Denali Muse Tracks

Virtual reality worlds allow users to enter an environment where they may experiment with their surroundings and abilities without consequence. In the case of the two articles I will discuss, virtual worlds are used to exercise and practice certain skills. In “Avatar II: The Hospital” by Stephanie Simon for The Wall Street Journal, virtual worlds are being used to simulate the experiences of nurses and doctors. This technology is training students to interact and act appropriately in simulated situations such as a black out in an emergency room full of patients or a schizophrenic patient who is repeating the same thing over and over again. It is standard to read a textbook and sit in on lectures where one is taught to handle these situations but when you are actually placed in one of these high stress moments that is something no class can prepare you for. The virtual world of medicine helps these students get a bit closer to learning how to do their jobs. I do not think any...

For one a Twitter discussion will be broken down into posts of 140 characters, so writing in a smooth paragraph form is not possible. It resembles a discussion in the classroom more, where everyone shares a snippet of their view on the matter. I actually liked being able to click on our class' hashtag and then see everything everyone was saying and posting. It felt more like a conversation and I was able to understand their voice better. Blackboard discussions are more formal where as the twitter language is less so and makes for a more free flowing discussion. Adding links to these posts also allows me to click and read the article they are referring to. 

Facebook My impression of Facebook is that there are a lot of visuals. Without even asking it to, a video about a band member of PussyRiot starts playing from the Vice channel, Noisey. In a few more scrolls a video about how to make butternut squash risotto will play from Bon Appetit. All of this content has been catered to me based on what I "like" and what I read on the internet. When it comes to the people I am "friends" with on Facebook there is a lot of information about their activity on the site as well. I will see posts that my mother has commented on all day long. The older friends I have on Facebook take up my news feed as much as the publications I mentioned before do. Facebook is also a way to have a private conversation with people which is mostly what I use it for. It's like texting, which is hard if you have a lot of international friends who will not receive your iMessages.  Twitter I log onto my twitter and I am also bombarded by images. The...

Social networking technologies have come a long way since we were first introduced to them. The capacity at which they are integrated with our daily lives and interactions is much more than when they were first used as a place to post your favorite song on your myspace. Now they are more invasive and we have the power to search for information that never would have been available to us without them. For example, using social media for recruiting. This helps companies with specific job openings search and scroll through sites like Linkdin to find niche candidates for the positions. I recall as an intern one of my tasks was to search through Linkdin results for profiles of people working for similar companies. I compiled them all into an organized graph based on their education history, work experience, etc. This is the main discussion in the article for NPR, "Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting" by Frank Langfitt. This purpose of social networking opens up comp...

Blogs and Wikis have made their way into professional settings. Both can be used as cyber social spaces for collaboration and knowledge sharing. In the two articles, "More on How to Build Your Own Wikipedia" by Margaret Locher and "Wal-Mart Tastemakers" by Michael Barbaro we see how both blogs and wikis find their purpose in the workplace. Wikipedias are used more for information collection and data sharing. This seems to be a very effective use of a group wiki because organizing information, numbers, chart, clients etc in a large company can be a very daunting task and physical copies of this information is archaic. A wiki also doesn't take up data on a hard drive than can potentially crash or run out of space. Using a wiki as a collaborative think space between likeminded employees is good was of collecting and sharing valuable knowledge. In the case of the Wal-Mart article, blogs are being used for experience sharing. The employees of Wal-Mart give a candid a...