I found this assignment to be very interesting for several reasons. The first was this concept of a group project in which the partners never met in person. This is my first online class so I guess this is a concept I am trying to grasp on multiple levels. I thought it was going to be difficult to try and form a cohesive Wiki entry, but much to my surprise it wasn’t. Denise and I used e-mail to communicate and that worked well. E-mail allowed us to share ideas back and forth as well as files and web links.
E-mail may not have proved as easy had we not had the topic we did. Denise and I decided to do a WikiHow page for “How to Survive a Study Abroad.” We chose this topic because she is currently on exchange from Australia and last year I participated in an exchange there. This made it easy for us to show this topic from opposite angles and provided us with an easy outline to work with on our page. Therefore we could both just write from our point of view and then put it together rather than having to try and combine research or opinions on a topic.
Wikipedia is “an online encyclopedia.” It is made up of a bunch of linked pages that guide the user from their searched topics on to related articles that might interest them as well. It was created by 150,000 volunteers from around the world. The site has over 2 million entries and doubles every year (Wagner, 2009). Wikipedia has branched out from its original site to create other website like Wiki How and BufWiki. One benefit of having and online encyclopedia is that it is much easier to change and update than print and bound books. I think it would be great if there was a way Wikipedia could be monitor for accuracy because I think it would provide a great tool to people who want to access information and do research right at their computers.
According to Royal and Kapila Wikipedia is currently the third most used site for news and information on the web (2008, p.139).You can find almost anything you need to know on one of these sites. This was another part of this assignment I thought was going to be very challenging. I thought it was going to be nearly impossible to find a subject that someone, somewhere in the world, hadn’t thought to post. Luckily, Denise and I were able to find a topic we had in common quite easily that no one else had.
The part of the assignment that I thought was the most interesting was that we were able to so easily create a page that is now accessible to millions of people around the world. It is weird to think that our page could come up in a Google search and people could read it and take my advice or thoughts to heart in their study abroad experience. Part of me likes that I have this ability for a couple reasons. One, when I was preparing to go abroad, the most helpful person I met along the way was the girl who was on exchange from the school I was going to be going to. She was able to answer all the questions I had, plus she was able to tell me things that the packets the international office gives out never would include. Therefore, I like that this page could possibly be helpful to someone who might not be able to have that kind of first hand knowledge. I also like this because one thing I have noticed is that people who haven’t had the kind of experience that studying abroad is, don’t really understand how much it impacts participants and they get sick of hearing about all the differences and culture shock you experienced. This Wiki is just another way to share this information to others who do want to know what I have to say because they want to know what to expect.
I think I find this so strange because it just goes to show how much stuff on the internet is made up by people with no expertise or real knowledge on a subject but how many people could see it and possibly think it was true or a fact. On the other hand, however, it is great that people who might have something out of the norm to share and have a medium to broadcast their thoughts. Prasarnphanich and Wager state in their article that Web 2.0 technologies have allowed for pages such as wikis or weblogs to be created. They believe that “wikis have allowed a very different for of collaboration.” It allows anyone to update and add to content on shared web based documents with no single ownership (2009,33).
As Wikipedia has made its climb in popularity, it is now heavily seen in academic work across the world. Colleges and Universities are having to make sure that students realize that this is not to be taken as fact because it has no editors or people who check its validity.
One article I found online said they believed it is dumb-ing down higher learning because its providing false information at the click of a mouse and students aren’t learning the correct facts (Badke, 2008).
Creating this Wiki page has been a good experience for me. I was very fascinated by our topic because I was interested to see how much mine and Denise’s experiences and opinions on how to survive a study abroad would differ and how much they would be the same, having done the opposite exchanges. Having never made a page like this before I found it very interesting to see how it was all set up and how the website worked. I found this assignment to be very beneficial in learning another aspect of Web 2.0. I think that this technology is one that is going to continue to amaze in how it is integrated into society’s day to day life and I look forward to seeing how it advances.
Sources
Badke, William, “What to Do With Wikipedia,” Trinity Western University. Vol 32 No. 2, Mar/Apr 2008.
Prasarnphanich, P., Wagner, C. (2009) The role of wiki technology and altruism in collaborative knowledge creation. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 33-41.
Royal, C., Kapila, D. (2008) What's on Wikipedia and what's not....?: Assessing completeness of information. Social Science Computer Review, 27, 138-148.
