Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual reality can be used in the field of education, hospital, and airspace training, etc. For example, in the article "The Advantages and Disadvantages of the Virtual Classroom and the Role of the Teacher" by Guy Posey, Thomas Burgess, Marcus Eason, and Yawna Jones. Talks about the advantage and disadvantage of using virtual classroom. For advantage, virtual classroom can help instructor to organize the class well, in the areas of " course documents, assignments, class notes and other information." It also can save "time, gasoline, childcare and travel expenses" if virtual classroom applied to life. For disadvantage, the used of virtual classroom can cause " the lack of face to face interactions with other peers and the instructor", and sometimes there will not be an immediate feedback if they used virtual classroom. It also cause students in building their relationship with their classmate if they used internet which not much of conversation and outside activity will be taken place. Playing game and watch movie can foster our creativity, we always think and imagine what would I do if I am one of the character in the virtual setting. Sometimes, we even will learn and simulate them. These activities we do in daily basis will foster our creativity. In the future, I believe virtual world would change the real world, in a way of  how we look, smell, eat, and touch. In the article" Virtual world may impact real-world behaviour", they run the test to examine how participants react to the food they consume after they play different games, which include chilli sauce and chocolate, but they found out no mater how to arrange the dosage of the food they can't figure out those. Here, shows that these participants' flavors were affect by the game, which one of virtual setting. Therefore, we know that virtual reality can impact our sense now and will have further more in the future.

Blog: Social networking sites

My impression for Facebook is a amazing social networking sites, it connects us with family and friends all over the world. But, I feel the site are getting more advertisements than the past, and some of the users are use it for malicious purposes. 

My impression of Twitter is a social site that is not easy to use. And it's not as useful as the Facebook, we can use Facebook to send voice message and we can have a video chat any time. But, for Twitter we only can tweet information and reply. That's why the user of Twitter us declining. 

My impression for Linkedln as a networking site that for business purpose. We rarely use it to communicate with friends, but we often use it to reach the recruiter or vice versa, and to submit our resumes. Moreover, we can build our resume on the site. 

My impression for YouTube it is social entertaining site,  people can post any types of videos, such as academic, artistic, or personal. We can share our comments and communicate with the video distributors. We can see a lot of talented people post their video on Youtube, it is a platform for us to know each other, and an opportunity for us. Lastly we can also earn money from our video if someone watched our video on Youtube. 

Blog about Twitter

Twitter is a social media platform that shares daily information. Twitter limits the words that we want to say, whereas blackboard discussion doesn't restrict that. In this way we have to say and write in a precise way, to tell others what you want to say in few words. On the other hand, Twitter is like other social media, you don't the confront others, such as teachers or classmates face to face. So, in the case we can give compliment or criticism to others in an easy way, sometimes we refuse to comment others because we don't to embarrass others and ourselves. So, that's Twitter can do for us to avoid the awkwardness.

Blog Social networking

Blog can be used in military. In the article "Pentagon Keeps Wary Watch as Troops Blog"
by James Dao, mentions that blog can make more people knows about the cruelty of war. According to the article, "at the highest echelons of the Pentagon, civilian officials and four-star generals are newly hailing the power of social networking to make members of the American military more empathetic, entice recruits and shape public opinion on the war." In this article, blog can use in many ways to make a better military and a better country.

Additionally, blog can help us to create a better society. In the article, "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid" by Michael Wilson, in his article stating that blog can use in our neighborhood to safeguard our friends and family, and also it can helps to convict the suspect because everyone of us could be a witness of the incident. According to the article, "blog seemed to know, sometimes chronicling daily activities in detail,... one woman wrote last year, 'and one was trying to steal a ladder while I guess another which I could not tell was male or female, who may have lived their claimed ownership to the ladder and they begin to fight.'" We can make a better society by using blog.

Blog v Wiki

Wiki and Blog are all products that produced and extended by rise of internet. Wiki and Blog are all rely on the internet services, because of the internet we can reach each other through different platforms, such as Wiki and Blog. People even do editing and writing blog for livings. They significantly impact our lives. Both of them distribute massive of information that we need for daily lives, sometimes they share information faster than the News.

Wiki is a tool that each of us around the world can contribute and access contents up on the so in a way we create the most compete and large database. We can consider it as a collaborative tool to connect each of us around the world. We are holding the responsibilities to correct and polish the information up, and to do our best to make sure the content up there are true and not malicious attacking someone or some groups. It is like the community that we built and we have to protect it.
According to Wikipedia, "the online encyclopedia project Wikipedia is by far the most popular wiki-based website, and is one of the most widely viewed sites of any kind in the world...Wikipedia is not a single wiki but rather a collection of hundreds of wikis, one for each language. There are tens of thousands of other wikis in use, both public and private, including wikis functioning as knowledge management resources, note taking tools, community websites and intranets." It is so useful in our lives. That we can access different information through many different languages. What a great idea is that? It is great to create this environment for us to archive what is disappearing around us.

On the other hand, Blog is consider as personal wiki, that for personal use to share information around the world to see it. We use it to discuss what social trend, all kinds of issue. It is similar to a forum. We can comment on it and we can both share information up there, but there right to delete and approve are on the blogger's hand. Blog can significantly affect a business, according to the article Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write Unfiltered Blog by MICHAEL BARBARO, "Wal-Mart says the Web site helps buyers solicit quick feedback from consumers on the merchandise — and shows a softer side of the giant company, which has 5,000 stores, 1.2 million workers and annual sales of nearly $400 billion." It is clear that it is a new way of advertising the product online by using blogger to blow up the effectiveness and worthiness of a product.

Work cited:

Wikipedia on Wikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki


Wal-Mart Tastemakers Write a Blunt and Unfiltered Blog, NY Times, march 3, 2008, p. C1, at:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/business/03walmart.html