Our Group Wiki - week 7

Here is Our Group Wiki Project

This was a really good experience! I've never created a wiki before and it was a lot of fun to explore this with a couple of classmates. It really does create a new way for people to collaborate, share, and communicate.

I thought it was a relatively easy way to collaborate - we left messages for each other on the wiki, but I found that our main form of communication was email via our course site. I think next time I create a wiki with students or colleagues, I will use the "comment" section (of the wiki) more - I think it might make it easier to communicate with my collaborators on a regular basis.

But overall, I thought we did a good job on our wiki and worked well as a group. It's given me a new appreciation for peer editing. It's not easy editing someone else's work - I can see that students may have difficulty with this because a) they may not know how to edit others' work b) they may not feel comfortable changing someone's work c) they may lack the social skills needed to give constructive feedback.

These issues I've listed above doesn't deter me from using wikis with students; rather I see how important it is for them to go through the process of peer editing - it definitely is a skill that needs to practised and guided (if they are to get better at it).

Now that we've created a wiki, I feel a lot more confident that I can help students with such a project in the future. It took a bit of time to familiarize myself with the navigation (such as creating pages, linking it to the front page, creating links in the sidebar, embedding URLs), but once I was comfortable with that, it was quite easy and fun. I think, for my next wiki project, I'm going to try wikispaces...I like the layout/organization that I've seen so far in the other groups' wikis...so it's definitely worth exploring.

Next step, see if I can convince a colleague to experiment with me for our next collaborative project...