mike_novak



toc

=Analysis & Reflection=

Oct 04 - Lorem ipsum.... Yeah... I got nothin.... no reflection yet. Just reading my book and looking for a comic book to analyze. Just toyed around with some graphics and made headers for the projects section to spruce things up. Still working on the Culture Jamming one. Besides that... I got nothin..

Question 1.
When first encountering wiki at the beginning of the course. > >
 * What do you think/feel about this collaborative learning environment ?
 * What are your expectations for yourself ?
 * If you have previously used wiki in another course, describe what you have previously learned and how you want to expand your understanding.
 * What can you contribute as an experienced participant?

I believe the wiki is a great tool and it rivals the platform of CCNet or WebCT. The wiki invites the sharing of information between students, invites contribution, discussion, and offers a friendly, less sterile environment the the other class platforms students are familiar with. I believe being able to build an environment visually that reflects the student community adds much to that appeal as well in contrast to the environments of CCNet or WebCT.

My expectations at the beginning of this course were to practice greater personal discipline in ongoing participation throughout the semester. I have learned from my previous experience that if there is a topic one has expertise in and wants to contribute, he is likely not the only one, and might be left the ability to only slightly contribute to that topic.

I have used the wiki platform in a previous course, so I was somewhat familiar with the concept of contribution and the collaborative effort it takes to build it. I suppose the aspects I was not all that proficient with was the technical things, such as using anchors and building a table of contents.

I believe my skills lie in the graphic design realm, and I have a good body of knowledge of some music and visual genres. Also, due to my positive outlook on the use of wikis for a class site platform, I believe it will always translate into my enthusiasm to contribute in areas that I can.

Question 2.
Think about the following and answer to the best of your ability: > >
 * How do you choose which postings to contribute or change? What do you look for?
 * What are your thoughts on adding, editing or re-arranging other people's work?
 * Do you regularly check your own postings for alterations? Has anyone changed your work and how have you felt about it?

For adding or contributing content, at times I would look through the table of contents to find areas to contribute to, or found the topic accidentally by clicking on a link in another topic. What I would look for were areas that I felt I had some expertise in as not to include false material, or assumed material. For the most part however, I tried to add my own sections that I felt were lacking in representation.

I think being able to add to, and edit other material is a very important feature of the wiki, and its greatest asset as a learning tool. For the most part, I think there is some unwritten etiquette and maliciousness (at least among the members in this wiki) is not evident. However, I feel that individuals, and myself included, feel a certain ownership over a topic they may have started, and at times get uncomfortable with others adding onto and improving their material. What one has to keep in mind, is that the topics are for all to consume, but also for all to alter into a larger body of knowledge. I believe that these quarrels were also minimal, and toward the end of the term most members have gotten used to the idea of their topic being modified by others. I feel that it is easier for one to accept a change in material that adds to the topic, rather then blatant attempt to blindly contribute to a fulfill class requirement that may not be at par with the knowledge of the person that may have started the topic, as well as altering the aesthetic or images/media the original poster may have included.

I would check the topics I have started or altered periodically for alterations, and at times was glad that others took the initiative to contribute to them when their contribution was constructive. I would at times start topics to give people places to contribute (Infomercials, Rocksteady), and to see what people would contribute. Although with the ability for others to alter your material comes the danger that an individual can delete a majority of your contribution in an attempt to post theirs. Now, for the most part I don't think that it is intentional with malicious intent, but I have heard of instances where members would start a topic and have their contribution vaporised and the topic hijacked of sorts. I suppose with the amount of people contributing, politics can arise, and it really just comes down to communication. In the event that I would change someone's content by a larger amount, I would generally leave a comment in the discussion area to explain why I felt it needed to be changed. In the same respect, in the event of having to revert my topic to an earlier version (when most of my content got deleted) I would attempt to include the individuals useful information, and offer my explanation of my actions in the discussion area. Though I am not sure if people actually check these discussion messages.

