Betsy's New Media Blog

For Professor Dorazio’s class, she split the entire class into groups of 3 to present to the class what we learned about collaborative tools. My group consists of Pam, David whom is also in COM418 and myself. For the assignment we had to pick 3 collaborative tools that helped us this semester with communicating with each other and the Italian translator students. As a group we chose to evaluate and discuss Elluminate, Skype, Google Documents, and Zoho Writer. The presentation is to last about ten minutes, and we will start with an overview of each tool, what it is used best for, and where to find it. After introducing each tool we have made a chart that we are going to show the class, the chart will compare each tool side by side. We chose to compare the tools this way to showcase what the tools work best for and to also distinguish which tool was the overall best tool to work with. The tool we agreed on that works best was Elluminate, it is best for communication, sharing documents and files, instant messaging, editing, and it is all in real time. Elluminate also has simple tools such as the hand raising, mic on/off button, and clapping/thumbs down that are not present with the other tools. The one we chose as the worst tool was skype. Not that it is a bad tool, but it simply has less capabilities and available tools as the rest. Skype is best for microphone of video chat, sending simple files and that is about it. For us skype had the most connection problems, Elluminate has the best bandwidth as it is made to have more capabilities at once.
I think this is an interesting assignment, hopefully the rest of the class will find our findings interesting. I am looking forward to finding out what the class has found and will present.
Recently someone in my class informed me about www.meebo.com.
This is a chat tool that connects all instant messaging tools into one. It transfers all your buddy lists from the different tools, for example AIM, Yahoo, MSN, into one buddy list.
I thought it was interesting since I never heard of it and that I have a few accounts with some of the services listed.

I have received my copy of the Italian translated text of the Strawbery Banke Museum! My Italian team did a great job. They did say they had some difficulties in agreeing on words that match up with the English version. I am friends with some of the girls in the group on Facebook, but I have not used any other collaboration tools to communicate. We email back and forth and sometimes talk on Facebook, but I know some students in the class have had the opportunity to speak with the Italian students using tools such as Skype. It is cool that we are collaborating at such a distance. They only have a week or two to translate everything- their teacher has them under a tight deadline. The Italian professor said that if they can’t translate under her deadline then they are not made to be a translator. I was worried they would run into more trouble with the English version, but seems that they have words that coincide with our language. I imagine other students aren’t as lucky, but hopefully they can overcome the obstacles.

I am in the process of emailing back and forth with my Italian translators. I have sent away my PDF file for my other COM class, and hopefully things will be smooth. One of the girls on the team has already friended me on Facebook, I am interested if other tools such as Elluminate of Slideshare will work as a collaborating tool (hopefully these tools are available in Italy!). I will not be able to attend tonights Elluminate meeting, but I have kept up with the posted slides and discussion agendas. A good family friend is in the hospital suffering from brain cancer- so that is where we are headed in a bit.

But…some of my posts/comments are under either Betsy or Mary- some of the comments I left were to be entered with a password. Some of them I had to choose Google to leave me email or something and that is why my name sometimes shows up differently- why? I don;t really know and it probably confuses some people. Hopefully they accept them!

The third Elluminate meeting still does not coincide with my schedule! I am angry that this is something useful and new and I am missing out on it! But anyways, this is a great collaborative tool that will allow my classmates and I to communicate with the Italian students, hopefully this is something that they can download and use with us. On top of the project my other class requires us to evaluate some tools such as Elluminate and skype. So this should be interesting. There are so many more pros than cons already, and I cannot wait to see if it will work as well as it seems from someone on the other end (in Italy).

Another tool I remember using from high school that I know some people at SUNY have used is called www.turnitin.com. This allows you to submit an essay and have it checked for plagiarism. If it catches something within your paper it will turn up red and tell you what is wrong with it. It will sometimes tell you that a sentence was found and that it was by this author and that it was not cited correctly or at all. It is a useful tool just because paraphrasing isn’t always the best way to form sentences. Thought I would share this since we are all getting ready for our final paper!

Editing tool

So finally I have heard great things from a tool! I’m glad to hear that people were interested in the November 7th meeting. Unfortunately, my schedule does not match everyone elses, I find it inconvenient that it has to take place on the weekends, and on top of that early in the morning. I am in the process of looking over the information posted on Elluminate, and obviously won’t be able to take part in this weekend’s meeting. November 14 is my father’s birthday and my second week of work. I am finally working!! I will keep up with the posting information and comments people have in the emails. This will be a great tool to use in the project I discussed previously when communicating with the Italian translation students.

For my COM495 class, we have been preparing some texts that will be translated into Italian by Italian translator students. The project itself is to create a brochure of a specific place, mine being the Strawbery Banke Museum of Portsmouth, NH and make it for tourists. The brochure itself is not to be translated. The other part of the project is to create a feature article that reflects those from the popular traveler magazine Conde Nast. The feature article I chose to do is on a museum within the Strawbery Banke. This part of the project is a bit tricky- having to keep up with the status of the magazine and the readers itself is difficult, but also trying to create text that will keep the readers interested and wanting to visit the place is also tricky. It’s hard to create something that will interest and inform someone that has no idea what you are talking about, but without “dumbing it down” so to say. You don’t want to write things that are obvious in our sense, but is foreign to others.

