Sunday, November 7, 2010

It's working! Technology is working!

Alright, I have a confession to make. This class is nearing the end, and the further into this subject I have got, the more my thoughts towards new technologies have changed.

For example, in the first few weeks of this course, I doubted the potential of the class wiki. I wasn't sure that the wiki would be of any use. While I quite like wikipedia, I didn't see the point in having a blog that focused only on digital media. As I've added things, and read bits and pieces on it throughout the semester however, this has changed. Before I began writing my essay, I had a look through the annotated bibliography, to find articles that might have be useful for my essay. After all, the articles were all related to social media, which was exactly what my essay was on. Obviously.

So after I found some useful articles, I realised that there may be others in a similar position to me. Not just those doing the same course, but perhaps Media students doing VCE, hoping to get an advantage on others by reading up on various forms of media. Whilst I imagine a VCE student this inventive and motivated might be hard to find, surely, it's possible, right? A friend of mine got a study score of 50 for media, and he never did anything like that... But still, I think that if lots of media students knew about this wiki, at least some of them would find a use for it.

Last week, while writing my essay, something occurred that gave our class wiki one final stamp of approval. I was writing about how social networking websites can give people a place to share artwork, or photos, which can help them create a network of people who share an interest. A website where you can share artwork also opens up career opportunities, and can get you "known", as long as your art is good enough.

I felt that this was a particularly valid point in my essay, though I had just one problem. I couldn't remember the name of the website I was thinking of. There are several websites that fall into the category I have just described, but I had one in particular in mind.

First of all, I went onto Facebook, and thought that perhaps I could ask a friend what the site I was thinking of was called. This is significant in itself, the fact that Facebook was my first resource. While Facebook has become a very useful source of information for me, this time it didn't deliver, as there was no-one online who I could ask.

What I really needed was a list of social networking sites, accompanied by a small annotation describing the site. And then it hit me. The class wiki! That was exactly what I needed.

So I went to the class wiki, and within seconds found what i was looking for. The name DeviantArt rang a bell, and once I clicked on it, the description confirmed what I had thought. This was the website I was writing about.

I have no doubt that the class wiki is a handy resource to know about, and is a helpful asset to anyone completing this subject. I found it particularly amusing that the wiki helped me to write my essay, and then I have retold this whole story here, on my class blog.

Finally, the ways in which modern media technologies can be used as resources are becoming clearer to me. I feel quite technology-savvy at this point in time.

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