Test

EIR Closure

I had learnt a lot in from EIR. All those are useful skills that will accompany me the rest of my life. To me, the most important lesson is using search facilities to do my research. I was taught on how to use Boolean operators to narrow and focus on what I am searching on. It will certainly produce better searching result. In the past, I used to get lots of results and most of them are not relevant to what I am searching on. That also led to me hating to do research since I always cannot get the relevant result that I want. However after this lesson, I had gotten much lesser results of higher relevancy. I will strongly recommend this subject to my other friends when they are choosing their CDS as it will certainly help them.

Reflection for Day 7

Well, today we had another test early in the morning. However I am quite disappointed that I had done badly for the test. At the same time I feel that the questions are tougher this time around. The options are quite near and hence I had trouble pointing out the correct answer. With this test, it will be the end of all the lectures. Lastly I had survived the whole of EIR.

We were told to participate in wiki. The wiki that we use is a freeware from http://eir-rawkz.wetpaint.com/. However after using it for a while, I realized that it is not very useful. The reason being that too many people are editing it at the same time; hence there is a different in the version of the text. It results in error when saving. Because of that I didn't managed to include what I want to add until the end of the lesson and at home. When I was about to add in my information, I realized that the amount of content is already quite a lot. Therefore I didn't have much to add on other than correcting certain mistake that I notice and also to include a few more points. Even then, I had a great experience in collaborating and sharing on the topic of Ethics using Social Networking Services. For examples, we share about the basic ethics of using social networking services such as not spamming and to respect other. I think that is pretty much common sense. You won't like it if people come spamming at you, so do not do that to someone else. Other than that, respecting other is also very important. We should not defame people especially if the new is not the truth. It will only bring about hate. Racism on the Internet such as blog is also a serious offence as Singapore is a multi-racial country. The authority will not allow people to spread or talk bad about another race. One person had been jailed for doing so as he shown sign of racism in his post blog.

From the activity, I understand about community spirit. The community spirit within our class can be strongly felt. In just a short moment after we even given the instruction to start researching for the content of wiki, many information and resources had appeared on the wiki. That is also sharing of knowledge within the community. Although I don't have much content to add on, I did edit part of the content and added some extra content to make it even better. It is always good to share knowledge than keeping it to yourself. I think that all this is impossible if there isn't any community spirit.

I may consider using wiki for research in my own Diplomas. The reason is that wiki enable a group of people to easily collaborate large amount of information together. From the activity, I can conclude that using the usual manual method of compiling information, it will take a very long time. Hence this also saves quite a lot of our time.

With this last reflection, it marks the end of EIR. I had learnt and done a lot of work in the past few days. Nevertheless I still enjoy this subject a lot other than having to complete lots of work within such a short period of time. Indeed this is the fastest pace of subject ever. I am surprise at time that we had done and learnt so much in such a short period of time. I had also been blogging almost every day for the past one week. It surely is a pleasant experience doing so and I enjoy doing it.

Tomorrow will be the last and final day of EIR. By then had to finish our final portfolio which is due for submission. Even though my portfolio look quite completed, but I still feel that more can be done to improve it yet I have no idea what to include making it better. There is also a short presentation tomorrow which is graded. The presentation is for us to talk about our experience that we had during the past few days. However I don’t seem to have much to talk about. I just know what I learnt a lot of useful skills that I can apply it in the future. Lastly I certainly hope that this will not be my last post in this blog. Can anyone give me the motivation to continue blogging even after EIR is over?

Reflection for Day 6

Today we mainly touch on the topic of evaluation of internet resources. Having so much information, websites and articles on the internet we are often spoil by the numbers of resources. However not all the resources are useful and accurate. Therefore we need to do something to make sure that the content that we are going to use is useful and accurate. The way to do it is to evaluate the internet resource. It is mainly evaluated based on a few factors. The factors are as followed: purpose, coverage, authority, accuracy, currency, accessibility, presentation and arrangement, overall. The most important factor is overall. That is because in general the website must be easy to use; provide readers with detail that are trustable.

After learning that are the factors for evaluating the internet resources. We had to evaluate one of the resources that we had searched for last week. From the activity, I realize that it is not easy evaluating the content that we got because there are just too many factors to consider. That is part of the portfolio that we had to submit at the end of the subject. Although I had done much for the report for the portfolio, I will still continue to edit it to make sure that it is better. After doing that, we had another small activity which is “My Dream Holiday”. I will not talk about it in this post since I had already explain on that in the previous post. The great thing about this activity is that there are not restricted amount of money to spend on.



