Thomas+Lee+-+Analysis+and+Reflection

The experience of the Wikispaces Research and Development project was very interactive and thought provoking. Collaboration is a theme that is persistent in the CCIT program, and I think that applying it to a digital innovation course is a great idea. At the beginning, I was very lost as to where to start editing. There was just so much content that it was difficult to find somewhere to put in my two cents or make changes.

I started the Wikispaces project by editing administrative details of the space. For example, I fixed some broken links and I added some feedback to the test results. Since there was a wealth of information already on the Wikispace (some people started very early), I had quite a bit of material to work with and edit. To start out my content portion of the assignment, I created three “stub” pages containing a basic outline of the information I wanted to communicate. The three topics I chose to focus on were Online Journals (and how they differentiate from blogs), Privacy Invasions, and the Got’em Xanga Tracker. My favorite one is the Got’em Xanga Tracker because it truly is a digital innovation that is at the fingertips of Internet users. Some edits were made by other students to give me better direction with regard to my content. I failed to use subheadings in my original versions, and another student corrected that for me. That made adding more information easier when the whole page is split up into separate parts.

In regard to the collaborative writing experience, I found it to be very useful. In the future, CCIT graduates in the workforce will have to collaborate with others. The media and IT sectors are largely run on a teamwork basis. Great ideas and innovations are best when they come from the collective efforts of a skilled group of people. CCIT classes at Sheridanare filled with people who have very diverse skills and hard work ethic. The Wikispace community reflected this, as can be seen by the large amount of changes that occurred everyday. Although students were motivated by the main goal of achieving a high score on the assignment, it demonstrated that in a Wikispace everyone is involved. I personally found that other students’ ideas were able to complement my own. An analogy to this would be that the students in CCT 205 are all like pieces of a grand puzzle, and at the end what can be seen is a wealth of structured and organized information regarding digital innovations. Even though we are being marked individually in terms of our efforts, I thought of this Wikispaces project as a group project. In reality, it truly was. Each of our individual contributions adds up to a whole, and the ability to edit anything and everything on the Wikispaces site makes it that much more of a group effort.

In consideration of future CCIT students, a few ideas and suggestions can be considered. A chat function on the site would be a really great tool for the Wikispace. I found that many people were on the website at the same time as me. With a chat function, we would be able to talk to each other about the changes we make on one another’s pages and about administrative details of the course. I personally do not have a big list of CCIT people on my MSN Messenger account, so such a tool would be great to have on the Wikispace. Another helpful tool for starting out on the Wikispace project would be sample pages of what kind of information is expected, the format of the information, and bibliographical templates. This would be a tremendous aid to people who are lost as to where to start looking for information, and how to write and format their Wikipages. A final suggestion would be to evaluate students at more than one junction. This type of evaluation scheme would prevent people from leaving the project to the last minute. Unfortunately, many people do leave a project of this nature to the last minute when the project is only being evaluated at the end. It creates a false sense of security for last-minute rushers.

Overall, the Wikispaces project was a great learning experience, and hopefully future CCIT students will have as much fun with this as I did.