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!!