Mejia,+Marylou

Beginning of the Semester: First Encounters of the Wiki Kind
As a CCIT student a supplement to my education always took place online. However, online contributions were always constrained within a closed site--specifically WebCT. Sure, I started and maintained threads on online discussions but never was I able to **construct** and **add knowledge** as an organization to a public space. The only experience I had with a wikispace was last semester for my Oral Rhetoric course (WRI333)--and although it acted as an online learning community, I rarely edited the space. The wikispace was mostly used for my professor to upload her lectures and notes. This is the first time I am building a website as a collaborative process and I am a little intimidated. What information can I possibly add to increase the value of the website? Well, here's to attempting to fill in the wikispace with my knowledge! Cheers. = =

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Middle of the Semester: Getting to Know the Wiki
Although I began the wiki exercise with a bit of trepidation, not knowing what to contribute and on what grounds, I now have a method for contributing to CCT 300s Wiki Community. I will scroll down the Wiki's Table of Contents and peruse titles for pages students have already posted; if I see any topics that catch my eye (anything in which I have a personal interest or that has been explored in any of my previous CCIT courses), I'll add my own tidbit of knowledge if I find an aspect of the topic missing. For example, I drew upon course readings from my VCC 366 course, //History of Consumer Culture//, to add to the Commercial Advertising page. I noticed that although the author noted various advertising mediums, a brief history of advertising, and some ad techniques, a fundamental advertising technique discussed in my course was absent. Therefore, I added my own discussion of the technique and its implication on advertising to the page. My addition to the Soap Opera page did not derrive from my academic knowledge of the genre; rather, my personal experience with it. I noticed the author did not note the technical and narrative distinctions between North American/British soaps and Latin American soaps and proceeded to outline it on the original page.

I have no problem with changing, re-arranging other people's work or having my work changed or re-arranged. No one can possibly know everything about one subject and so I would welcome anyone adding or changing my text so that more information on a certain topic can be expressed. Two heads are better than one, right? And so what better way to capitalize on that fact than to contribute, change, and re-arrange information on a collective body such as a wiki. When I edit a page that is not my own, I'm acting on the impulse to create a better product--to create a more holistic product. I almost feel constant editing is a requisite when one belongs to a collaborative information source such as a wiki.

I've checked my additions to others' pages fairly often and am pleased when aditions, even aesthetic changes, are made to the page. Sometimes the organization of my information is not as clean-cut as I would like it (mostly due to my inexperience with wikis), so when a table of contents is created, special headers are added, etc., it takes a load of pressure off of me. It's also encourage that other people are reading each other's work and relieving pressure from other contributors by applying their expertise to pages where such skills clearly have not been applied.

End of the Semester Comments
Some of the challenges or limitations I found while working on the wiki was cleaning up/adding to other people's data to add more knowledge-based material to the site. Skimming through pages and defining what exactly needs to be added and searching your own resources ended up being quite a bit more time consuming than writing my own piece.

However, it is through this collaboration that I, and others, learn more about issues they haven't necessarily encountered before, and in addition add more kernels of knowledge to genres they are familiar with. All the while, in an environment that is not pedagogical or intimidating or confusing (ie/ trying to get through one of Marshall McLuhan's books).

Apart from the wiki, which I thought worked really well (for reasons cited above), I thought the use of the comic genre to apply New Media theories was a refreshing perspective used by this course. It was a challenge for me to apply said concepts to graphic novels, because I've never even read an Archie comic before, but at the same time it was an enjoyable process. Learning new information should not be the equivalent to going to the dentist's office--and getting the opportunity to learn through such an entertaining media as graphic novels definately is not a chore. Well, less of a chore, this still is a university course...:)

Contributions

 * Added to Hierarchy of Media page: specifically to Books Category and Television Category (Oct. 11, 2006).
 * Added "Beginning of the Semester: First Encounters of the Wiki Kind" to Marylou Mejia (Oct. 30, 2006)
 * Contributed in creating GNC page. (Oct 26, Nov. 1, 2006)
 * Added section "Appealing to Reason versus Emotion: The Evolution of Advertising" to the Commercial Advertising page. (Nov. 8, 2006)
 * Added to "Mexican/Spanish Soap Operas" section in the Soap Opera page. (Nov. 8, 2006)
 * made some edits to Sports Television in Canada. (Nov. 8, 2006)
 * Added "Middle of the Semester: Getting to Know the Wiki" to Marylou Mejia (Nov. 14, 2006)
 * Added Chick Lit to Table of Contents. (Dec. 8, 2006)
 * Added a comment to Final Thoughts. (Dec. 8, 2006)