve the different answers. Search booleans like site:(address) would come in handy to search specifically, but also -weffriddles to make sure I don't chance on the answers. I spent a full week playing it, finishing at batch 6, if you decide to take this game on. heh.