Virtual World

A virtual world is an online society that takes the form of computer generated environment through which users can interact with one another and use, also create objects. The users take the form of avatars visible to others, it also allow multiple users.

The video I watched today in class about virtual world is something that I never had a clue that was going on. I am not a games man but this one gone far beyond my imagination. I had to go online and briefly looked to find out more about virtual world and found stories which are absolutely shocking to me.

Well there is good side and ugly side of it. First of all I can not imagine how much real money spent on these things that have no real existence except as viewed on a computer screen or some kind of a monitor.

The sad thing that I am personally disgusted about is the fact that it involves children and vulnerable people who can access without parental control and been exposed to some kind of adult material and extreme violence.

Virtual world so called second life is also affecting adults, Sean kane and Benjamin Duranske in 2008 reported “A south Korean man, who quits his job to have more time to play games, actually died on August 6, 2005 of heart failure due to exhaustion after playing an online battle simulation game for fifty hours, only stopping for short to use bathroom and brief naps” (Kane, S.F, 2008). These facts show the ugly side of virtual world.

I could also agree that there is good side of this as I read a story of a young boy called Joe on Scientific American magazine who have been treated using the program that allows therapists to role play in a 3-D virtual world environment in which they communicate through avatars.

Taking on the good side and ugly side of what is called “second life” I think I better stay on “first life”.

Cooperation and collaboration

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw

In class today we have watched a video and discussed about cooperation and collaboration. Between these two terms, one thing that is present to both is that the teams work together towards common goal, but the difference on these terms is that cooperation is when working together so both of our needs get served but collaboration is working together to create something.
From this video the dogs do understand the aims of extreme shepherding as they are trained for that, they collaborate with shepherds doing something that the shepherds would not be able to do on their own.
The sheep on the other hand are not doing anything other than following orders from dogs team.
I don’t think that everyone should know what the goal is as we have seen in this video that the dogs team does not know what the goal is but they are cooperating working towards that goal.
Rosemary Bray pointed out that “successful team work regardless of the nature of the team requires building one on one relationship, outstanding, constant communication, doing ordinary things extraordinarily well paying attention to fine details and then more communication” (Bray, R, 2004.)

Viral Marketing depends on passing on information from one person to another aiming at high number of recipients to forward that information to a large number of friends.
This video is an example of viral marketing as it depends on cooperation and collaboration of friends passing to each other to achieve its goal of advertising.

Digital Footprint

After watching video in class I came to understand more regarding digital footprints. Digital footprint is the term used to describe the traces of your digital images that you leave online, and this information is transmitted online into sites such as forums, social networks, email attachment etc which leaves traces of personal information about yourself available to others or public. And this information can be spread very quickly over online social networks.

The video I watched in class shows it is usual for teens or young adults to post pictures to others and that information can be spread online or to more people very quickly. For what I have seen many of these young adults fail to realize the impact that these public displays of poor judgement will have on future. Once they got into the wrong hands it almost impossible to delete them.
The video I saw explains what I have just written above, briefly is a story of a young girl who sent her own inappropriate photos to who supposed to be a boyfriend who then send them to a friend then ended up to everyone.

From this experience I will argue that employers should not have access to anyone’s life online as images sometimes can wrongly be translated and in some cases employers may lose a good employee just by seen nasty images. Also in my view I don’t think it is appropriate for parents to put pictures of their children online as we have seen the damage that can be done with images online. That child can grow up and find pictures of him/her on internet while he/she did not upload them.

In the video I just find it taking inappropriate images is unacceptable behaviour and so the sending of someone’s images to other people.

I conclude by advising these young adults that as long as the internet and technology stays on, when you upload your images or send images to anyone, you automatically loose the ownership of those images to public domain and they may haunt you later in life, also it is not such a good idea to forward any emails of photos to others as we have already reviewe the dangers.

(Image by caseinside.com)

Week 1

So grateful today to kick start Social tech engineering...I had fun in class registering for the unit and also create this blog.We also had to create CVs and apply for some jobs.

It was great, thank you for reading and keep on checking my blog.