Tutorial 3 & 4

From tutorial 3 and 4, I am able to have an in-depth knowledge about Twitter.  For example, Twitter is actually a combination of blog, social networking site, instant messaging tool and allows users to conveniently “tweet” about their daily happenings.  It enables users to be constantly connected with their friends and relatives and inform them about the activities around them, for example what have they encountered.  The case study also educates me about the disadvantages of using Twitter.  Some of which includes constantly checking the website for updates, which can be time-consuming and if we were to constantly check out the “tweets” of our friends, the SMS charges can accumulate rapidly, meaning that it may cause users to incur high phone bill charges.

Twitter enhances my learning of EIR, as my research topic requires me to have an in-depth knowledge about Twitter.  This is especially so, as during the first practical sessions, we were asked to create a Twitter account.  It is useful for my learning of EIR, as it is also a platform where I am able to ask for help from teachers, as I have became a “follower” of EIR’s Twitter page.  The teacher would post many inspirational quotes by famous people So, I am able to get answers to my queries almost instantly.   It fosters participation of students like me to write about our thoughts about Twitter.  The EIR teachers are also able to guide students through Twitter, which promotes interaction between students and teachers.  It also helps me in my learning, as it aids me to realize how twitter works and introduces me to a social networking cum blog site, which is what EIR is all about.  There is also Twitter activities which involves us to “tweet” our thoughts about one of the EIR lesson based on what we have learnt, allowing me to be updated with the latest technologies and trends to use such social tools to interact and learn from other classmates and even communicate with teachers. 

There is word limit of 140 when using Twitter.  On the other hand, blogspot allows me to type in as many words as possible.  This feature makes me think that blogspot is a better platform for students to write about their thoughts and feelings on EIR lessons.  If I were to use Twitter to write about the things that I have learnt during lessons would be very brief, as I would not be allowed to elaborate or give more examples about the week’s lesson.   This is due to the limitation of words that I can type (140), as compared to the boundless words that blogspot allows me to type.  Also, Twitter is also based on only one’s feelings on a particular topic, say on a disease, and mainly talks about how the patient is currently feeling etc, but would only have a brief explanation.  On a flip side,  blogspot would talk more about how it came about, the cures for the disease and perhaps the person’s daily meal, for example try not to take seafood etc. 

Also, from Ms Lian’s explanation on the week’s lecture slides, I have learnt that image-based and multimedia sources should have beautiful images accompanied with explanatory text.  A picture does not tell users more information about the picture of say, Japan, hence there should be text to describe more about the place, for example the location of the places of interest, how to get there etc.  Current awareness and alerting service requires users to subscribe to alerting services in particular to a topic that he or she likes to find out more about and this is a handy tool as it saves users the time to constantly check for latest updates.