Work or Play?

Working at home is really a good idea for people who are living very far away from their workplace. This also saves time and money to travelling to the office and the company can save the money for rent and electricity because a physical workplace does not necessary to be there. 

But this causes quite a lot of problems:
1. Working at home requires quite a lot of self-discipline since there are distractions at home and there is no control from the boss anymore, so people have to control themselves in order to work effectively.

2. Working at home requires people to have online communication skills, as they don’t need to talk to their colleagues face to face. Online communication skills are very important because it would cause ambiguity to communicate through text (Though talking face-to-face causes ambiguity too).

Here is a video about the revolution of Social Media. 

This video provides a lot of statistics. It shows that consultants and marketing professionals are most active users of social media. 83% of all companies use Facebook and there are more than 700,000 local business have Facebook pages. The other Youtube video even showed that 80% of companies use LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.

The video shows that social media is really powerful in workplace.

I am working in Cartias as a part-time piano teacher. I always think that Caritas is an old-fashioned, traditional organization, but I found out that there is a Facebook page for Caritas Cheung Hong just a month ago! 

The Facebook page is basically like any other Corporate Facebook Page. Caritas Cheung Hong is a Children and Youth Centre, so the page has quite a lot of activities going on and photos of different activities.

Does Technology control Us?

Nowadays, everyone got an iPhone or a smartphone which allows them to get access to the Internet and SNSs every minute and every second, on Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. People go to Facebook when they are traveling the MTR, having dinner with their family and friends, and even walking on the street, so does technology control us or do we control technology?
Let's watch a video about how the future technology will make us become.

The man has a pair of lazy eyes, implying the future technology will make us stupid. The Mactini is also an irony of the products of Apple.

At first, I think it’s us that control the technology because technologies are invented by human beings to improve our living standard and lifestyle. Computers make our lives much better when compared to the 70’s. There are computer system behind traffic lights and microwaves, as mentioned in the lesson. I think no matter how advanced the iPhone 4 or MacBook Air is, they still have to control by us, in order to accomplish something. Another example from the lesson is the idea of Hacking. The most popular example would be jailbreaking iPhones because people want to escape from paying the apps in iTunes Store.

But as time goes by, as we are surrounded by so many technologies, we forgot what is around in our surroundings. It is so true that technologies really do allow us to do a lot of things, like Skype, which allows us to contact our family and friends in all over the world or Facebook, which allows us to find your classmates which was sitting next to you in kindergarten. But sometimes people are so tied up with the technologies, like when your lecturer has asked you to do a paper on the impact of Internet on our language use. Students just go to Google and there are already hundreds of papers or researches have been done on this topic. Actually there are lots of books in the library that provides us information, but because of the ease of getting the information online, we fail to leave the Internet behind, so I think the situation now is that we are both controlling each other.

Let's watch an awesome video about the screen technology!

Social Networking!

The main social network sites (SNS) I used are Facebook and YouTube.

I am sure all of you are very familiar with Facebook. Facebook is so popular to the extent that you will be isolated among your friends or you are not a human being at all if you don’t have a Facebook account. More and more people are getting on Facebook, even parents and grandparents.

One thing I like about Facebook is that I can connect with my friends so easily. As I said in class, it is even more convenient than calling your friends as they will ALWAYS be in Facebook even though they don’t answer any phone calls. As Facebook allows us to create events, my friends would create events on Facebook whenever they want to have gatherings and it can show who is available and who is not. Here is my Friend Wheel! 

Facebook is a great tool somehow if you use it wisely. Some people would afraid that they don’t have any privacy when they have Facebook account. One thing I heard from my mom is that the employers would go on to Facebook to check on their potential candidates, to see what kind of person they are by looking at their photos, comments and so on, to define whether that candidate is worth hiring. As I said in Week 3, I think there is a choice that people have to make. You always have a choice whether to give up your privacy in order to enjoy cool things or not. To be a wise Facebook user, I think we should think about the issue of privacy.

YouTube is a useful SNS too. I have an account with YouTube where I can subscribe videos, so whenever there is newly release videos, I would receive a notification through my Gmail.

