#week2reflection

Today we were talking about online tools, what is the most effective tool to use in order to complete our projects. I think that people in this world are curious human beings who always try new things, then they’ll decide how is it useful to them, they like it or not, others are using it or not, et cetera. Social media is one of the things they always try, because it’s free; and if you don’t like it, you can just delete your account with one click, or just let it be there.

Those who tried everything even took their times to explain social media one by one. Using the most perfect example, of course. Bacon.

(credit: ooolalina.tumblr.com)

Of course one’s preferences affect the online tools he/she uses. For example, I, myself have tried almost every social media available (facebook, twitter, youtube, tumblr, instagram, myspace,—I know, lame—and reddit) and I prefer twitter and tumblr more than facebook and the others since I don’t really like facebook and twitter and tumblr are the most interesting than the others. I’ve been using those since 2011.

Believe me, tumblr is a bit complicated, but once you understand, it’s addicting.

Oh, and who says tumblr doesn’t have a national anthem?

(credit: gingershanks.tumblr.com)

Diversity is a part of the world, even not as broad as the world, a group also has diversities among the members. Different preferences led to a discussion about which social media is the most effective and the discussion itself will lead to a conclusion. My group has decided to use facebook to communicate and even though I don’t like facebook, but I must say that it is the most effective of all when it comes to sharing things. Democracy works.

Technology creates a network that expand togetherness, I’m conscious now that understanding the relations between technology and communities eliminate the chance of failure of stewardship. To create a relevant community I realise that I have to be able to spot what kind of social process that technology brings and understanding it.

   I remember the first online community I ever joined was called Hi5 which was about 9 years ago and shortly after I joined MySpace. I was using Hi5 primarily for chatting with friends and getting to know new people while MySpace was only a place I would go on for listening to music or finding some new bands that I might like. After a while I totally lost interest on both of those online community sites, lost interest on Hi5 because it became a place where only attention seeking people (extreme ones at that) gathered and I also stopped using MySpace as I found out it was way more efficient to find what I wanted to find on other websites.

   Then Facebook came out but I was (for some reason) entirely sure that it would end up like Hi5 so I refrained from creating an account there till 31st May of 2010. After I created an account I only went online just to chat with some of my friends and that was about it (anyone can tell how much I really used Facebook if he/she check out my photo albums with the profile photo being 4-5 years old and all the other photos I'm in where just uploaded from other people and I was just tagged in them).

When it comes to analysing my usage of social networks, I only really use one social network: Facebook. The reason for this is, I am not a huge fan of social networking, in my opinion it is a waste time especially when you look at the rubbish people normally communicate though Facebook at my age (18). I have never understood the popular online culture of Blogging and updating your status with every little detail of your life; I personally don’t care you saw a cute cat, or you just bought a tin of baked beans. There is a limit!

            Contradictory to the statement above I do still update my profile and status however not with every detail and only if I feel people would want to know. So I primary update my status if I achieved or discover something I feel friends and family would like to hear about. For example my old rugby club asked me to keep them up to date with my ‘international career’ and my family asked for updates about school and life etcetera.

But the main function I use Facebook for, is as an organisational tool, it makes it so easy to organise an event whether it is a one off event: I can quickly invite everyone, set a time, a location and discuss any problems and other possibilities with everyone at the same time. Or weekly occurrences like my rugby. Being a member the rugby Facebook group allows me to easily find out match times and location, training sessions and social events. The club officials also upload game photos and match reports which I can easily share.

I also use Facebook for commercial reasons, every summer I run a small Inflatable games company in England, Hertfordshire; BonsterBash I recently made a Facebook page and website (www.bonsterbash.co.uk) to make myself more accessible to the public without having to pay for “real” advertisement. For me Facebook provides “Word of mouth” advertising which is perfect for small companies operating in a local area.

When it comes to further exploring online communities I don’t personally have any real interest, although it its interesting to know how they operate. I prefer to communicate and network in person or email, apposed to a Skype calling, twittering and blogging.

All forums and other content based websites thrive on people submitting and creating their own content. It takes special people that spend more time creating content then viewing it to keep these communities alive. On one website that I am active on releases data on their web traffic for their users and it is always surprising to read. They normally average around 90% of comments and posts to around 10% of their total page views. The website receives around 200,000 page views a day, which means that their content is generated in 20,000 page views is enough to keep the other 180,000 people coming back. This clearly shows the producer/harvester mentality of people in online social communities.

I am a harvester; I scour the internet daily for random tidbits of information and rarely produce my own content. The one exception is the website I mentioned in the above paragraph. I have been a member since 2009 and read through and post on most days. No other social community has the same effect on my posting habits. To try to change this, I decided to finally try to start posting and contributing to probably my most visited online community; Reddit.com.

