Anastasia+Trofimova+(Analysis)

Creating and maintaining a communal Wiki page turned out to be more interesting than I originally expected. I was surprised by the amount of knowledge and facts that our class possessed together as a whole, compared to any separate individual. It became an enjoyable and educational experience, also since I never had the chance to use Wikis before.

The setup of the Wikispaces site made it easy to create information in an organized manner, since all text was automatically formatted to look the same. The templates that already existed for the user made the work enjoyable and more focused on content, rather than technological difficulties. In the words of Joan-Vinyl Cox, it was a “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get) process. Spelling mistakes or conforming the layout to look similar for all pages were not tweaked automatically, so they had to be done manually. Adding diversity to the layout using pictures was also something that had to be done manually. It was very efficient to have your work edited and proofread by other people to get the most accurate facts and the best layout.

My individual contributions included 3 pages of content, and tweaking of some minor spelling mistakes that I noticed in the table of contents and other students’ pages. The information pages I created were: E-mail Monitoring and ISP Providers (International). Both were researched extensively on, and I’ve learned a lot of new information. Also I contributed to the discussions, and initially placed my third page there by mistake.

The experience was educational in regards to both factual information and technological skills. I learned many novel things in the realm of communication and information technology, as well as several biographies of famous authors, like Michael Focault and others. What I found dissatisfying though was the fact that like all things technological, Wikispaces didn’t work properly at times. For example, on the Macintosh computers at Sheridan, it did not allow me to edit anything, presenting “undefined” in the edit window instead of the current data that was already there. Inserting Visual Editor elements, like the horizontal rule or images option was also unavailable. If this problem was to be solved, the experience would be so much more enjoyable for me and my peers.

Overall I believe this experience should become mandatory for all students in the Communication, Culture and Information Technology program. It provides the necessary skills in using the current communication technologies of today that are integral in our field of study and future professions. It is more efficient than previous setups of group collaboration, where the group members would need to synchronize their time and travel to a physical location to meet and work on a project. Wikispaces provides the opportunity for a purely work-based environment, leaving out distractions and constraints of time and geography, and achieving more quality-oriented results.