I seldom write comments on the video, but I found that the audiences are quite brutal on the comments. However, sometimes the comments can be like a little blog where people can share their opinions after watching the video.

YouTube can help me find songs that have long history, like the following one.

It can also remind me of my childhood memories.

And I appreciate the people who have the patience to make such great videos. Here are 2 examples!

Please Enjoy! 

Does Textspeak make you stupid!?

'Textspeak' or 'Netspeak' are not new terms for me and people have been arguing about whether Textspeak will affect the language standard of students, especially for younger students where they haven’t been mastered the rules of language very well. Teachers would be very worried about the English proficiency of the students, as they have to handle public examinations.

I remember when I first learnt to use ICQ in Form 2. My proficiency of English was not good enough to chat with my friends in complete English sentence, but on the other hand, I didn’t know how to type Chinese characters either (yet), so I tried to use Cantonese written as English, like ‘ng’ (唔), final particles, like ‘la’ (啦), acronyms, like BTW, LOL.

I have a cousin living in Canada and one day he MSN-ed me and chat with me. Later on, I found out that I have to force myself to use English in MSN and SMS to communicate since I have to talk to him. At the beginning, it was quite difficult because I have to use English to express different meanings as the sentence structure of Chinese and English are quite contrastive. But it became easier when I used it everyday and I can even type English faster.

                           

What I want to bring out is that using Textspeak didn’t worsen my English, but the opposite. I found out that I am more capable in constructing a complete sentence, just like when I MSN or SMS my friends, I will just type out what I want to say in the message. By ‘practicing’ everyday, I can type English faster with my keyboard with construct a sentence more smoothly. I totally agree with what David Crystal said about txt. I think people who use Textspeak doesn’t necessary make you stupid, but to make you become more capable to distinguish the difference between Standard English and Textspeak and to use it wisely. 

Information is Everywhere!!

Whether we manipulate information or information manipulates us?


Today, information is everywhere that makes our lives so convenient that we really can’t live without. The Google search engine is a really great helper when we work, we can find everything we want by typing in keywords. With just one click, you can find websites, pictures and video clips about the keyword you typed, e.g. when you typed ‘Information overload’ on Google, it showed about 4,590,000 results in 0.12 seconds (as shown under the search bar). Less than 1 second, you can have all the information you want through Google.
With Google Map, we can find places that we haven’t been before accurately. You can see the map with street view, so you would know how the street looks like even when you haven’t been there before. The first picture has shown where I am living and the second one has shown the back door of where I lived during the study tour!

A is where I am living! 

The backdoor of Wesley College, City Road, Sydney

With Google Docs, we can save and edit our documents in different formats just as we like, like document, presentation, spreadsheet, etc. You can even create folders to manage your documents.
Though the Internet is really convenient and it can make our lives better, we may suffer from Information Fatigue Syndrome from the British Psychologist David Lewis (1990), e.g. having 4,590,000 results from typing ‘Information overload’ or having three hundred more pieces of new feeds on Facebook everyday, or receiving loads of unnecessary emails everyday, etc.

My Digital Life

Digital technologies cannot really separate with my everyday life.

I use my MacBook everyday to do the following things: 

- check Email (Gmail) My Email Address!
- use Facebook to connect with my friends My Facebook

- use MSN and Skype to communicate with my friends in Hong Kong and overseas
- watch videos clips or music videos in YouTube, e.g. Bruno Mars - Just the Way You Are
- read my classmates’ blogs, as well as to write blogs like what I am doing now

I use my moblie phone everyday to text with my friends and parents and my iPod Touch for quick information, e.g. bus routes, restaurant guide, dictionary, etc. 

In my leisure time, I take pictures with my digital camera and upload them on Facebook.

In this course, I think I can learn the way we use English in digital media, how people use those digital technologies to communicate with each other, whether the relationship between people become closer or distant and the things we can do with digital media, e.g. we can see the pictures immediately with digital cameras, and we can use Photoshop to edit the photos.