Class reflection

How teaching strategy of the class help me in learning?

• Learning strategy – For the class, I learnt a lot from the readings before the class. I captured most of the ideas, concepts, and details from that way. However, during discussions in the class, I found out that I a missed a lot. Sometimes I overlooked concepts during the reading because I do not think that they were important. Sometimes I did not find the relations between concepts. The discussion helped me to collected the missed ideas. Then, I got all that I should.
• Teaching strategy – It is very nice to have multiple teaching strategy in the class. Different strategies make the class not boring. Some strategies helped me learn better than others in the same situation. The voting activity and the activity that I had to select the concept that match questions written by others really forced me to deeply analyzed concepts. They were good even I took a lot of time for them. And, of course, the presentation is the best for the Internet culture topic.

Favorite topics

• Personally, I like social capital and social media in the workplace. The concept of social capital and online relationship surprised me. I’ve never though about those before even those concepts appeared in our daily life. For the social media in the workplace, it directly corresponds to my field of interest.

Personal takeaway

• The most important takeaway is the concept about research garden and my own flower. It clearly illustrated how people understand an area of research and how people think about their own research.
• Another one is the important of situation awareness in online collaboration. I did not think that people really considered it in software development, at least in my country. I feel like it would really help in online collaboration.

Memes in Thailand

Originally, I do not know what the Meme is until I saw examples of Meme in the presentation. I used to see a lot of them in international websites, but I do not know that we call them Memes. Then, I realized that I used to see some of them in Thai internet culture also.

In Thailand, Memes are quite rare; furthermore, I have never seen any Lolcat. We have no terms to described those kind of pictures. One of my friend simply called them “9GAG’s joke”. We only see them and enjoy. On the other hand, we correctly understand the term Infographics, and it is really popular in Thailand.

As I know, Memes were first promoted to Thai internet culture via the Facebook page 9GAG in Thai. The page was established on December 27, 2011, with the purpose to disseminate international jokes to Thai people. Now, the page has around 1.3 million likes. The Meme culture was first introduced by the translated Memes from the 9GAG website. The translator had to edit jokes to match Thai sense of humor as well as Thai culture. After that, the page administrator encouraged visitors to post their own Memes on the page.

According to the Facebook statistic, the most popular age group of the 9GAG in Thai page is 18-24 years old. That could be a reason that most of Thai Memes are related to school life and teenager hobbies. Let’s see how Thai Memes looks like below.

Actually, we are selling the air.

Chips in the bag are extra bonus.

Is the next class Math?

Let’s walk slower.

Have you ever tried to borrow your friend a pen?

Then, he said he had only one.

I got B as the answer.

But it looks strange, let’s choose the C.

It is not easy.

to avoid chatting about the exam after I leave the exam room.

Was your team got the same score as our team last night? LOL

As your team failed to get into the next tournament, you have no right to complain.

Computer games  is always the cause of bad behaviors.

Those soap operas has never been the cause.

Role of weak ties and strong ties in social network

I found an interesting article called The Importance of Strong and Weak Ties In Leadership Development. The article provided a good summary of social network, the role of weak ties and strong ties as well as their relation among them. The author pointed out that weak ties are good in collecting diverse information, especially new information from other networks. Differently, strong ties provide effective transmission of information between parties via social network. Moreover, the article introduced the idea that social network structure is similar to structure of an organization. This article is interesting, and I recommend you guys to check it out.

Twitter: More than just tweet

There were a few weeks that I explored Twitter. The tool itself is not complicated, just write a short message and tweet those texts. The real challenge was how to effectively use the tool.

The first week, I tried to collaborate using Twitter. It was a bit difficult especially if the people you would like to talk to were not usually using it. However, I found that the Twitter direct message was very powerful. The direct message sent my tweet via nearly all channels – Twitter, mobile phone message, and email. Then, those people got my message wherever they were.

