Communication Feast

     I never thought I could meet a communication feast until I attended the Ales 204 class. It brought me a fresh communicating ambiance, from Twitter to Blog, from Facebook to LinkedIn. From this class, I learned how significant the social media involves in my life.

posted by notshortonopinions, Retrieved on August 1,2011
http://notshortonopinions.wordpress.com/

     Taking Twitter, my favorite social media, as an example, basically, twitter provides a convenient way to communicate with fellow classmates and the professor at anytime and anywhere. We can share feelings or comments on the lectures, ask questions about the courses and update every minute happenings of our daily life. For doing these things, you only need a laptop or just a mobile phone, typing what you want to say and @ your potential audience and that is all. Obviously, Twitter presents a fresh world to me and the most impressive thing I remembered is the playing dodgeball story. I followed the UniversityOfAlberta when I first used Twitter. During those days, I got updated news for the numbers of candidates and I felt excited when the numbers approached to the record. Unfortunately, I had class on the competition day. Yet, I got every picture of wonderful moments from the twitter and it just like I was actually there. That was the first time that I realized the outstanding features of Twitter. However, there is just one disadvantage of twitter I want to mention, which is the characteristics limits but I think that is why Twitter can be that clear and fast.

7 Step Social Media Optimization Plan,
Retrieved from http://www.seriouslysocial.co/

     Likewise, Blog, Facebook and other social media also give me various interesting stories. I send my feelings and get feedback. That is the usage of social media but just this function makes communication to be colorful. In my view, social media has become one part of my life and their influence on me beyond my expectation. They guide me to really involve in the world and my life is connected to others. I made many friends from communicating with them on these social media and here are five comments on my friends' blog.

Minmin Gao

Wenxin Li

Xuechan Yang

Lutong Huang

Xinru Ye     

     

    Today is the last day of winter semester and the last day of Ales class, but THIS IS THE END. THIS IS THE START. Thank you!

Writing a scientific article

     I never thought I had a chance to write a scientific article, because in my view, people who can write scientific articles only can be professors or researchers who are very knowledgeable and experienced in some fields. However, the Ales class told me “No.”. Hence, I got this assignment, writing a scientific article, from the class. This was my first time, I was nervous but excited.

     I went through all the topics and their requirements. Finally I chose option one, Open Access, as my topic, because it gave the questions for every section so that it could be easier to summary and organize information that I have to search. This article was separated to five sections, Introduction, Background, Impacts, Possibilities and Conclusion. At the beginning, I was confused about introduction and background parts since I thought what these two contained were almost same. But when I further checked these two parts, I found that the background part should be more relevant than the introduction part since the contents of background are richer. For instance, background contains the history of open access, interesting facts, the current issues this movement faced and so on. Thanks to the questions, I finished every section smoothly because I can catch the key points to search what I want. However, also because of these questions, my article looked like answering questions. So, I spent some time organizing it which made each paragraph can be connected very naturally. After I finished writing, I put the whole contents of article in the Wordle website and got this beautiful word clouds. Here is the picture.

Zhou,F.(2012).Open access in Wordle.Retrieved on April 10,2012  http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7200/7066675199_8aed931933_c.jpg

     
     However, there was one part we cannot forget, which is the Reference. Refer to the reference; searching information is the basic but essential step in the writing. Wikipedia is a useful searching website, but it could not be academic enough to support the article. Therefore, I chose to look up peer-reviewed articles that helped me finish the writing and I found the U of A library website was a good source to obtain peer-reviewed articles. After finishing the contents of article, I started to reference. APA style is the citing method for scientific articles. I checked Purdue OWL website and it assisted me to cite each reference properly. After adding reference to the article, I felt that the article had been more academic. 
     In summary, writing a scientific article is a strict process. From this assignment, what I learned is not only how to write a scientific article but also how to search academic information which is properly related to our research and how to cite the reference. These two essential steps are the keys to write a good scientific article. Finally, I want to introduce my friend Yunke Xu's blog, and we have similar name for the blog. She will have a Pecha Kucha presentation on Friday. Good luck!