Week Eight Blog Post

Social Media Etiquette and Online Tools



This week in class was a bit different, as Professor Calderwood was in the UK on Tuesday with Google. Having Tuesday off was nice, but there's always work to be done. On Thursday, the class presented finished projects regarding social media etiquette. I took a lot of time to prepare the slides, but when it came time to present, I had some technical difficulties.

I decided to use Google Docs to present my project, made it an effort to make things look smooth. To utilize notes on my tablet, I realized it was necessary to to run several instances of Teamviewer on a dual screen monitor and stream it via my tablet and podium. This method didn't serve me as well as I had wished. I spent much of my time trying to use my tablet to transition the slides, and had a hard time reading the tiny sized notes. It just goes to show that there is such a thing as too much tech. Nevertheless, presenting wasn't a huge anxiety because I felt like I had prepared my slides well enough.


My project was regarding the incident of "The Donglegate." This event involved two male attendees at software development conference PyCon, made a an inappropriate joke. Tech developer Adria Richards was offended by the jokes and posted her feelings on Twitter. The backlash was extreme and one of the men was fired. She was also fired for "publicly shaming the offenders,"SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin said in a blog post. the second part of the presentation highlighted on preventative measures and administrative action.

We also had reading from our chapter five of Connected Educator, "Using Tools to Support Connected Learning." Firstly, Delicious and Diigo were mentioned as being useful collaborative tools for documenting and archiving the information you stumble upon. This section reminds me a lot of the curation chapter we had read previously. Having what information you want available is an essential part of being an effective student and professional. Having the ability to to share your information with others is a huge benefit of using these two tools.

Being able to report your research publicly is also an effective way to show others in your field what you're working on and what interests you hold. Doing so will provide the professional with feedback, allowing them to build on their skills and research. Blogger, Wordpress, and Tublr are all good examples of online blogging tools. Google Docs is a collaborative tool that Matt Waldron and myself are using for our Statistics project. Having information for us all in one place, and the ability to work simultaneously is priceless. As a side note, I like how Taylor Binet pointed to Google Alerts in her blog. Knowing when your name is being used on the web can be great in nipping unwanted content in the bud.