The last activity for the day is to discuss on YouTube. YouTube is a video sharing website which had gain popularity since it started out. It is actually just a video sharing tools between a small group of students for their project work. However the students realize that it is such a good tools that they expand it and bring it to the internet. It has grown over the years with millions of video on it now. Google bought YouTube over because YouTube is simply too popular with the people and Google with a large database is able to let it grow. Now YouTube contains lots of different types of video. It includes education, advertisements, tutorials, MTV and many others. Education videos are very useful as it allow the viewers such as students to learn some facts. While companies put up advertisements to promote their products. More companies are doing so because the viewers and traffics of YouTube are very high. Doing advertisements on YouTube is also much cheaper than using tradition media such as television and newspapers.

I usually go to YouTube when my friends refer me to a certain interesting video or to see some MTV. Other than that I use it to find tutorial on how to do certain things. However before I try out the solution that is in the video, I will often look at the comment given to that video. I certainly do not wish to screw up what I am trying to do. Those comment also help me make judgment on whether will I use the video. Therefore I don't use YouTube very often. My life will still go on as per normal even if there isn't YouTube in the future. I am sure if one day when there isn’t YouTube or YouTube isn't as popular as now. I think there will be a few reasons. One of the reasons would be that there is something that is better than the current YouTube that attract the people. If that is the case, it will be better in the sense that there is new technology or more creative ways of sharing video. The other reason is that Google suddenly want to charge the viewers for viewing the video. Anything that cost money will definitely turn people off.

The main purpose of YouTube now is to entertain the viewers. However there are also video which has research content that are useful to research. I would think that whether the video can be use for research will largely depend on the given topic. I don't think that there will be video n impact of youth using internet social network on YouTube. I would think that it is very difficult to do research using YouTube because most of the video have very little text or no text. Just video alone is not enough for a proper research. I guess the only way to do research based on video is to view the video and then try to translate into text. Other than that i couldn't think of anymore ways to use YouTube for research purposes.

When we were discussing on what are the factors that lead to the extreme popularity of YouTube and we discovery many facts. Such as it is free, includes lots of videos, user-friendly. However lots of video is also part of the downsides as having too many videos make it tough for the moderators to control the type of content available. This result in many useless and pointless videos that are upload for the sake of uploading. It only wastes the viewers’ time and bandwidths. That is not very responsible of the uploadeder. Some even posts fights or riots and that result in certain countries blocking YouTube. I think blocking YouTube as a whole country is pointless since people still can access it via open proxy. For now I strongly believe that YouTube will still continue to grow in the years to go unless there is something big and attracting the people to other site for video. Otherwise Google wouldn't have bought over it for billion of dollars.

“My Dream Holiday”

My destination for my dream holiday will be Hong Kong. The reason is that I had never been there before and I can visit my friend who is living there. I often heard that Hong Kong is very similar to Singapore and I want to see the similarity by myself instead of just hearing what other had said. I often watch drama from Hong Kong hence from the drama I heard about names of some famous or popular street. However I never had to chance to visit them personally. This would be a good chance for me to do so. A visit to Ocean Park and Disneyland would be great. Although I know that the Disneyland in Hong Kong is not as great as those in Japan, it is still a must go attraction.

Since Hong Kong population is mainly Chinese, language will not be a problem and I can understand simple Cantonese as I always watched Hong Kong's drama. It not a good idea to go somewhere when you even has problem communicating with the people there.

I had gathered some of information regarding Hong Kong from Hong Kong Tourism Board. However before using the information from there, I would have to evaluate it to see if the content are trustable in order not to mess up my dream holiday.

For this website, I will evaluate it based on purpose, coverage and usability.

The aim of the website is stated very clearly. The purpose of Hong Kong Tourism Board is to market and promote Hong Kong as a travel destination worldwide and to enhance visitors' experience once they arrive. It is an official website by the government of Hong Kong. Hence the information of this website should be pretty accurate. I am sure the government will not want to give inaccurate information and turn potential tourists away.


The coverage of this website is mainly on the places and attractions that the tourists can go. It is very comprehensive. An example is that it provides very detail information on the tour that it has. Example of details is the pricing and duration of tours. Specific telephone number and website link are also given to provide tourists with extra help should they need it.

The usability of this website is very high. The navigation bar on the left is simple and easy to use. Users don't have to be tech-savvy to use it. It will not attract potential tourists if getting around the website is tedious task.

In general, I will think that this website is great for those who are doing their planning before going to Hong Kong. It will help the tourists to do their planning even before stepping their feet on the land of Hong Kong.

Reflection for Day 5

Today is a very short day with just only three hours of lesson before we head home. Weekend is approaching.

