My Blog For 211

https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7396/26769234963_d91e244520_b.jpg I remember the day I was first introduced to an online collaborative, but toxic community. My dad had finally decided that I was old enough to play videogames. I was thirteen and having played Halo at friends’ houses, I could not wait to have an Xbox for myself. Halo 3 was the first online game that I could play with my friends and communicate with strangers whom I would never meet in real life. It was a time where gaming in an online social space was relatively new still; toxicity amongst gamers was not a well-known issue in the gaming community. I have fond memories of having my teammates swearing and vulgarity being overheard on the speakers by my dad walking into the room. I can only imagine him second-guessing his decision to buy me an Xbox. I have no doubt that online gaming was where I first learned my extensive vocabulary of curse words. Only in the recent years have I really noticed game developers trying t...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Wikipedia_mini_globe_handheld.jpg             Wikipedia has always been a source of information that I do not use for school work because it is simply not allowed, but as a source of learning on my own because of how accessible and generally accurate the website is. However, I was never really informed on how the website actually accumulated its information. I knew that anyone could edit it, but that was about it. On Tuesday in our collaboration class, I learned that Wikipedia actually has editors that go over new information added to the site and will decide if it is valid or not, edit it, or delete it. We also learned that in the pat Wikipedia team of editors was accused of being very one sided in terms of its scope that its information is written about. For example, Wikipedia was once under fire from the press for having a team of editors mostly made up of white men. Any information we read will alwa...

https://pixabay.com/p-426895/?no_redirect This past Tuesday, in our ESOC class we discussed fake news as it was a term coined this past election and in my opinion overused. Although there was some validity to it being thrown around so much. I remember going home to my mother telling me something she saw on a news station and it seemed a bit odd to me, she would then show me multiple websites proving her point, but when I would do my own investigating on the story, I found multiple websites contradicting every "fact" she found. Basically, this past election it was so easy to see some up surd story and just believe it because of the masses of people also backing the story and not a single person actually act checking it. Personally Ive always been one to double check facts on the internet to make sure that they are true, I found it amazing how if a "news" story had support, no matter if it was true, then to the majority it just had to be true. This video made by C...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Black_Lives_Matter_Black_Friday_%2815742148387%29.jpg This weeks class discussions brought up an interesting question, do movements like Black Lives Matter, have a leader. Sure they have originators of the cause, but it does not seem like they have a sole leader who decides the every movement they do. If anything, it seems like social media, or even random groups of people control the groups rallies. Whenever these rallies occur, they are generally responding to an event that has occurred. In this case, most of the time it is unfortunately the death of a young black male in some very preventable way by a policemen. These rallies, generally are marching for the right reasons, however, they blow up so large, rightfully so, because of social media. Social media allows information about these events to spread across America in seconds. Essentially, any movements, such as the Black Lives Matter, would not be anywhere as large as it is t...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bagogames/26769234963 This week in class, we discussed gaming toxicity in the online social video games. For those of you that are unfamiliar, toxicity is essentially hatred, profanity, or slurring that occurs in online games from players to other players. A person is labeled as a toxic player when they display such behavior. I myself have been playing online games since high school such as Halo, Call of Duty, and more recently Overwatch. After years of being a decently invested gamer, I have seen many cases of toxicity displayed from other players, whether they be enemies calling you trash, or teammates calling you trash, lol. Sometimes on occasion there is a female playing and they experience toxicity on a daily basis. Gamers will take it so far as they will threaten female with rape and other disgusting acts. Now of course its all talking with the safety of the internet in between the players, so people feel like they can say anything they want and g...

This week during our collaboration class, we presented with groups our 1st projects. The goal of the project was to present Tuckman's five stages of group developement using a story to see how each stage of development occurred within the story. My group presented the five stages using the movie "School of Rock". Most groups used either a movie or a tv show to show the stages, and throughout the presentations, I felt that the most important stage out of all the stages was the adjourning stage. This is because adjourning is what allows the previous group members to go on in life, while keeping in mind what they learned from their group. Each member will then be better prepared for the next time that they collaborate because of their new findings from previous experience. Overall I feel that ever stage is important, but adjourning is the stage that prepares us for our future. Just how Dewey Finn was able to find a new career by finally deciding that maybe being a rock sta...