Conversation making was the purpose of my second week. It was a lot easier to make a conversation with people I have already known.  It was perfectly fine to me. Twitter made the conversation easier because it was not necessary for both parties to be on Twitter at the same time. The problem for me was a conversation to the rest. A lot of people I followed generate serious contents regularly. I was not sure if I should give a response to them. They could be a representative of some organization. However, I did respond some. A person sent me a direct message back, and I felt really good about it. This may be a good practice that I should follow.

Foursquare: Why people feel free to report where they are?

In my opinion, Foursquare is a SNS that quite different from others. The user has to report where he is and with whom to the world. Isn’t it too strange? However, a number of my friends continuously update where they are on my Facebook via Foursquare. Then, when I would like to learn more about SNS, Foursquare is a very first choice.

Foursquare is a SNS that people usually access it via mobile application. With mobile phones, people can easily share their current location. The application provides information of many different locations from local restaurant to tourist attractions on map. The user can discovery nearby locations, and he can check in at the visited location. The check in is for both personal record and location sharing to friends.

After I tried Foursquare, my perspective toward it changed. The application itself was useful even without the check in feature. The application impressively showed details of the nearby locations including the distance. With the check in feature, I have to report where I was. It was not that bad to share my current location to the people I know who they are. It may be because I shared only some special location, not all. The function provided a good record for me to see which tourist attractions I used to visit and which I have not tried yet. Comments for each restaurant from other Foursquare users were also helpful for me to make a decision. Moreover, as an international student, it felt good to see active friends around, especially friends with the same nationality. No wonder why my friends keep using Foursquare.

However, the most interesting feature in my mind was the list. People can create list of interesting location for others to follow. I found the Purdue Graduate Bucket List, including 12 places on and around Purdue University, West Lafayette campus, that students should visit before they graduate. It was wonderful to complete the list of missions and learn new things. I passed by the sculpture of lion faces pouring water from their mouth for years and wondered about it. Once I checked in at the Lions Fountain, the list solved that it is a fountain with drinking water! This feature should be useful if people apply it to tourism.

Disconnect

I had a change to watch the movie “Disconnect” directed by Henry Alex Rubin. The story was very interesting. It induced me to be more careful when I use social network websites. It is a kind of sad drama. Some of you may not like it. But If you would like to know how people think about the negative side of social network, I would recommend you to watch it.

“Disconnect” tried to communicate possible bad effects from social media usages. The movie represent it in three cases – careless usage of Facebook in teenagers, online identity thief, and the meeting and dealing of people out side the online world. Let’s watch the trailer.

Knowledge from bloggers in long tail

As we discussed about long tail, individual bloggers, in social media content creation in the class. I have learnt that the long tail usually gets low number of participants, but there may create a niche that shares common interest.

Long Tail
Credit: http://tingkelly.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/book-review-the-long-tail-chris-anderson/

At first, I am not quite clear about how could the niche happen. If I write a blog about a specific thing, will people that interesting in that topic find it out? I have just discovered a real life example to confirm that it is not that hard for the niche to happen.

I have just finished my Master study for a few months. Then, like a week ago, I got an email from LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing. It said they found my work on the Purdue library and would like to publish my work with their publishing house. However, I found that it is an on demand publishing, so I ignored it. Nevertheless, they still sent me the follow up email. It made me curious about this publisher so I googled it.

I found several blog posts suggesting people to avoid this publisher. The blog with the best clarification to me is “Lambert Academic Publishing Continues to Spam” posted my Christopher Collins . There were also 36 more comments on his blog post sharing the similar experience with this publisher or asking about other publishers. Yes, he is one in the long tail. However, he created a niche just from his shared experience. And I believed that a lot of those people have never known him before like me.

What I have learnt is the truth about knowledge spread in social media. The large amount of knowledge in the blogosphere could come from individual bloggers. The knowledge could be their direct experience, their research, or even their shared opinion. Moreover, today search engine is powerful enough to bring people with the same interest together. Consequently, I you have some great idea or experience that you would like to share, don’t hesitate to post it and they will find it out.

Welcome

Social network is another world that people, especially the new generation, unconsciously step into. Let’s explore this whole new world whether it is a wonder land or a dreadful trap.