Early in the morning we had our test. I am glad I don't have to redo the test because after I pressed the Submit button, the browser cannot load the result page. Thankfully the result still went into the system. I scored 16 out of 20 and I think it was badly done. I could have done much better if I remember some of the facts. I must do better in the next up-coming test in order for me to score well for this subject. Well at least after the test, my mind is off-loaded with content from lecture 1 - 5.

We did something more relaxing after the test. We visited talkingcock.com. I remembered that I once visited this website years ago when my friend introduction it to me. At first I am very shocked on why this is allow in Singaporean. It was part of the practical. We were supposed to evaluate by website. The class was split into three groups and each group will add as a role. There are three roles which is Singaporeans, Foreigner and lastly Prime Minister. My group was given the role of Prime Minister. We did have fun being the Prime Minister for a few minutes. There are many articles in talkingcock.com that are mainly targeted at the Singapore Government. I believe that if the members of government seen it, they will be very angry. However as a Singaporeans myself, I know that what is in the website sound quite true. It represent the feeling and though of the citizen of Singapore. That is why I think that there are some uses of this website. For example if the Prime Minister read the website, he will know how a typical Singaporean will feel. For example when the people complain about the traffic jam, (Electronic Road Pricing) ERP is being put up to solve the problem. However with the ERP, the users will have to spend more money on the road. Even though the problem is solved in this case, not everyone is happy especially those people that are from lower and middle income group. The upper income group will not feel that pinch of having to pay the extra few dollars to travel faster. I would rather paid a few extra dollars than to be stuck on the road wasting time. For me, if the issue on the internet is not too serious, I think that it should be allowed going on. Otherwise we will have less local content. We should be more open-minded.

Some Singaporeans will think that this website is very good because it uses mainly Singlish and not properly English. Singlish is very common in Singapore especially at places such as coffee shop. Some of the less educated Singaporeans usually communicate with such language hence their English never improve over the years. However if too much Singlish is used, it will be a disadvantage because foreigner usually does not understand Singlish which is a mix of many different other languages. Some of the Singaporeans also agree that the website represent their voices. What would the foreigners think of Singapore when they see that? Some might think negatively even though some will still think positively.

Foreigners tend to have many different views on this website. If such website is very common in their own country, they will not think too much about i. Some countries are already more open-minded then Singapore. However if the article is being targeted at a certain country, those foreigners from that country will be the unhappy one and also get angry over it. Not only that, they might start a conflict with us, Singapore. To reduce such problem, there are laws that will punish those that write article which will start a conflict to break out. However the internet is so big, it is not possible to track and see all the websites since the number of websites can be a lot. There is not enough manpower to do so.

Lastly as the Prime Minister, I think it is better not to ban the website as we should let the people have some free space and also freedom to write whatever they want. We can also know how to people feels toward a particular policy. Most Singaporeans does not add to point out their unhappiness on the government in public for fear of getting into trouble. A ban should only be done if it is too serious and will greatly change the views of the people. The foreigners claimed that Singaporean needs them as they are considered foreigners talents and that we must respect them. I think that is not completely right, although we do need to respect them. However I think that they also need us. Example will be the bus driver. There are an increasing number of bus drivers that are from China. However they didn't know that they can never get the salary that they get here in China. Furthermore with some many people in China, graduates have problems finding a job. Even if they found, they paid will most likely be lower than in Singapore. Hence this is an interconnected world; no single country can survive on alone.

Reflection for Day 4

Once again I had survived another seven hours of lesson. Today we started off by doing our report. It was not a good start because I was stuck as soon as I touched on the introduction. It is easy writing report however it is not easy to write a report that can get a good grade. I had encountered some other problems as I continued writing. It seems that my brief description and analysis of the various search facilities are being mixed together. I also couldn't analysis much on the part for Meta Search Engine because that is very similar to Search Engine. I even realized that I keep repeating the same things over and over again in different sections of the report. Furthermore the different between Search Engine and Meta Search Engine is very similar and that made comparison much tougher. I am going to continue improving on the report to make it better.

After finishing the report, we went on and proceed with another activity and that is participating in forum discussion. As I had said in the previous post, I am not new to forum and I do enjoy participating in forum especially on topics that I have knowledge in. In that way, I will be able to share my knowledge with the rest of the community. Sharing knowledge is important because we should not keep it to ourselves. If we share it with people, people might comment or improve on it. In that way, we will also improve. It is just like talking to people other than that you are behind a computer screen. I always like to listen to people chat or join in the chat. It is very enriching to do so. I often learn and gain experience while being engaged in a chat. Sometime I will choose not to speak and listen carefully to those that are speaking. This explains why I hardly talk and some people do notice and ask me why I didn’t talk more. It is not that I am shy; it is just that I choose to listen more and talk less.

