Final Blog

Overall, social media tools are very helpful in many situations. Each has their differences and can be utilized differently. However, they all have a similar goal: to connect the world, entice individuals to become involved in current events, and to allow communication and discussion in a public place. Each different social media tool is used for different things. For example, I will be discussing social media tools that I have been using throughout this particular class. The first tool that we used was Blogger. Blogger is very good to write a lot of information in one place. It is very useful to write your opinions, your views, and your emotions in one organized place. It is also very easy for people to follow your blogs and read what you really have to say. Twitter is also used like Blogger, however Twitter uses micro-blogs called tweets. Twitter is good for fast, quick things that need to be said. It is also more widely used than Blogger (in my opinion). Another tool, Facebook, is widely used by millions of people throughout the world. It is a very public place that is very instant and used significantly as a tool of communication. In my opinion, it is much more organized and well-developed than Twitter and Blogger. There are groups, games, and millions and millions of people to communicate with. You can join in the discussion much easier on Facebook because there are specific places to do so (on walls of organizations, on posts, on pictures, and etc.). Now, branching away from the sites that allow you to write and express anything on your mind (along with other various things), we explored two more sites YouTube and Flickr. YouTube is much more user friendly when it comes to sharing videos and using videos to uncover information because it has a specific task of sharing videos, where as Facebook is used for multiple tasks. YouTube holds millions and millions of videos, it would take years to watch all the videos that are hosted by YouTube. Flickr is very similar to YouTube in that it is used to share images, however, Flickr is used to share pictures rather than videos. Although Flickr is picture specific and widespread, Facebook is much more user-friendly (in my opinion) to share pictures. It is more "homy" in the fact that you can share your videos with friends and family on one page, where as on Flickr it is more in a public place for the world. Podcasts are another social media that we explored. This social media tool is more used for pleasure, in my opinion. Podcasts are simply audio clips that portray information about particular topics. All other social media tools are not simply audio clips, but rather more intricate and have more aspects to them. The last social media tool used in this class is wikispace. I believe that this tool is the most helpful social media tool because it allows people to share information and create projects in one convenient place.
Professionally, I think that wikispace will help me the most in the future. This tool is useful when working on a group project because it is not necessary to all sit down at a table to do the research. Rather, you can interact over the web with the discussion groups. It is very easy to be organized and very simply used.
For this class again, the only thing that I would do differently is the wiki project. I think that it was too difficult to assign all the tasks and to make sure that they were all done in one week. In my opinion it would have been much easier to have the powerpoint for the wiki project at the beginning of the class and have been able to work on it all along. I also think that the class would have been much easier if all members had actually participated in it.