We have reached the finish line :)

Wow I have to say this has been a really interesting semester especially in my ALES 204 class. I can not believe its all over and all that is left are finals! Right now all thats on my mind though is Christmas which is definitely one of my favorite holidays of the year and just thinking about all that food makes me drool. Until then its study study study.

http://www.4socialmediaconsulting.com/

When I first walked into ALES 204 I can honestly say I was not very excited about being in this class and thought it would be such a waste of time. I didn't really think social media could be used for anything except for your own personal entertainment but now that i've gone through an entire semester in this course I have completely changed my mind and can see the great uses of social media. I only knew of facebook and twitter as a social media tool but I never really realized how many more tools existed out there to help with communication like blogging or flickr if you want to share photos. Social media tools like these help connect everyone's ideas together. I learned these tools can also be used for research and helping me obtain a career in the future. Sites like linkedin help future employers obtain information about the person they want to hire or even just obtain information on research topics. Also a business facebook page, which I had no idea even existed can act like your online resume because it leaves out your personal facebook page and keeps your business one looking professional. If your not much of a reader other social media tools are available like youtube and audio boo. These websites allow you to put up your own videos or voice recordings on the internet to share with everyone. Not only were the classes very helpful but so were the labs. We learned how to create a Pecha Kucha presentation, poster presentations, practised public speaking, learned proper writing citations, interview practise and how to send emails for certain situations.

These classes and labs let us experience all these social media tools first hand and so did creating this blog. For instance our first blog post was to introduce ourselves which I feel like I could have done a better job now and same with our second post where we had to create a business facebook page and blog about it after. I feel like after writing those two blogs I began to feel more comfortable sharing my ideas. For our third blog we got to edit a wikipedia topic of our choice, which I thought was really cool because I got to do one that I have a real passion about. It was pretty tricky to learn all the wiki codes and stuff at first but towards the end it got easier and gave me more to blog about. Our fourth blog was a topic of choice so I decided to choose to blog about audioboo. I really enjoyed listening to podcasts for music purposes only but after class I found out it could be used for so much more like interviews which we got to practise using audioboo in our labs. It was actually pretty fun. A fellow classmate of mine Rachael felt the same way and was also very excited to have discovered audioboo.

As an aspiring nutritionist/dietitian I feel all these tools that I have learned how to use will benefit me in the future and I recommend that everyone out there try and experiment around with some of these tools as well cause no matter what you are doing whether it be studying or just for fun social media is a very important thing these days and will be in the future.

Here are some comments that I posted on some of my other classmates blogs:
1. I posted on Sydney's blog about her wikipedia article. I found it interesting since she wrote about allergic reactions and I have terrible allergic reactions.
2. I posted on Brian's blog because he is also a fellow nutrition and foods student that is also a male like me. There are not many males in this field of study so it was nice to see what another male blogged about.
3. Toni's blog about facebook shared the same ideas as what I thought about the professional facebook assignment so i had to comment on it and share my same experience.
4. Rebecca's blog was probably one of the best blogs that I have seen so far. Her story about her twin brother and why she chose nutrition was just so passionate that I could not not comment on it!
5. Kelsey also had one of the most professional and interesting blogs i've seen. This course seemed to be perfect for what she was interested in, which was public relationships. After reading her blog i just wanted to comment on it.

Thank you everyone for reading my blog so far and happy holidays :) . Also here is a sweet video about what Microsoft thinks the future of social media will be like.

In Coming Podcast!

In a recent Ales 204 class we started talking about creating audio files and then sharing them over the internet. This is known as sharing a "Podcast" and is very easy for anyone to do. All you need is some kind of recoding device hardware like your laptop or a phone and then just upload it to the internet for everyone to see or download and then your done! I think this is a great way of sharing ideas because its free and there is not limit really to how long or what you want to say.

Hahaha. http://lphilli04.edublogs.org/category/podcast/

 When I first heard Professor Laccetti say the word podcast in class I immediately thought we were going to listen to music. Before this class I only really thought of using podcasts for music especially in the eletro/trance/house/dubstep genre because these kind of Dj artist put up new podcasts on the daily. Check out these artists called "Above & Beyond" that I really like and their podcasts "Trance Around the World". After the class though I learned that podcasts can be used for much more like news, field recording, lecture notes, audio storage files, interviews, story telling and much more. I was even talking to my friend about podcasts after and learned that one of her professors recorded all his lectures and put them up as podcasts for study purposes. This lecture made me realize that this kind of communication tool could be very useful in my field of research which is nutrition. I found out that on the American Society for Nutrition website they had podcasts up of all kind of nutrition facts and lectures. Her was one i found interesting on alcohol and liver disease. 

