Initial Impressions
The first time I worked in the wiki, I have never created a wiki entry before, let alone create a wiki for collaborative work. Choosing the best place to do the wiki was a research assignment on its own. I looked for ease of access for members of the team and a good organizing page. I choose Wikispaces because it offered what looked to be the best place for this type of collaboration. Unfortunately, this will not be a choice in the future due to the site ending. However, for now the site offers ease of access and organizational features that aide in the collaboration project. For this site, outside collaboration is not allowed. While this is a good feature for closed team collaboration, I don’t think this would be a good option for my future needs for wikis. In my limited knowledge of wikis, public collaboration is a feature I’d be more interested in pursuing. The first part of the assignment is sharing files for future work and creating pages and adding files seemed to be easy in Wikispaces and I was pleased with the outcome. My initial impression of the site is good, and I look forward to working in the site in this collaborative team method.
Middle Impressions
I chose to write the literature review in Microsoft Word, because I’m more comfortable with its word processing features. This allowed me to make sure spelling and grammar were acceptable before trying to use a new word processor that is within the site. Copying the pieces of the review into the wiki proved easy and quick. I have to admit, at first I put the essay in the wrong place, however, it was easy to correct. I’m happy with the results of the wiki. I will need to go in and edit the wiki for formatting and other things. I’m hoping doing this will prove to be as easy as my previous encounters with the site. Although, formatting does not always offer the same ease as word processing software. Internet sites are versatile to many different devices; therefore, it is difficult to format in a certain way. This is because screen size and resolution change on various devices.
I’m still disheartened that this wiki will not continue to live after a few months, because it will no longer be providing the service. It alerts the users to this when they first go onto the site. This means that in order to save the current work, the creators will need to save it to another place. Long-term collaboration will not be in the future for this project.
Final Impressions
Reviewing the Wikispaces submissions, I noticed some definite formatting issues. I suspected that due to the web coding this would be an issue. I attempted to do a bit of formatting, however, as suspected the coding did not honor the formatting when publishing from the editing window to the published page. I could have looked into a back-door way of getting formatting to take in the environment. On some webpages there are ways to go behind the site and look at the actual coding in order to correct and make paragraphs formatting consistent and predictable. However, since there isn’t going to be long term use of this site, there isn’t a reason to delve so deeply in this environment. I did however, gently go through and be sure that formatting was consistent and predictable between paragraphs.
Overall, these things were expected and known before beginning the assignment. I am pleased with the final product even with its limitations. I hope that this will be a project that will transfer easily into K-12 classrooms. The ease of putting information into the site is promising. However, just as the assignment foretells, and the personal experience of the project, the technical skills needed are not overly intense. I am concerned that there will be academic skills that students will need in order to complete a similar assignment.
