Wiki Reflection - Give it a Shot

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.