Bibi+Rafeena+Haniff

=My Contribution=

Issues Online was the topic I chose to tackle for my Wiki Space assignment. I wanted to focus specifically on the issue of online censorship. I found this subject to be of great interest to me because I feel that we are living in a time when people are determining what is acceptable on the Internet and what people will have to adapt to. Like the invention of the television or telephone, people are still becoming used to what they have opened themselves up to – both costs and benefits. As one example, television allowed a variety of material to be beamed right into people’s homes, expanding people’s knowledge and experience of the world. The cost of this exposure was that parents had to become more responsible for ensuring that their kids were watching appropriate programming. The Internet is far more influential than television, I believe, because has created a new virtual universe. This universe has laws that are broad and still being created to adapt to the world around us. Borders between countries have opened up like never before, and people have access to an unprecedented amount of information. So not only does the Internet have to create laws to protect people, but it also has to find a way to incorporate societies and cultures into the Internet. In my assignment I attempt to address both sides of the issue of online censorship. I hope to show that it isn’t just a black and white situation.

In addition, I have also created the “Firewall” and “XML” pages. Some examples of the pages I have modified include “Barriers to Access”, “Blogs”, “Consumers use of Online Information”, “Non users of Interest”, and “Pod casting”. I have tried to create and modify more pages, but as stated in my reflection section, the Wiki Space information changes so quickly it is sometimes hard to keep up.

=Reflections=

When I first started using the Wiki Space, I felt like I was learning how to play poker all over again. I had to adapt to the overall Wiki Experience and learn new rules such as Wiki Netiquette, which includes guidelines on setting up new pages and editing the pages afterwards. For example, I found working with the table in the “Help” section to be hard at first, but after finding out about the “Text Editor” button, editing information and formatting became much easier. The most challenging part of this assignment was finding a topic that was interesting whilst ensuring that no one had written about it yet. It seemed like a race to get the most interesting topics up first. If I wasn’t first then I’d only be able to add my information to another person’s page, and this would not count as my assignment idea. I became very frustrated when I’d stay up all night writing about an interesting topic and then find it online the next day. Equally frustrating was putting up a topic and then having someone filling in information about it seconds later.

The benefit of the Wiki Space was that I was able to learn about a variety of topics. This made it much more fun to research the different subjects, since it turned out to be huge project done by the whole class. It was also good that there was no delay when information was updated, because it would have been even more frustrating to look at an assignment the next day and see that 12 people have written about the same thing.

=Suggestions=

What I would suggest for future assignments similar to the Wiki Space assignment is to have people do this assignment in groups. With broad topics already in existence, this will allow people to begin working on the Wiki Space as soon as possible and not wonder how or where to start; this would also ease up some of the frustration that I experienced. I feel that the community building part of the Wiki Space allows the information to be more comprehensive and accurate; however people should be aware of the Wiki Netiquette and that the general format of the Wiki must be consistent.