Final blog

Through the class I feel like I have grown as a learner and as a collaborator. Through the beginning of the semester we had to group up with people, all of which I've never met before in order to complete a central goal. Through this it teaches us how to collaborate face to face as well as collaborate through online means for the larger group projects. I learned many concepts about collaboration and how to work well in teams through our group work. I found some concepts very fascinating, during my 2nd blog I was talking about the tuckman stages and I focused a lot on storming. The idea of this stage being where more conflicts arise, this stage has the group start to understand hierarchy if you will. That phase is important for a strong team to form, everyone needs to be comfortable with each other and be able to give real input towards their goals. From my 6th blog I discussed how social medias allow the people to spread a message instead of only large corporations being able too. We can spread a message through social medias using powerful tools like hashtags in order to get ones ideas out to the world. And with these tools the information is together so it in a sense aggregates information together. From my week 11 blog we talked about spreadibility and stickiness and I used the Cleveland shooter as an example of stickiness due to how it cycled through twitter and all over social medias. It got placed in places where people could easily see it and through that it gets passed around from person to person. However like Eve mentioned in her post that twitter hashtags have the potential to either fail or be used for not its intended purpose. While hijacking a hashtag can technically be a constructive thing it is still a possibility that things could go wrong. I'l like to address a blog post from Miros where he talked about group projects and how people think over grades differently. In our class we talked about how a group has a goal, its a goal that everyone has which does kinda argue the individuality of the goal. I think that since the group needs teamwork that if a person is not overly concerned with their own grade they should contribute for the sake of the group and for their goal. Finally with collaboration we are able to create new things, as wyatt said in his post about rappers, they do sample other works in order to create something of their own. I think the use of others works (if credit is given) should be acceptable if the new product is something new.

Week 12

This week we finished up our group project including the filming. During this time we had the chance to understand spread ability and stickiness. I think that stickiness is still very important in the realms of spreadable medias. While it is more of a forced way to spread ideas around it does help spread information out to the world and get messages across. It is easy to get everywhere due to the nature of stickiness. An analogy we had for this was that it was like a cactus and it just gets stuck to you if you go by it. While this week was relatively mellow I find that this concept was confusing. What was a good way for you guys to remember the difference between stickiness and spread ability?

Week 5 Blog

This week on Thursday we did not have class but we did have an article on aggregation and about the failed attempt of the new york police to reach out to the community and strengthen their relationship with the people.

The readings along with the video from Class show off the situation with this hashtag, and it was rather interesting how it ended up this way. You start with a good idea, a way for the NYPD to branch out to the people that they serve in order to be closer to their community. Then you open a platform for people to bring about the issues with the NYPD as well as corruption and brings a lot of this to the surface. Many of the things were police abuse, or what looked like police abuse (stated that some actions were perfectly legal but they just look "brutal") but its still worrisome. So weaker form of collaboration was used since people were using the hashtag to communicate and connect, aggregation because people brought sources that were not intended to be used for this hashtag. Its just interesting to see how something with such good intention gets hijacked so easily.

As a last note this lead to larger groups using this hashtag to spread their activism, a tweeter did use this opportunity to talk about the Ferguson issue as well as other racial issues, not just the nypd. Interesting to see how something with this sort of core can branch out and spread so far to be used for something completely unintended.

Week 11

We had a relatively relaxed week not having class on Thursday but we had to read over the Spreadable media article and discuss it with our groups online. The idea that media now a days is very easy to spread I find to be very beneficial for people to stay up to date with important things that are occurring. I am active on twitter and online communities so I have friends all over the U.S and spreadable media keeps me informed of the ins and outs of what goes on. Stickiness of media is how something causes deeper engagement for a kind of media, and through twitter I was able to follow a crime in Cleveland where I have a friend. I was worried about his safety and through this I was able to keep up to date with what was happening with this very scary situation that has been dealt with. On a lighter note our group is planning out our project and we are making progress, for those curious here is a link for the crime for the Cleveland Shooter

Week 10 blog

During the week we had to learn how to make / edit pages on Wikipedia. Wikipedia being a very important collaborations tool, information is gathered by many users and brought together to give people (mostly) accurate information about a topic. My group decided to edit Baby Furniture which was a pretty random topic but there was plenty of things for us to look up and add to this preexisting page. While I found that the training modules were somewhat tedious it was useful especially for making links. Good collaboration can keep sources of information like wikipedia safe, I have seen my fair share of pages that have been tampered or outright wrong (either by people messing around for by a potential typo) and the ability to be able to help keep things in order keeps it healthy. What is your thoughts on Wikipedia? Do you think that it is a good way to have information? Do you think its good to allow anyone to change it?

week 9?

I missed a few of these posts but I think I have the right day for it, anyways this week we had a guest speaker who discussed with us the differences in diversity in jobs in different areas. There is noticeable differences in both gender and ethnicity in the data that our guest speaker provided, which I found rather interesting. Is there really a reason why this would occur? I know that we discussed reasons for this occurrence, how jobs with generally more chances for creative thinking to be involved have a greater amount of diversity. And with diversity does come new ideas that can branch off to something amazing, and with everyone having synergy and working together it allows for better outcomes. Which leads to why would diversity be so low in other areas, sure theres less chance for creativity but the numbers are very drastically lower that it is concerning. Why do you think theres such a split and what do you think can be done to lower this?

