My wiki wiki impressions about a wiki wiki learning...

HI everybody,

I am going to tell you my positive impressions about what we learned so far by exploring the wikisphere and editing our articles on a public wiki called Edutech.

First, I think that this activity fostered a multi-steps collaboration: between me and my classmates, but also between us and the Edutech’s online community. In simpler words, me and my classmates worked together in order to find useful information in the web space and then edit our article on Edutech. By editing it we had to pay attention to what other people (in this case some students of blogging English1) had previously published on Edutech about the same subject. We integrated our article with the previous one and then add the new information.

Collaboration is a key word when dealing with wiking. Even if you worked by yourself and edit an article, you know that someone is probably going to read it and probably integrate it with his personal contribution. The creation of a collaborative environment is one of the characteristics of wiking, there is in fact another important aspect: multi-directional sharing and exchanging of information among a ‘boundariesless’ online community, which has basically a common task: the construction of knowledge. We represent only one of the authors of what we edited on a public wiki rather than the only author. In my opinion the logo of wikipedia, which is a world made up of puzzles sums up and graphically represents this idea and our activity.

Second, I think that this activity has also many positive effects on our language learning because we read a great deal of articles and visit many web pages which are obviously written in English. This enables us to enrich our English dictionary with a lot of new technical words and at the same time use them when we write our contribution. Wiking is an excellent activity for our English learning because we exercise all these language aspects together: we read, we analyse and concentrate on the key information, we summarize and integrate them with our ideas and finally we publish them.

This new method of learning is stimulating and effective. Moreover, besides improving our English we also improved our technological knowledge. Thanks to this activity I got more familiar with the wikisphere and the wiki’s writing features; in particular I learned something more about quotating, citing the web pages and evaluating the web sources.

Wiking also fostered our critical approach towards what we read because we had to add some information to what other people, before us, had written about the same subject. We used a critical method, we took notes about what was not clear and modified them, and finally we integrated our contribution in order to make the entire article more organic and exhaustive and avoid any unnecessary information or repetitions.

Finally, in my opinion editing an article represents a challenge: you must be as concise, clear and informative as possible because you are addressing to a worldwide online community; everyone can potentially be your addressee and his/her positive response represents a success for you!

This is all about my analysis,
Take care you all!!!

Bye bye
Francesca!!

Editing an article on a wiki

HI EVERYBODY,

The task of our weekly activity was to collaborate in order to write an article on a wiki. Me, Annalisa and Lucrezia (my classmates) contributed to Edutech, a wiki which deals with a great amount of technological and educational subjects such as: e-learning, blogs, podcasts, ect. ). We chose a subject among those of Edutech and decided to explore the world of podcasting in order to find something interesting and original to add on Edutech. In other words something which would be useful and interesting not only for us but for the online community, since anyone can read it.

The main steps that we follow for our work are:

1- We explored the world of podcasting basically by reading many articles published on the Net, we were particularly interested in “educational podcasting”;
2- We wrote down some notes about the most interesting information;
3- We compared our notes;
4- We put together the most significant information and wrote an article, then we published it on Edutech.

This activity was really interesting because we improved our knowledge about the wikisphere. It was quite hard to put together our information and write something in a clear and concise manner, because there were many interesting things to say, but we couldn’t write too much (it would sound redundant!). Writing on a wiki is a project in progress because anyone can read and add new information to articles or perhaps correct what is unclear.
This activity fosters collaboration among us, furthermore, I think that it is a stimulating way to learn English since we are actively participating to our learning. Besides collaboration, it is a powerful tool to share and exchange information to a worldwide level.
Finally, thanks to this weekly activity we improve at the same time our technological knowledge.

If you want to read our article on Edutech just click on the following link:
ARTICLE


Don’t hesitate to leave your comment, remember it is free!!

(Source of the picture: http://www.ewarna.com/images/licensing/collaboration.jpg)


Bye Bye
Francesca

WIKING: a new type of virtual communication based on collaboration

HELLO EVERYBODY!!


We have just made another exiting virtual journey on the Web by exploring the wikisphere. But what’s a wiki? What are the most significant characteristics of this web genre? And what are the purposes and benefits of wikis? I will try to answer briefly to these questions and above all I will focus on the striking features of wikis.

A wiki is a type of website devoted to collaborative writing. It is a place where contributors have almost equal opportunities: they can EASILY enter, write what they think and know, add or remove some information or correct what other people have previously edited. Moreover, a wiki is a never-ending project! This type of website fosters people’s collaboration in order to achieve a common goal. A wiki is an easy editable website because you don’t need to know HTML: you write your content by means of a simple markup language by using a web browser. Moreover, another feature that distinguishes wikis from online chats or forums, is that you can contribute to the wiki without a preliminary registration. However, you can also find some private wikis on the Web, which require users authentification to edit something.

A wiki is a hypertext medium which is made up of many pages, it provides no-linear navigation because it contains a great deal of hyperlinks to other pages. This type of website also provides some tools which are useful for monitoring the constantly changing state of wiki. Furthermore, there is a place where contributors can discuss and resolve some disagreements which might arise over wiki content.

As far as the language is concerned contributors use a simple language often made up of short sentences. The audience consists of people from all over the world and for this reason the language should be simple and comprehensible. However, sometimes you can also find a formal register: this depends on the author and the subject of the article. Wikis are available in a large number of foreign languages. This makes it possible for different people from all over the world to collaborate for the achievement of a shared goal. If there are many users, the online wiki community benefits more.

The most significant example of a wiki is WIKIPEDIA. It is an online encyclopedia, one of the net’s most popular reference sites. Everything which is written on Wikipedia has been written by an online community; its entries are freely editable and you don’t need a registration to publish on it.

VANDALISM AND COLLABORATIVE PRINCIPLES

As we have previously seen the open philosophy of public wikis enables everyone to edit on them without any registration. But if a lot of people find this feature exiting at the same time other users, who are not well intentioned, might use the wiki to commit vandalism. However, since the wiki’ s online community is very large, contributors pick them out and correct any errors.

It is advisable that all wikis’ contributors follow some common rules in order to create a productive collaborative environment. On wikipedia you can find a link to Policies and Guidelines which users should follow for the achievement of the common goal; moreover, on the "wikiquette" page there are a series of principles which Wikipedia and wiki contributors in general should keep in mind and follow in order to behave and interact appropriately with other wiki users.

Some important principles included on wikiquette are:

- be polite and civil
- remember that wiki users come from all over the world
- be careful of the words that you choose
- respect the views and opinion of all wiki members
- work toward agreement
- be prepared to apologize
- don’t ignore questions
- help to mediate disagreements between others


After having briefly analysed the striking features of this quite new web genre, I think that wiki-ing helps wiki users to become more collaborative and flexible. It fosters the creation of an online community; each member brings benefits to the others and helps the whole community achieve of a common goal. I would like to suggest some wikis that I visited and found interesting:

-Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia editable by anyone
-Wikinews: free news that you can write
-Wiktionary: you can collaborate to write a multilingual dictionary

That all for the moment, enjoy your trip in the wikisphere too!!!

If you have any comments please don’t hesitate to write to me!
Bye bye

Francesca