Jenny'sIDMBlog

Media representation is the way the media characterizes daily life and news, for example how they show different communities, ideas, events, or topics from a particular perspective or ideology. There is huge power in mass media for influencing society, so it is imperative that they get it right but unfortunately, they often don’t, and there are many people who are treated unfairly in the media like ethnic communities and women. Many different cultures feel that they are misrepresented in the mainline media, they feel there is a lack of diversity, think about it? most media companies are led by wealthy white straight men so unfortunately a lot of the time, media has limited representations. “A new survey, commissioned by The Runnymede Trust, has found that four out of every five people (78%) thought that the way that the media portrays ethnic minorities promotes racism. This concern was not just expressed by respondents who were from minority ethnic backgrounds. Over two-thirds (76%) ...

For this week’s reading task, we were given the challenge of reviewing our fellow students' feedback on our blog. I chose to have my blog on “Active reading” reviewed. We had to take that feedback, review our original blog, and rewrite our blog. I received only one comment on my blog which was all very positive and basically said my blog was perfect? So, what am I supposed to do with that comment? Well, I chose to look over my blog myself and see if I needed to change anything. I decided to change the photo so that it stood out a bit more, then I decided to justify my paragraphs to make them appear more uniform, then I played around with the font size and style. When I was finished changing font etc. I re-read my blog and decided that I should add more to the last bit, where originally, I had ended on one line. I decided I should add another paragraph here because the blog sort of ended abruptly. I wasn’t sure what else to do because you must be careful not to fill up your blog wit...

  Reading an academic paper on active reading, what have I learned? The paper is titled “using student-constructed questions to encourage active reading” It was published in 1984 by the Author Ernest Baljthy.   (Bajthy, 1984)  This paper seemed to be aimed at teachers who want to encourage their students to open their minds and think about questioning pieces of text to help them remember what they are studying. Although it seems to be aimed at teachers, I think students can also learn from it. At first glance, I wasn’t sure how to condense the information in the text, but then I put into practice some active reading skills I have learned, I skimmed over the main bulk of the text, and then I looked out for text that would be relevant to this assignment. After deciphering this paper, I have learned to approach my reading with a more critical eye, If I question what I am reading and take notes, I will learn more from the text. Teaching yourself to self-question will make you...

  Before I watched my designated blog videos, I didn’t really know a lot about “Media Compression” I knew what the word compression meant but I didn’t understand how much is involved in compressing media files. The overall aim of media compression is to reduce the file size and save space, specifically image, audio, and video files.   (Techquickie, 2014)           A lot of image formats use some type of condensing   The three most popular are PNG,  GIF , and JPEG . JPEG compression is mostly used for digital photos, it uses a   lossy  compression process that averages colours and eliminates colour differences that are concealed by the human eye. GIF compression decreases the colour palette of images to less than 256 colours.PNG compressions comprises a lossless ex pression that filters the image information and forecasts  colours from pixels nearby. Each of these systems works differently but they can all...

  So, I am not going to lie, I am going to struggle to write four hundred words this week on my blog. I have been sick all week and honestly, I have done very little college work. I have watched all the videos for week 8 group work and that was tiring enough but hey Ho I will soldier on. We had arranged to meet up in my house this week to start recording for our group project but as I didn’t want to infect the other ladies in my group, I had to cancel that meeting. I contacted Kellie today to ask how she is getting on? Kellie told me that she has been working away on the posters and animation and she recommended that I at least watch all the group videos because there are some very useful tips. So, what have I learned from my videos this week: I learned how important it is to take notes of good takes and make sure you have backups and your files organized. I learned it is useful to get feedback from people and then you should re-edit when you feel you know what you want to change...

