Sarah Kyle

  UOSM2008 has been a very rewarding, challenging and eye-opening module.  It was a welcomed change from English Literature, and I not only acquired valuable digital literacy skills  but an online identity which will undoubtedly assist future employment prospects. My additional reflections have been collected in a PowToon below:   My Twitter, LinkedIn and about.me pages can be found here, or on the about.me widget on my homepage. Continue reading →

This week’s topic on the advantages and disadvantages of Open Access for the content producer generated some interesting thoughts amongst fellow UOSM2008 students. It additionally prompted several of us to try new ways of presenting our blog posts: Prezis, SlideShares and videos were abundant! What stood out the most this week was the overwhelmingly positive response to Open Access.  I was not alone in sharing my frustration at restricted access to articles. Continue reading →

One of the most frustrating things when it comes to essays, as a student, is when you cannot gain full access to a journal article. Recently, I attempted an inter-library loan, waiting over a month to discover that my request had been cancelled – other libraries were unable to share the article due to copyright. My deadline by this time had passed, so I could neither read nor cite this academic’s work. Continue reading →

In my reflective summary for Topic 3, I noted how Aliyu’s use of a current social media trend within his blog was really effective.  This influenced my approach to Topic 4, prompting me to highlight a current, widely covered topic on social media, the eclipse, and the ethics behind hashtag ‘hijacking’ by businesses and corporations. Liveblogging varsity this year gave me the skills to embed relevant tweets but, frustratingly, Youtube did not allow embedding of John Oliver’s video. Continue reading →

Social media is a great tool for businesses.  Not only can they communicate with customers on an accessible (and increasingly popular) platform, but they can promote products and services to a massive audience – Twitter alone has over 270 million active users.[1] When it comes to advertising, Twitter is also key to a successful campaign.  There’s now even the term ‘reactervising': when businesses react to live events with adverts. Continue reading →

This week’s blog post took me a little longer than usual to gather my thoughts – I got distracted by wanting to read more facts and articles, whilst being attracted to articles about graduate jobs (behaviour typical of a final year university student, unfortunately!). However, my additional research did lead me to two insightful videos, which I finally discovered how to embed within the body of my text. Continue reading →

“Your personal online branding is very important. Employers will look at what groups you’re part of, the photographs you’ve been tagged in, and comments you’ve made on other people’s blogs; negative feedback you’ve left can really go against you.” – Julie Bishop [1] The above quote does not intend to discourage anyone commenting on this blog but instead introduce the idea of a ‘personal online brand’. Continue reading →

This week’s background reading covered a variety of issues relating to online identity: anonymity and authenticity, presentation and reputation, our online and offline identity, privacy and security, and finally, identity protection.  Initially, I found myself trying to cover all of these topics but I quickly realised this was not realistic – it was never going to fit under the word count! Instead, I tried to limit myself to the areas that took my interest: online personas and anonymity. Continue reading →

This post primarily focuses on online personas, arguing that in terms of professionalism, there is value in having multiple online identities and potential drawbacks to being anonymous. An online persona can be defined as ‘a partial identity created by you to represent yourself in a specific situation’.[1]  Examples of personas include social networking accounts, such as Facebook, or online blogs. Continue reading →

This week’s topic focused on exploring the concept of digital “visitors” and “residents”, drawing on our own experiences and theories by Prensky, Cornu and White. By engaging with other members of UOSM2008, I was able to gain a deeper understanding and new thoughts on the topic. Continue reading →