My Blog For 211

https://pixabay.com/p-1173935/?no_redirect This fall was my first semester in the ESOC major. Prior to this semester, I had ever taken a class that focused on collaboration. As the semester went on, I realized that there was so much about the act of collaborating that I simply was not skilled in. A topic we discussed this semester that I found to be the most helpful was the Tuckman's five stages of group development . Even though in my entire school career I have always had to do group projects, I suppose I had never bothered to actually think how the groups came together and worked towards the best outcome. Now that I am fully able to understand each of the five stages of group development, I can keep them in the back of my mind in future collaborations to help me through those projects. This semester, my ability to simply just write has also improved probably due to these blogging assignments. Before this class, I had always had issue with not being able to write enough on sch...

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...