  Ah! peer review, why is it so hard? This is the second time in my “Introduction to Digital Media” module that we have been given the task of reviewing our fellow students' blog posts. I am still not fully comfortable commenting on other students' blogs, I struggle to find anything negative to say because when you think of feedback you automatically think it is going to be a criticism of someone else’s arduous work. We are learning through our prescribed reading’s this week that feedback should not come across as a negative thing. We learned about the “SPARK” method.  (Gardner, 2019) Spark is an acronym: ·        Specific: Our comments should be linked to a phrase, sentence, or word. ·        Prescriptive: We should offer a solution or suggestion to help improve their work. ·        Actionable: Your fellow student should know what they need to change to improve. ·   ...

When man discovered fire to when they made the first windmill to create power to then lead on to where technology is today, would have been unthinkable a couple of decades ago. Most people I know have mixed feelings about technology, we can all agree about the positive advances in technology like medical advances. “Advances in areas of anatomy and physiology enhanced life expectancy and reduced illnesses. By the end of the 19th century, the importance of technology had been firmly established and it was clear that dependence on it would only grow.”  (Knowledgehut, 2016) A lot of people are addicted to technology for example smartphone addiction and social media addiction, I really fear for the future generation because they are hooked on likes and striving for perfection online but as most people know no one is perfect and to try and keep up the pretense is soul destroying and crippling young people’s mental health and confidence. Human evolution is deeply linked to technologi...

  Making a college documentary, week 2 We are still in the pre-production stage; everyone has explored lots of separate research into our topic “Cancel Culture and Online Shaming”, so we are trying to bring together our separate work and start creating a script while organising our different roles for the production stage. Kelly is taking the lead on things, she has ordered a lapel mike and she has been trying out different animation websites in case we are going to use an animation or avatar for our project, I also played around with the PowToon  (Create, 2021) website this week, we haven’t made the final decision on this for now. Kelly wrote a list of different roles we would need for our project, like editor, lighting, music, script etc. We spoke about the different roles in class, none of us have a particular strength in any area (as we are all new to documentary making) so for now we chose to share most roles, so that no one feels under pressure, and we can support eac...

Surprisingly I liked getting feedback on my blog for Study skills, it meant that when it came time for me to rewrite that piece, I could use the comments left on my blog to revise what I had previously wrote and change it to make it better. When I wrote my Study skills blog, originally, I wasn’t really used to writing blogs or attaching photos, so I attached my photo with too much information and it didn’t look well, so I got a chance to change my photo this week, which is great. I only received one comment on my blog, and it was mainly positive comments about the overall layout and how it flowed correctly so I didn’t really have to change that much. Kailan suggested that I expand on some of my definitions so that is what I implemented, and it does sound better with a longer description. I would have loved if I had received more feedback from other students because it would have given me more to work with, it feels like I didn’t really do much because all I did was expand definitions f...

  S tudying, where do we start? Sometimes the thought of studying can be overwhelming, especially if you have lots of different types of subjects, which can lead to procrastinating. The best way to get started is to get organised, look at your time management, figure out when is the best time for you to slot in some College work. I find I work best in the mornings, so I try to get my studying/College work done then. So how do we study? There are different tools we can use for studying for example we can use Quizzing, Spacing and Mixing,  (Matty) these are the hardest ways to study but also the best ways to study. The more your brain works, the more brain activity it induces, the more it strengthens your brain connections and the better the information will stick. Quizzing/testing yourself is where you test yourself as if you were in an exam, for example you can write some questions and answers, cover up the answers and check to see if you get the answers right. Spacing means s...

Think about it, how do websites make their money? Do you really think we are getting all this knowledge for free? We all know that websites have the usual advertising and subscriptions but that’s not going to bring in the big bucks and that is where Dark Patterns come into play. From Tv and internet ads, to radio commercials, to signposts, we have all generally come to accept that advertisements are a common backdrop to our lives. Companies are constantly developing new ad strategies to attempt to attract new customers and sell more product. They know what works; they’ve invested millions in market research and testing. And just like brick-and-mortar companies, online companies are developing their own tricks of the trade. While the logistics of the two are vastly different, the goal remains the same: Attract new customers, increase the customer cart size, and retain the user base. But, sometimes in their efforts, companies can stretch ethicality thin in exchange for higher profit mar...