For one of the last assignments for comparing citation tools on-line, I came across one that I hadn’t used or heard of before. It actually seems to be one of the best I have found, too bad I didn’t see it before, because it is very useful. The website is called “BibMe,” maybe some of you have used it, I was very impressed with it. It allows you to search within whatever type of resource you are trying to cite, but it allows you to search first by author or title of whatever source type. If you choose to search by author/title, it then brings up a list of relevant sources and then you are able to choose the one you want. If your match does not come up, you are then able to complete the information on your own by filling out the correct citation information. As I was filling out my list of resources for the assignment I used BibMe and for most of my sources, I just typed in the name of the titles, and to my surprise more than half showed up. After choosing the correct source from the list, all of the information about the author, publication info, and anything else is already filled out for you. You just look it over and DONE! The first time I did this it was in the MLA format, which you can change by simply clicking the APA format underneath the list of sources in your saved bib section. I did however, have to type in some of the information because there was no match, but no biggie. I tried using the citation machine, but compared to BibMe, it was no competition. Having to always type in the information can be a disaster, misspelled words, punctuation mistakes and whatever else can really screw up your citations. That’s why I prefer using the BibMe website. I don’t really have anything bad to say about BibMe…another thing I did like was that you can type in all the information you want and it will save all of your citations in a bib format on the right hand side. So after completing everything you can just copy and paste to your word processor. Try it out, it works really well!

So, I tried skyping for the first time last week. I had downloaded skype but didn’t get the full effect until talking with people on the other end. I didn’t have any contacts previously so I never got the chance to actually use it. Skype was what I expected, personally I do not care for the application. I can see why using it for business reasons when people are far away use it, while it is free it allows you to speak and see the other person and you don’t have to worry about a high cell phone bill. I also like how you can multitask while skyping, I did like however, the fact that you can chat without being visable to the people you chat with. I had to skype my group around 8am which is wicked early for me so those of you I chatted with were saved from seeing my morning zombie-like self. Anyways, the downside of skype was that my group and I were cut off at certain points. The fact that you don’t know who’s going to speak at what time and getting a ‘dropped’ call makes me think that skype is not always reliable, especially if each person has a different type of internet connection. While it was somewhat easy to talk with people in a group, I would not go to skype if it weren’t for this class. I think the negative outweighed the positive in my experience. Hopefully some of you think otherwise. I will say that it was nice to hear people rather than reading what they have to say- that saved time.

People that know me usually know that I do have a cell phone, BUT I prefer to text over speaking on the phone. I guess I am not the only one, I had asked a few of my closest friends, and they too agree that texting is better than actually speaking to the person. Of course there are going to be people that disagree, which is fine- whatever works for you!…I just like the idea of texting someone when I want, no need for phone tag! I hate doing that. I think texting is also appealing because while doing it you are able to multitask, well at least me. Being on the phone you have to focus on whoever you are speaking with and that alone is time consuming, and then the other person always wants to chat about nonsense things…as if we have the time here people! I am not just a 3 word texter either, so don’t think that I carry on long text conversations either, I get to the point! My point is, texting is more convenient- your phone allows you to see that your message has been sent and delivered to your recipient. It is also convenient to do while in busy settings where you would normally not be able to hear whoever is on the end of the line as well as being in places that normally you would not be able to talk such as offices and work. So what do you think? Is texting all its cracked up to be or is it another phase?

So for homework assignment 6, I read the articles that were posted about the politicians taking on the internet for their campaigns and whatnot. I found it pretty interesting. So for my essay I compared 2 of Jankowski’s posted articles to the other 2 articles. The latter 2 articles explained how politics is changing overall, how the generations that are involved with politics are changing. Same goes with the internet, it is always changing and the generation of the internet is also changing. Change is a good thing…? Right. It is. Even for politicians such as OBAMA and Bush. From the article I gathered reasons why these political websites have come about and how it was done. Campaign sites as well as other numerous sites offer information to the public, anything they would need or want to know about the candidates, the voting process, the election in general as well as posting some speeches or related articles. On the other hand the 2 articles Jankowski added to, were more of reasons why a politician would want to create a website. So for the first it was mainly trying to accommodate the user or the public to general information; this information is posted so that the user is in control of finding out whatever they seek from the internet. From the politicians stand, they put out information on websites to gain support, spread information about themselves that is otherwise botched from what other media such as reporters for tv and radio might say. They also put information out there that will try and initiate any potential voter to help within the election process, such as volunteer work, donations and benefits. So, do these sites exist for the public or the politician- who gains more out of the websites?