Question 3.
As a final reflection for the course, post your thoughts and ideas on:
 * challenges or limitations you experienced while working collaboratively on wiki
 * advantages or benefits from participating in this wiki
 * things about the course you thought worked well and/or suggested improvements

__**Challenges and Limitations:**__ In regard to the challenges and limitations of the visual. I believe the wiki is a fantastic platform for the ease of ability to contributing content. Where I found it challenging and limited is in the manner in which the content can be displayed. We are becoming more and more dependent on the visual representation of material, however the Wikispaces platform (and I point to Wikispaces for the sheer ignorance of using any other wiki actively) is very limited in being able to represent content in that way. I realize there may be some advantages to not offering much choice in font colour or sizing in keeping a constant aesthetic throughout the wiki, but slightly more freedom in being able to make fonts larger or smaller, in an assortment of even basic colours would definitely help in being able to draw to interesting points within a topic. Other areas of improvement to the platform would be; being able to send private messages to individual members (parallel to ones in some forums), being able to use bullets in the "a), b),..." format, a choice in visible or invisible lines of a table, and perhaps (but not most important) being able to "watermark" an image as a background, or change the colour of the background of the actual wiki page. It would also be nice if one could cut and paste out of a Word document and retain the formatting, such as bullets, bolded lettering, etc. On the positive side, I did enjoy being able to add embedded media from sources such as YouTube, and being able to link to existing images on the web as opposed to uploading such material.

In regard to the challenges and limitations as a collaborative effort. I didn't find that there were too many challenges on the collaborative aspect. Perhaps not starting a topic early and contributing to that topic can leave one struggling to find areas of contribution. I feel I have used my time wisely in regards to contributing to the wiki and started early. This stems from an earlier experience from a situation in my previous class where I waited until a few weeks before the end of the course and my topic got taken over by another member and left me no room for contribution. Being out of the country, I spent much of my time and an excess of $200US in internet access to chose, research, and contribute to a different topic. Lesson learned. Your topic is not your own... and people will appropriate it as their own if you are not contributing to it.

__**Advantages and Benefits:**__ I feel the advantages and benefits to using the wiki are that it can be accessed virtually anywhere, from any place that has internet access. You literally could be in another country with a different time zone, and still participate. Perhaps a parallel advantage toCCNet or WebCT, however where I think this platform excels, is that it invites participation much more then those platforms, mainly because it's aesthetic can be made more user friendly through the inclusion of media, pictures, links etc. In essence the wiki becomes a classroom, aesthetically reflexive of its community and its area of focus. I believe this makes its members feel more of a part of it, rather then just passively visiting sterile offered environment of the previously mentioned platforms. Also, the aesthetic of the wiki can be constantly altered to take away from the monotany and obsolescence. It is always nice to redecorate your house and move some furniture around... the wiki at sorts becomes that; a dynamic, 24 hour, online classroom.

I believe the benefit of using the wiki is that it actually develops the class as a community. This can be seen with individuals posting much more then images, but class notes, study notes, interesting links, and interesting media to point to just a few. Students seem to be less individualistic and more community minded when involved in the wiki building process, which is a welcomed change from other courses that do not use wikis as their base.

__**Reflection on the class:**__ I think the class was fantastic. The two books by McCloud opened up my eyes to a genre of comics I was not familiar with. I have to admit that I held many of the same prejudices as the ones that plague the industry when I first started this course. Some of may stem from not being raised on this continent and never got into the superheroe thing, and comics are somewhat part of the culture. In turn, comics never peaked my interest. Since the beginning of the course I have purchased a few graphic novels, and am sure that I will continue to read more with a different respect for this genre. I must say, other students, even ones that have taken CCT 300 in the past, were jealous of the inclusion of comics in its curriculum.

Furthermore, I enjoyed the content and the structure. Although I must admit, because we didn't discuss any of the online readings in the tutorials, I wasn't aware of them untill about a week before the end of the course (largely my fault for not checking the syllabus I suppose). Also, though I appreciated the time we were given to work on our assignments and wikis in tutorial, in retrospect I would have liked if a part of it was dedicated to the review of topics raised in the lectures, and perhaps using the last tutorial as a review for the exam. Those points out of the way, I really enjoyed all the freedom we were given in the Culture Jamming project. Overall the grading structure of the course seemed very fair. It was nice not having a mid-term exam at a time where we had many others from other classes. Although I do feel that I was somewhat blind to what topics were going to be on the final exam, some indication to areas of focus would have helped when preparing for it. Otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed the laid back atmosphere of the class and the content. **GOOD JOB GUYS!**

__Reflection__

 * (My experience with my own wiki for FAH288** **fah288h5.wikispaces.com****)**



As mentioned above I truly believe that the wiki platform is a fantastic way of building the course as a community. I think that every class should use a wiki for its content for several reasons; it's an online classroom always available, and it is available worldwide to everyone, and perhaps topics not yet reflected on the internet might be found in it's content since it is likely to be very specialized. Students also feel more as a part of a class community then just another face in a lecture. But how much of that community building comes from a passion for community building and how much stems from wanting to attain a good participation mark in a class?