Week 7

We did presentations this week. Everyone did a fantastic job with their websites and their timelines and we covered a nice variety of topics, each was diverse so every presentation felt pretty unique. I found the presentation about the cams on police to be a very interesting topic. That is a huge issue with law enforcement that they have these incidents that lead to harm of the innocent people that they have vowed to protect. And I find that the examples that they presented showed just how bad it can actually be. Its actually rather shocking when you think about it, how these people who are supposed to protect us could be more dangerous than the real issues at hand. I enjoyed every presentation but think that topic jumped out at me a little more than the rest did. Overall this was a very mellow week, we just presented and prepared for our midterm. I'm a little iffy on some of the ideals of Tufecki but its something I've had to read up on to understand a little better. I hope everyone does well on the exam, have a nice week guys.

Week 6 Blog

This week we were talking about hashtags and Tufecki claims. One claim I wanted to talk about was the first claim that Ted had a Ted talk about going over "Organizing without organizations" which was an idea that actually jumped out at me. The idea that we can organize without organizations meaning that we collaborate easily with users without the need of a large organization to do a lot of the work for us.


We dont need a large organization to form (as showed in class) to form a petition or make media content or other numerous things that we can use. So why exactly is this so important? We do not need the presence of a large organization to make a petition or a video, we have the capability to make these things and get them out to people very easily and very efficiently. Through say twitter, a person could make a petition and use twitter to spread the message, through this these people can share it out and it can spread over a large area very quickly.

I did not understand the idea around clicktivism and why it has no real effect over government or politics. I feel like with the first idea it would allow people to spread their ideals and even give another outlet for people trying to push for their ideals or running for office an easier time to get information out there. What do you all think?

Week 4

Our new unit started after we had our take home exam, finally starting unit 1 storming. We learned about reddit how sources like reddit are beneficial to many people as well as the zapatista movement. With the beginning of this unit we had to join groups and with this unit being called storming it reminds me of the Tuckman stages of storming

The Reddit article was very interesting to me because it shows the value in the internet and for communities that subreddits can harbor. The suicide prevention subreddit gives space for people to feel safe and able to speak freely. It shows the power that a community like this can have, the internet as a whole was able to protect itself from SOPA with reddit being a large platform for it.

Week 2 Blog

Week 2 of class was pretty interesting. We continued to do work in groups and explore different aspects of grouping.

I actually really liked the Tuckman stages of development portion that we worked on Thursday, so I decided to look into it a little more and try to understand it fully. At first when we were learning about it My first thought was that Storming was absolutely a bad thing to have during the grouping phase and I thought to myself "is there any good that can come out of the storming phase" and I came to a little conclusion about it using the readings, my ideas and from Boundless

From my understanding based off the two readings the storming phase is a time where the team begins to formulate ideas. There is a constant fear of acceptance, rejection, and consideration that causes tension between members. And on top of this there are can be conflicts with roles, who is to lead? who is to do what? as the reading from class uses as an example, is there a reward system? Due to this there can be less motivation and groups can even fall apart during this. So how could this be possibly good for a group?

I believe that groups become stronger when they can over come a conflict like this or when they can sort out roles. After roles can be finalized and everyone understands what they need to do, the groups goals and functions a group will be stronger than ever. As long as the group can surpass this part of the process and continue together then the rest of the Tuckman stages are very simple to do. It just requires patience.

Heres to week 3, hoping to learn about something else interesting and continue to work with everyone.

Week 1 Blog

Good afternoon folks,
I'm Caleb Smith, Junior here at the University of Arizona studying Business. I was born here in Tucson, Arizona however I travel to Maryland during the summer.

         Its a new year, 2017 and the world is changing. Our President uses social medias to keep in touch with the people and through social media we are able to connect with the world in a much easier manner than even just a few years ago. What may this be useful for? Communication and Collaboration. Communicating and collaborating aids in knowledge being shared as well as the ability to work with one another when you are far apart. From the reading "What is Collaboration Anyway" it discusses the different ways that collaboration is for filled through electronic means. Wikipedia is mentioned as a way that people collaborate, as well as aggregation. Information is added to an Article of wikipedia by the means of the people, and if information is pulled from areas that were not intended to be used in collaboration are aggregated for this sort of use (cited obviously).

       There are aspects of working together that we read about in the Tina Fey's Rules of Improvisation that I agree with fully, its a group effort to do something. You can't just not contribute during collaboration, you need to add to something and continue going along. Final little tidbit I'd like to mention about things we've learned in class was from the TedTalk and the digitization of books from his RECAPTCHAs. Its amazing how its possible to get all of these people to work towards immortalizing human knowledge, even if they do not know that they are helping. The power that the internet has given us can allow for some really amazing feats.

New year, new semester, it should be pretty interesting, looking forward to working with everyone and having an enjoyable class.

Caleb