My Rollercoaster Adventure: Building/ Editing a Wiki

The Task:

To create a wiki entry and to edit a wiki entry written by one of your class mates. Possible topics include: entries on each of the text books that we will reading and assignments that we will be doing. This assignment, like so many in this course, has been left purposefully vague. I am interested in what sorts of community/structure arises \spontaneously" from this exercise. The following questions are meant as a minimum level of content in your report. Please record your general impressions and ideas about this technology, go beyond the rather spare yes/no questions I require as a baseline.

The Questions:

1. Which entry did you write? which one did you edit?

I wrote and additional blurb to the separate Shuen page my entry included a bit more detail in the Summary section. In addition, I also included how the class engaged in the text and the the discussions the novel facilitated (for example, the discussion we had about which fictional company/service we would create in order to make a profit using Web 2.0 strategies). I was surprised at how much anxiety making a addition to the page created for me. Something about the fact that everyone could see (via the history function) who had changed what, and also the fact that I knew that everyone would be engaging directly with the wikis. Unlike, the blogs were everyone has the addresses, but no ones blog is directly displayed on Cicada the wiki entry's have a more blatant sense of being exposed. Also, unlike a Wikipedia entry there is no sense of anonymity.

2. How hard was it to make an entry?

It was fairly easy to make an entry. I had no trouble assessing a page, but I know other members of the class did because other people were in the middle of making edits. The only difficult part was the anxiety of know that your edits were going to be clearly visible by the entire class.

3. Did you notice the opportunities for social interaction? Did you speak with the student whose entry you edited? Did anyone speak to you about editing your entry? Was there any sort of spontaneous order that resulted from this exercise?

4. What is your general impression of this tool?

I actually, felt this would be a very useful tool for student currently in the class, but also it would be a very useful tool for students in following generations of this class. For example, whenever I am writing/researching/reading for a class one of the first things I do is look up (either on Wikipedia or on the web) the author and the novel to get a general sense of what I'm about to dive into. For future students I imagine it would be very helpful to get a sense of what they can expect from the class in terms of readings and assignments. In addition, this is not a general body of knowledge created by people who may have vested interests in what is said about a subject. These wikis are created by students who have knowledge of the class and are unbiased to the authors and the class itself .