On October 24th, I started my own wiki [|fah288h5.wikispaces.com] which at sorts became an experiment of the drive to create an online community. My original intent was to create a place where students could share notes and elaborate on topics raised in tutorial and lecture. FAH 288 (Art History of the Early 20th Century) is a course that is very heavily weighted on readings for each lecture, and each lecture is a marathon of note taking for two straight hours, averaging 12 to 15 hand written pages per session. The coursed does have a CCNet page, however not too many students would visit it aside from checking the syllabus and downloading assigned readings. The discussion forum would get barely any traffic, with only 4 topics posted even to this point. In turn, I felt that having a wiki was the ideal platform for sharing of notes and ideas since in my previous experience it was so effective.

I carefully structured the wiki to be user friendly and assuming that most students by now are familiar with Wikipedia, would have a decent understanding of the concept of contribution. To promote the wiki to the 150+ students, I asked the professor Alison Syme if she felt it was appropriate, to send out a mass email to all the students informing them of the wiki's existence and purpose. I also made sure that all the necessary info was up before the mid-term exam for which this wiki was going to be such a valuable tool.

I must admit, I was disappointed at the low amount of contribution the wiki received by other students. I suppose I wasn't expecting as high of an involvement as in other CCIT classes where contribution is part of a requirement, but I assumed perhaps around 10% of active involvement. In the end, I believe it was myself and one more person (also a CCIT student) that were the sole contributors to the wiki. Although I know that he wiki did receive a fair bit of traffic before the mid-term exam, and I was thanked by many for taking the initiative and "saving their a$$", so traffic was not the issue. After asking a few people questions on the wiki, and their passive use of it it seemed that it seems that it received such low contribution for several reasons:

> > > >
 * people were reluctant to open up an account at Wikispaces for fear of spam //(spam)//
 * It was inconvenient to open up an account at Wikispaces //(the incentive to contribute was lower then the value of time)//
 * People were not familiar with contributing to web sites //(remnants of the Web 1.0 conditioning),//
 * people didn't have the time to contribute //(time),//
 * majority of the student would hand-write their notes in lecture and didn't want to take the time to retype them //(inconvenience)//
 * they felt that the quality of notes were good enough, or they would carry on and look for sources somewhere else on the basis of those notes

All in all, my intent to build the wiki was for no other reason then to offer a place where students could help each other through a difficult course (pertaining to the amount of reading more then the difficulty of material), and to share my own notes. I must admit my disappointment was offset by the amount of gratitude I have received for taking the initiative in doing so. In the end I have learned that people have still much to learn about the use of wikis and their effectiveness as a part of a class. Also, much of the incentive to contribute will either stem from the passion for a particular topic, or participation marks, or both, much more so then the want to create an online community. I believe that a majority of people have yet to learn that the web has become a two way highway as opposed to a one way street.



__**Summary of Contributions:**__
Throughout the term I tried to correct any spelling mistakes, improve formatting where I thought it would need it, added table of contents, made graphics, embedded images and media, etc. It's hard to recall all of the topics I contributed to in that way, however these are the ones I can recall:

__Wiki graphics__
>
 * Lab Pages - top graphics and embedded scientist graphic
 * Course Outline graphic
 * Table of Contents graphic
 * Lecture Notes
 * Analysis and Reflection Graphic
 * Graphic Novel Analysis Project grapic
 * Wiki Project graphic
 * Culture Jamming Project graphic
 * Understanding Comics Page - added a table of contents and book graphic
 * Reinventing Comics Page - added a table of contents and book graphic
 * FAQ graphics
 * Project 1, Project 2, Project 3
 * Final Test
 * Final Test FAQ

__**Wiki Pages - mainly my content:**__

 * Infomercials Page
 * Tom Vu Page
 * Reggae - the history of reggae
 * Rocksteady Page
 * The Internet as per Ted Stevens
 * CBC - Rough Cuts - Culture Jam

__**Added content to:**__
>
 * Added embeded media to Calypso Page
 * Updated links in Ska page
 * Formatted Study Notes for final exam

Buddha Image from - http://www.foguangshan.org/fgs-cartoon/images/budda.jpg Pagoda Image from - [|http://home.worldonline.nl/~mndell/tibetklooster.jpg]