MenC+AandR

=Analysis & Reflection=

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Contributions
Some of my contributions include the creation of 3 new wiki-pages: myware, global cultural flows, and a summary of the Chapter 14 readings. The Chapter 14 summary is not intended for marks, but rather an extra resource for classmates. For the other two, I thought were topics that were not yet explored on our wikispace, but topics I found to be very relevant to digital innovations and cultural transformations. My other contributions include wikilinks between related topics such as spyware/myware/surveillance and global cultural flows/global village/globalization, addition of various table of contents, anchors, navigation menus to improve ease of use, added pictures to improve the overall aesthetics. I also collaborated/added information to some wikispaces but avoided drastically changing the content of the information.

Reflection
I found it interesting that in the process of trying to improve the wikispace, you learn a great deal (about wikis and about the topics themselves). For instance, when reading up on the history of Baidu on the ccit205 personal wikispace, there was a brief statement about NASDAQ. I was not aware of what that was, so I searched it on wikipedia and sure enough, I found that NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) was a U.S. electronic stock market. I felt that not many people may know exactly what NASDAQ was, so therefore, I created an external link that connected the Baidu wikispace to the NASDAQ wikispace.

This episode illustrates how an online community can grow quickly and vastly. With internal and external links, you immediately connected to the world within clicks.

The concept of six degrees of separation is a theory that claims that everyone on this planet is linked to one another through a chain of social acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. I think the wikispace concept is very much like that. Each wikispace created is eventually linked to a number of other pages (within and outside of that community) so that eventually, you could visit every single page without ever having to go to the table of contents or hitting return on your browser.

In a nutshell, I found that the wikispace assignment was a great way to generate involvement, encourage collaboration, create a community, and inspire to create more work. It was an overall great and inspiring learning experience.

Suggestions
Because wikispaces are not individually-authored material, it is difficult to maintain consistency in appearance and content. For example, some people may prefer the line separators before the subheading and some may prefer it to be after or, an individual chooses to create anchors instead of having a table of contents. To improve on the cohesiveness of the wiki-community, an outline or structural guidelines may help.