At one point of time, we seem to lose control and started spamming the forum with replies that are rubbish. Even then, I think that we were all having fun and chilling out from the serious work that we had much earlier. After all this activity of participating in discussion forum is to let us use the forum just in case that some people never visit forums before and hence it should be fun. Given the format and look of this forum, it does not even seem to look like a forum. The interface is completely different from the usual forum that we see and use. To see all the reply, we had to click manually using the "next" button and because of this it is not user-friendly. Lot of time is needed to browse through all the replies. It not a major problem when the number of replies is small. Having a real forum within the e-portal is not very efficient as not much people will use and it will cost lot of money to have one, therefore I think that it is alright that it is not user-friendly. I believe that in the further it will be improve as technology is getting better each time. With that the cost of running a forum will be lower.

And I also need to study for tomorrow test.

Reflection for Day 3 Part 2

Based on what I had done in class and at home for the past few days, I will think that invisible web (database) is not more effective than other types of search facilities. In fact I did not even manage to find any result that is relevant to what I am looking for. For my topic I will still prefer to use Google Search as there are more related articles on the internet. Maybe in the future, there will be more materials related to this topic in the invisible web since internet social network services will continue to grow. Most youths like us use the social network services in one way or another. I believe that people will start to conduct research on that since social network will bound to create some social issues. The database for invisible web is considered quite small and it does not include the very recent articles.

The TP's Databases: ITRO also generated no result for my topic and I am not surprise with that. I believe that the reason is the same as what I had already given above. From what I had gathered from my friends, they are also facing the same problem when using the TP's Databases. I am not saying that the databases are not good; it is just that there is no data on the topic. Furthermore since those databases are compiled by humans, it will take some time before the administrator of the databases add in the newer data.

I think I will use the invisible web (databases) for research in my own respective Diplomas. The reason is that in my respective Diplomas, the research topic should quite establish hence there will be more reports, articles and even books related what I am searching on. However as I had said earlier, it will be better if we attempt to use each different facilities for our search to increase the chances of getting better search result. The types of search facilities to use largely depend on the given topics.

For this topic of internet social network, I will prefer to use Google Search Engine as it is more general and I don't really need to provide in-depth results. Furthermore more results are yield and they include forum posting. Invisible web is not able to include forum as part of their results because the information on a forum can be quite unstable. One example is the post that I had posted on yesterday on hardwarezone. The first person who replied to the post actually sort of scolded me for asking question. People on the forum also tend to bully new member. They are able to see whether the poster is new or not. When they see that you are a new member, they will try to say some nasty words. However I choose to remain unaffected by that because I had seen much of such cases. I am not at all surprise by the given replied, after all this is a Singapore-based forum. I also realise that the community in Singapore is considered as quite poor as compare to other countries. I wonder why that is so. Similar trends are also spotted in Singapore-based forum. But of course there are still some people that are giving constructive comments.


(To have a better view of the screenshot, please click on it to see the full size.)

Reflection for Day 3 Part 1

Well, after some serious work yesterday. I realized that many are looking quite dead maybe due to long hours of lessons. Nevertheless, we still have to gather our energy and go on. Today we continue to try out other types of search facilities such as Meta Search Engine and Subject Directory.

This is my first time using Meta Search Engine. It looks quite similar from regular search engine like Google. However it does not have it own database which Google has. That is why a Meta Search Engine will pull information from many other search engines. However I am amaze that even though it is searching from a few other main search engines, the results that are being generated are considered as low. I actually thought that I will be getting tons of result and I am wrong. I had used Yahoo Directory in the past, however I think that www.galaxy.com is a much better subject directory as compare to Yahoo Directory as it has more relevant results that I need. It is especially useful if you are searching on a specific topic since the results under that particular topic is already being narrow now.

All in all, to do an intensive research we must use all the different types of search facilities to help me gather our materials for the reports. We cannot just depend on one single search engine and expect our reports to be complete. Using a few search facilities will also allow comparing of the result of the search. It is just like studying, we cannot always refer to our textbook that we buy from school. Instead we must also source for extra notes from other books. No single book in the world can cover everything that you need.

In this case for my search topic, I find that subject directory is much more relevant to what I am search on. Some other topics might not be able to get any results from using subject directory. However I think that more general search facilities such as Google will be able to handle most of the research topic. Even then a subject directory is not enough as it mainly contain only reports. More articles can be found using Meta Search Engine and Google Search. I feel that our report needs to be all-rounded. A all-rounded report will consist of gathering information from reports, articles, forums and even news websites.

I think that site feeds are very useful as it keep us update to the changes in what we had subscribed to. Therefore we don't have to keep going to that blog or website to look for update which is a waste of time of there isn't any update being made. It is especially useful for people that are very busy. I am wondering if site feed can replace links since both site feed include link as well.