Analysis+and+Reflection-Hina+Afzal

For this wikipedia assignment I created my own page on “The Network society”, where I explained the shift from the industrial society to the post industrial society where networking is a key feature. I also put forth the major features of this modern information society. These features include: the global economy, information economy, network enterprise, transformations of work and employment and social polarization and exclusion. Further more, as a member of wikipedia I was obligated to contribute my knowledge into the community in a collaborative manner and so I was involved in editing (adding/deleting/making better) other articles contributed by other wikipedia members. I worked on various topics including: online gaming, globalization, e-bay, viral marketing, msn messenger, the new economy etc. These contributions to other member’s work helped in the consolidation of the material and made it detailed and thorough. The information added by other members was fairly reliable as the information was properly cited and referenced. The use of wikipedia was a very strong learning experience. It is a virtual environment where it is easy to obtain information and gives us the ability to contribute our knowledge as well. However, the part that I felt uncomfortable with was that any one could edit/remove your work. This was my first experience with wikispaces and that is why I felt that when people can remove your work, it seems like a waste of time and effort. In a sense it’s a good environment where people can add onto information to end up with a full fledge detailed information package, but then again one thinks of the credibility of this information. In addition if these spaces are not monitored it could give way to negative personal comments, flame wars etc. However, ccit205 wikispaces was an exception, as all the members knew that they were being monitored and inappropriate actions would result in penalty. Another thing that I noticed was that when people were in the middle of creating a page, they put an attention stub requesting people not to edit their work until they were done with their part and I think this was quite respected by other members and their work wasn’t interfered with until their final piece was ready for editing. This idea confused me a bit, because in a sense all of us are here to edit whatever we feel the necessity to edit, but at the same time the owner of the page has been working hard to get the information on there. I was confused whether this idea of having a “do not edit before completion” stub was appropriate or not. I think CCIT students should use the knowledge from wikipedia and use this collaborative concept in other courses as well. The wikipedia space worked really well for us as a class, and I think that all of us worked in a very collaborative manner to create, edit and eventually consolidate the material on the net for dissemination.