(I’m apologize for the late post, problem with OBA’s WiFi connection.)

"Think about your own networks."

Wait… what? Which networks? Well, I have Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, DeviantArt, Skype, WhatsApp, Viber.. But wait, can we also consider Skype or Viber as ‘network’? (They’re officially software or application, but since I use them to interact with people, not only family but also, friends, colleagues etc., they can also be called MY network, can’t they?)

     Nowadays, it’s hard to define a ‘network’. It can be everything as long as it involves interactions between its users. In my opinion, I used to consider Skype or WhatsApp as informal networks in regard to social learning. Categorizing them as ‘real’ networks seems to be a bad idea. But after doing some research about the real definition of ‘network’, and also what differentiates it with ‘community’, I came up to the conclusion that applications such as Skype or WhatsApp connect the users and therefore can be called ‘network’.

·  The network aspect refers to the set of relationships, personal interactions, and connections among participants, viewed as a set of nodes and links, with its affordances for information flows and helpful linkages.

·  The community aspect refers to the development of a shared identity around a topic that represents a collective intention—however tacit and distributed—to steward a domain of knowledge and to sustain learning about it.

(source: http://wenger-trayner.com/resources/communities-versus-networks/)

     No one can deny the importance of these networks. They can be used either for individual usage (for example: research, self-study, harvest information), either for collaborative usage (group research, interaction with group members, document sharing).

     Personally, I equally use them for both usages. I used Facebook as one of my personal network and also belong to some groups on Facebook, mostly used for updating group works and adding some group files. It’s even harder to set the limit between individual and collaborative usage since the most influential social networks like Facebook or Twitter are emerging to become a ‘new’ tool for collaborative work thanks to its easy-to-reach, useful aspect (for example, file uploading files on Facebook). So, it might be a really good idea to merely work on one online space like Asana or Basecamp for the group work.

     Speaking about the most valuable, I would say that the usage of networks for collaborative works is way more valuable than individual usage. We can’t really call it ‘network’ if it’s limited to personal information harvesting, if there’s no linkage between people, if it provides no interaction between users. 

     Finally, the new area that I would like to explore by experiencing with my online networks is Business. I would really love to use my online networks for the business usage. But since I couldn’t currently ‘jump’ into this, I did some research about tools that might be helpful for my future plan to explore this new area. This is also one of my group tasks: doing a research about an application called Zoho. This application looks great for the business intention: it provides the website building and is useful to run our own business processes, manage the information and be more productive!

I’m looking forward to exploring this platform in the future; it is unfortunately not free for now!

  Kiva

This week my personal goal was to explore the investment application of online communities, the website I chose to explore was Kiva.org. The reason I chose Kiva was because it stood out from the rest of the online investment communities, as it was neither a charity nor a business, but a mixture of both. Kiva grants people in poorer parts of the world the chance to apply for a loan; since banks will not loan because the person taking out the loan could not grantee or mortgage their property.

            Kiva relies not on donations, but people’s good will to support unsecure loans by temporary donating funds and although the lender has no grantee of repayment and does not gain any interest on there loan. They can take confidence in the statistics: 98.98% of all loans are fully repaid which is very good considering that they have lent to over 869,627 people. In addition to the obvious reason which is, your money is helping people! And what makes Kiva so great is once your loan is repaid, the same money you originally lent can now be reused to help someone else at no extra cost to you!

            History

Kiva first officially became an organization in October 2005, however the origins of Kiva started a year earlier in April when Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley started work on a new initiative called Kiva their goal was to create a means for poverty stricken parts of the world to access an unsecure loan inventing a whole new approach to charity: instead of blindly throwing money at a poverty in the hope the money will used wisely by loaning the money the person taking out the loan will have to do their best to insure its repaid, this means they will make the most of the loan in order to produce the greatest return.

 Their first success was took place in April the following year. The first 7 Kiva loans totalling $3,500 were issued and by September successfully repaid this success resulted in Kiva being founded as a non-profit organization. Kiva then grow rapidly and by November 2006 they had lent over one million US dollars, in 2007 they received the Draper Richards Foundation award of $300,000 on top of this they then gained a further $250,000 from donations/lenders as a result of a New York times columnist who generated mass publicity from his article about Kiva. 2008 proved an even more prosperous year as they were awarded the three-year $1,015,000 Skoll award for social Entrepreneurship. By 2010 Kiva had lent over $100 million in loans and continues to grow. Recent years Kiva has also began to fund and assist other like non-profit organisation.

But the problem from those times, which phones and online societies solved is that if people didn't make an appointment before and they wanted to see someone the only thing they could do was to go to visit him without any guarantee that he will be at home (terrible if someone had friends in other cities), so they aren't so bad after all.