Pauline+Liao

Individual Contributions

 * Content
 * Pages I initiated:
 * Child Online Safety, Innovation, WYSIWYG
 * Miscellaneous – Who is the Real Mike Jones?
 * Administrative – Journal Assignment
 * Community maintenance; some of which are:
 * Made internal Wikilinks between related pages and with my own pages.
 * Created external links for the list in “Canada’s Best Employers.”
 * Added more information on “Google” page.
 * Overall edits within pages: spelling, punctuation, capitalization, organization.
 * Edited the navigation bar.

Reflections & Observations
I personally found it pretty easy to start working with Wikispaces because everything was pretty straightforward. It took me a couple of minutes to understand the entire layout and how things operated, from creating new pages, formatting, creating internal and external links, inserting images, etc.

Some problems that I observed:
 * If two people are editing a page at the same time, the final page seems to lose some of the content (unless someone goes to the history, to see what’s missing and adds it in).
 * It was kind of hard for me to actually stop editing, i.e. making internal Wikilinks, because there are so many pages that have linking opportunities; edits are endless.
 * I noticed that some students created more than 3 content pages, the assignment should have had a concrete minimum/maximum number; because there would just be too many topics, or topics that other students could have done.
 * I also noticed that there are some topics that are done twice; perhaps, students could have included their additional information to the original topic, instead of creating a second page.

Suggestions and Ideas
Wikispaces is a great alternative to other online e-learning web spaces, like WebCT or CCNet. The fact that everyone involved, students and teaching staff, can collaboratively work on the content is an innovative idea. Also, as long as there are proper guidelines.

Suggestions for future CCT205 courses, if using Wikispaces again:
 * A clear outline of minimum/maximum number of content pages; there was some confusion at the beginning, until the professor cleared things at a later date, but students had already submitted their topics.
 * Guidelines about not adding double content pages.
 * Students need to keep an open mind when working with Wikispaces; for instance, when other students edit their original content.
 * Students should try to start early on the project, in that way they have the opportunity to choose their topics; instead of doing it later, when most of the topics have been taken.