Individual Reflection

Edits to the Wiki:

Minor edits to: CRAP, Flew: New Media as Cultural Technologies, Flew: What’s New About New Media, Collective Intelligence, and The Ethics Challenge

Major edits to: Definitions and Copyright

Links in: OLD/NEW media, Digital Writing and New Media, Flew: What’s New About New Media, Jenkins>Key Terms, Appropriation, Collective Intelligence, Jenkins>Issues, The Ethics Challenge, and Jenkins

I also did a major edit to Jenkins and didn’t realize until I started this post that it never got saved. Oh well.

Reflection:

What are you most proud of in the entire wiki?

I don’t have strong feelings about any of it, but the “Issues” and “Key Terms” pages under Jenkins were pretty good.

What are you most proud of in terms of your contributions to the wiki?

Again, I don’t feel strongly about any of them, but I suppose the internal linking required the most effort.

What do you wish you had time to further expand, include, or revise in the wiki?

One thing I noticed was use of the first person in a few pages, and I tried to rewrite some of that. I would work on that and on creating a more neutral, informative tone similar to Wikipedia. Hopefully in such a way that the internal links would be more robust, as well.

When did you get stuck while working on the wiki? How did you overcome your problem?

Mostly, I just didn’t want to do it. My own apathy has long been my greatest enemy, and I just wasn’t interested in this project at all.How I overcame it is kind of a tough question, as “I just did” presumably won’t suffice. I went through and made a to-do list, and while it didn’t contain everything I could (and probably should) have done, it at least got me to do something.

What did you learn about yourself as a collaborative writer? What collaborative skills do you want to work on in the future?

That I’m maybe a little too timid about editing other people’s writing, though part of that may just be the apathy kicking in again. Once I decided to change something, I didn’t get hung up on the fact that I was changing someone else’s work, I just couldn’t figure out how exactly I wanted to write it, which is always a challenge anyway. In the future I think I need to get more comfortable with the idea of scrapping most of someone’s work and doing it myself.

 Discuss at least four of the course outcomes you feel you worked towards with this assignment. Provide evidence of your learning by pointing to specific aspects of the wiki or your project journal.

It would be hard to come out of this project without making progress on the collaborative problem-solving front. Our in-class meeting in particular was very useful. I tried with limited success to employ the CRAP principles on the pages I edited, particularly repetition in the pages that are essentially lists, by keeping headers and links similar. I did a little bit of play, in that some aspects of this particular wiki software were different enough from other wikis I’ve worked on that I had to figure things out by trial and error. Including a major edit that didn’t get saved, without my noticing. The wiki as a whole is a decent example of collective intelligence, especially considering the week where we all read different things and provided the initial pages for them—that wouldn’t have been done by any of us individually.

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