Topic 2 - Exeercise 2.4

Dick Hardt raises a good point when he asks the question, “Who is the Dick on your site”? This point is something that we all should be aware of, and from an educational point of view something that teachers should consider before they allow children access to online communities. Hardt mentions such terms as phishing which is an email sent with the purpose of “scamming” the recipient into believing the course is legitimate. Pharming is another term used by Hardt which is what hackers do to redirect users to bogus websites. Privacy invasion and identity theft (pretending to be someone else) are two other terms that Hardt mentions in his talk. The solutions Hardt offers to overcoming these problems seem satisfactory but I wonder how beneficial they would be in an early primary classroom setting?

Topic 2 - Exercise 2.3

My Facebook profile is very basic giving out limited information. I do not have an avatar. The reason I initially joined Facebook was to see what all the fuss was about. Different people from varied areas of my life work colleagues, friends, family and people who I had lost contact with over the years are now “friends” on Facebook. I currently live in a small mining community and a responsibility in my professional position is to be professional at all times. With this and my “audience” in mind I choose to put as little information as possible on my profile.

Topic 2 - Exercise 2.2

Second life

I was very keen to explore second life and eagerly went to the website which I found to be pleasant and somewhat intriguing. I clicked on the join now button and a form came up for me to fill in to join up. This is where the frustration began. I spent an hour filling in and then re-filling my form trying to get access to the site. I was continually told to fix errors and re-submit but I was not clearly informed of what my errors were! After making several hit and miss (all misses I might add) as to what I did wrong I decided to scrap the process and try filling out the form again from scratch…..still no luck. Maybe its my internet connection, maybe it’s me…… I don’t know….all I do know is that this website is very frustrating in terms of logging in. I only hope it is better once your finally in it….as for me I probably will never know.

Topic 2 - Exeercise 1

Virtual Environments and Your Cognition
As I was already a member of Facebook I am familiar with how the social networking site works and willingly joined the online community set up for this course.
I asked many people who were in the group to be my “friend” but only two responded. I believe that has more to do with members being unfamiliar with each other rather than anything personal. We are constantly receiving warnings via email and Facebook itself not to accept requests by certain people to be friends because there are some out there who are predators and/or looking to taking over one’s identity. I think if the participants in this course were more familiar with one and other I would have had more success in adding to my “friends” list.
Social Cognition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cognition is a study of the way individual’s process information, particularly in the encoding, storage , retrieving and applying to social situations.

Visual Cognition
http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctymfm/Lecture%20Notes/BA%20Psychology/Visual%20Cognition%202.pdf
the capacity to see objects around us. These capacities involve the manipulation of representations through inference.