Analysis+and+Reflection+(Andy+Lee)

=Community Building and Maintenance=
 * added subgenres for electronic music and added a link to the site that depicts different types of electronic music
 * periodically checked and replied to other people's concerns and questions on the discussion board
 * fixed broken links on pages, edited spelling and grammar errors, and formatted pages for better viewing experience.
 * added section on UTM MediaGenerator's logo and media contest for CCIT students

=Content=
 * added significant contribution to wikispace page on Trance
 * added content to wikispace page on vlogs
 * added content to wikispace page on Warcraft

=Analysis and Reflection=

//**beginning of term...**// I have never been an active contributor in a wiki before this course. Most I have done are change minor things on Wikipedia. I believe wikis have the potential to be an effective learning environment I also recognize that collaborative learning environments could only be effective if people are there to freely express themselves while keeping an open mind. I feel that wikis are great way to share your knowledge with others and learn from them but at the same time many wikis are starting to become too controlled by small number of individuals that want to keep them static. For instance Wikipedia - wiki encyclopedia - has been created to allow users to input factual information on just about any given topic. There are few individuals that have spent a lot of time to contribute their knowledge to the site and although Wikipedia is supposed to be freely edited by anyone at anytime, these individuals have created a sense of ownership over these topics and try to keep them from being updated by others. From personal experience, when I fix anything from grammatical errors to erroneous facts on Wikipedia as a non-Wikipedia member (ie an outsider), gatekeepers of Wikipedia disregard my corrections and revert back to their unedited articles. In this new academic environment I hope to see people keep an open mind and be respecful of others' opinions but feel free to disagree and challenge other people's statements through civilized manner.

//**middle of the term...**// When choosing which postings to contribute to or change, I look for topics that I am familiar with and have an interest in. I try to change content that seems to be written with strong bias especially if they are supported by unsourced supporting evidence. For the most part, I tend to only make minor changes like grammar & spelling errors and things like broken links. I feel that we have become accustomed to taking ownership on whatever content that we create and I find it challenging to alter someone else's content because I feel like I am tampering with their work. But on the other hand, I am happy to add to another person's postings if I feel that they are incomplete or when I have knowledge that relates to the subject matter.

I do not check my postings or alterations regularly but I fully expect others to change them as long as they do not blatantly sabotage my work by deleting my postings or adding falsifying information. One problem I have come across the most on this Wikispace is when two or more people are altering the same page at the same time. When this occurs, Wikispaces automatically updates the page based on the latest posting. For example, if person A and person B were simultaneously adding content to a page, if person A saves her content first and person B saves her content right after, person A's content gets deleted accidentally. This is perhaps why people have been blaming others for deleting their posts.

//**end of the term...**// As this school term comes to an end, so will the life of this wikispace. Because this space is run within a school setting with students motivated by getting marks, it is very likely that the "owners' of this space will soon go away to tackle other online participative projects for their courses in the upcoming school term. This has happened through WebCT, ccnet, and other course related communities. One great difference about using a wiki instead of the aforementioned online academic applications is that the information that is aggregated by us is actually freely available to anyone that is connected to the internet (albeit, people actually finding this small and relatively unknown space is highly unlikely). Another great thing is that this space will not be purged as soon as the school term is over because it is not run on a Sheridan server (I remember there being a LOT of useful information in the discussion section of CCT355's WebCT site but it was deleted when the course ended).

There were some challenges as well as advantages when working in a collaborative wiki environment. As far as challenges are concerned, I felt that it was difficult to change other people's contributions beyond simple grammar errors and typos because I knew that they took effort to write the sections. For example, banners that were made for some of the sections by fellow students are not very visually pleasing but I don't want to delete it and create my own banner because I know that the person that created the section will not be too happy about me deleting their banners. There were also challenges when it comes to content management. Because there are such large number of people constantly adding content to the wiki, a lot of the information can get lost. Often times, I wanted to create a new section on my topic of interest but realized that those topics were covered by others and I could only add small sections to their work. Lastly, because Wikipsaces is a fairly new service, there are still some problems that exist within the program itself. Formatting of a wikipage is sometimes an issue because some of the text manipualting options don't work like they should. Also, some simple functions like centering of text on a page is not available yet.

There are also many advantages of using a wiki. Your work is available to others on the wiki thus peer editing can be done instantly. But as mentioned before because of self-censorship, some of the content that are perhaps not the best work is left alone by others because they don't want to offend the original author. As already mentioned, it is nice for the wiki's content to be archived for future references and also for it to be available for anyone that is not enrolled in the course. For example, I have the ability to show my friends and family the type of work that is done within a CCIT course.

Overall, the course was interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed working on the culture jamming project because it allowed us to use the technical knowledge gained from other Sheridan courses and create something socially meaningful that we are actually interested in. It was nice to have a very broad topic with loose set of rules to work with because it allowed me to be creative and do something that I enjoy. The textbooks for the course were interesting and easy to read. But I thought the online readings were superior to the offline ones. The online readings were very "current" and comprehensive.