Give it a Shot
I have heard about wiki’s, but I
have never worked on one until this class. I was a bit excited to learn something new to add to my
technology skills. One of our
group members, Kelly Sparks, who has had some previous experience with wiki’s
made a practice wiki for the rest of the group members to use in order to get
familiar with it. My initial
reaction to the wiki is that it needed some serious updating, especially after
using Google Docs extensively in EDUC 633. I reminded myself to give it a shot, it cannot be that bad.
Think again, even with the limited number of choices to select on our practice
wiki, it took some searching to figure out how to post on that page. Kelly posted additional instructions to
try out, which I read but still was not confident or comfortable using within the
wiki.
Kelly then created another wiki
that we used for our literature review.
I made a Google Doc to put our proposal in so that we could comment and
make suggestions to the outline that Corinne Blake started for us. It was then transferred into the wiki
page, not by me of course. I was
still trying to become familiar using it.
The wiki page did not have the user friendliness that I have experienced
using Google Docs, Sky Drive, and Weebly to name a few.
Try Again
As
a group we decided to keep our literature review in Google Docs to complete
both the writing and editing aspect of it. We assigned sections to complete, however, all three of us
added and deleted information as we saw fit. All three of us read all of the
research so that we could bounce multiple ideas off of one another in order to
synthesizes the literature.
When it got time to add information back into the wiki I offered to
create the wiki pages (e.g. team members, abstract, introduction, etc.). Yes, I was impressed that I figured
that out, and then the real frustration began. I could not rearrange the wiki pages; the wiki just placed
them wherever it thought was best.
I reverted to the help of a group member. I felt anytime I was being “helpful” I was creating more
work for the other group member.
Even searching the Internet for written information, and shockingly even
YouTube, was not very helpful when trying to figure out the wiki issues on my
own. This hindered my learning a
bit, as I could have spent more time developing a deeper
understanding within augmented reality (AR), which was the topic for our
literature review, instead I was spending time trying to figure out how to manipulate a wiki.
Finishing to the Best of My Abilities
The third time is a charm,
right? I was hopeful that the
battles the wiki and I have had might possibly be coming to an end. Not true, my final task for the wiki
was to copy and paste information from our Google Doc into the Wiki. The wiki does not keep any of the
previous formatting, which I did not know until I started transferring the
material over into our wiki. This
was very frustrating considering we had a 24-page document that was broken down
into 11 wiki pages. I had to put
in spaces, bold and italicize the font, and center the title for each
section. The last straw came when
I was working on editing in the references section. I had gone through and italicized all of the titles for
books and the title of the periodicals.
Once that was completed I highlighted all of it to change both the font
and size. As soon as I did that it
took away all of the italicizing, and I had to start all over again. Therefore, I find the wiki extremely
inflexible and I have no intentions of using this in my career unless the
format becomes user-friendlier. If
I am having a hard time grasping how to navigate the wiki, I can only image the
difficulty my students would have.
Final Thoughts
Without two great team members,
Kelly and Corinne, I think that most of my blond hair would be grey, not that
there is anything wrong with grey hair. Growing up with technology, you could even consider myself a “digital native” (Prensky,
2005). However, I have a hard time using something that I feel is outdated, especially
when there are other options available that are free (always a bonus to a
teacher) and much more user friendly.
I do thank each and every one of
you for taking time to read my viewpoints on the wiki. I truly hope you all had
a fantastic Thanksgiving. I am
very thankful and grateful for getting to work with many of you who are
inspiring me to become a better student, and teacher.
Reference
Prensky, M.
(2005). Listen to the Natives. Educational
Leadership, 63(4), 8-13.