In our labs we got to experience first hand how to create and share our own podcasts. It was an interesting experience and as I assumed before it was very simple to do. Here is what me and one of my classmates recorded which was us pretending to ask each other interview questions for practise. Also if you look at  another fellow classmate of mine Naomi she has also blogged a post about podcasting which discusses  the same topics as mine. Also she has her own recorded podcast that your guys should check out. 

Wiki Wiki What!

I have spent the last week editing my wikipedia article on the Maloof Money Cup and I got to say I actually enjoyed it very much. I feel it was mainly because I had a passion about the topic and I also knew a lot about the stub already. I didn't find editing my wikipedia article to be very hard either. First off it was fairly easy for me to pick a stub because usually there is only one thing I think about all the time and that is skateboarding and there were many choices to pick from in that category and I would be happy writing about anyone of them. Also finding reliable resources wasn't very difficult either because there was already a website created for the Maloof Money Cup which basically had all the information about the event on it. If the site didn't have the information i was looking for usually other reliable websites like Transworld skateboarding would. I feel i made the wiki stub pretty accurate and reliable to others as well. Some people in my class had some problems choosing an article and finding reliable resources as seen in my fellow classmate Julie's blog. You should check out her wikipedia article on rainscald she did a great job despite having running into problems while creating it. I think I could see how choosing and finding resources would be hard because I did choose a fairly easy topic to write about.

One problem I did encounter was dealing with the wikipedia codes. It seems like a lot of my classmates as well had the same problem. I found that their codes were very confusing and it was hard to find the right codes for what you wanted to do. I mostly went through a lot of trial and error when editing the stub. In the end though I figured it out and it was a good learning experience overall. 

My final thoughts about my experience of editing a stub on wikipedia was great overall but I still think that wikipedia could find a better way for us to edit stubs. I feel wikipedia can be a good source for citing as long as you check the resources at the bottom of each article to see how reliable it is. I believe my article can be used as a good source for citing as well. 

Facebook getting professional!

At the beginning of this week our ALES 204 class was asked to create another facebook page for business/professional use. I never really thought of facebook as anything more than just another social media tool to connect with friends and family and because of this i really didnt even know how to attempt making a professional page. As I started to create my first business facebook page it became easier and easier to see what was need on the page and why it should be kept separate from my personal facebook page. This is because employers may decide to look up your facebook profile before hand and they do not need to see what goes on in your personal life like the parties you went to and the comments your friends leave on your page. This just isn't professional which is why there should be a separate page from your personal one that portrays your skills, accomplishments and what your goals in life are. While looking at my other classmates blogs i found i wasn't the only one who thought this way as seen in my classmate Maureen's blog she too thinks that we should have a separate facebook page for these reasons.

Now that my professional facebook page has been completed you can see it as kind of an online resume. It contains informations about my education, what I aspire to achieve in life and about me personally and my interests. Also it leaves out anything that is unprofessional or negative towards me. In time I will also add to this profile more information I may have left out or have accomplished later on in life. Now that i'm in university and almost towards the end of my degree it got me thinking that this is a really good way to get myself out there as social media is playing a big role these days. This page will allow me to have another way of attracting or contacting more employers, colleagues and clients and keep me connected to my field of work.

I've learned a lot from creating this page and how social media can be used for more than just personal fun. As class goes on i'm excited to see what else social media can help us with. Here is a link to my flickr page containing my professional profile as well.

Hello Everyone!

Hi there! My name is Jia-Feng Hon and i'm a 4th year student at the u of a but i'm only in my 3rd year in the nutrition and food science program. After i took a health ed class and a nutrition class i became interested in food and health and transferred over from sciences. I plan on transferring over to the nutrition major next year and try to go for the dietitian internship.

When it comes to my field of study in nutrition, communication play a big role. Dietitians and nutritionists are interacting with people daily and need to be kept up with the latest news through email, newspapers, internet and etc. Also these kinds of communication help up keep connected with other people in our field and patients all around the world.