Reflection for Week 11

For this week lesson, I have learnt about the citizen journalism. The term citizen journalism refers to wide range of activities in which everyday people contribute information or commentary about news events. From my point of view, citizen journalism has its pros and cons. In the evaluation criteria of the Internet resources, I have learnt the different types of criteria. They are the purpose, coverage, authority, accuracy, currency, accessibility, presentation and arrangement, usability and overall quality.

The criterion that I used to evaluate STOMP website is accuracy. The reason why I chose this criterion was because I think that the reliability of the news is a significant criterion. The accuracy of the news in STOMP captures my attention. I wondered if sources of the news in the STOMP are independent sources or abstract from other sources. I think that some of the news uploaded on STOMP has contents of biasness.

For example, some news in the STOMP website included ugly commuters not giving up their seats to the needy people. They do give some evidence of the incident by providing pictures or videos. However, the description of the situation is mostly biased. How would I know if people just randomly took pictures of someone sitting on a seat and accused him/her of not giving up his/her seats to the needy people? They should give a more reliable description instead because what I think is that these people are not sharing news. Their main purpose is just complaining and that is when the facts of the news became unreliable and thus leading to people thinking that citizen journalism is not really good.

From this activity, I have learnt more about the STOMP website, the evaluation criteria and how to apply these criteria on websites and even on my research topic. Most importantly, I have learnt how citizen journalism should be properly created.
If I were to create my own version of "STOMP" in relation to my research topic, I will apply citizen journalism in a way that it will look more attractive. I will want my research topic to be logically organised and categorised so that it catches the readers’ attention. I will also want my research contents with clear headings to be easy to read.

I will include services such as no offensive remarks and unbiased contents in my STOMP. This is to ensure that my STOMP effectively addresses the implications for teaching and learning of citizen journalism mentioned in the article. It helps to earn the readers' trust as they believe that the news they are reading are much more reliable.