Some other impressions on wiking

Hi people,

this time I am going to give you my impressions on wiking. During last two weeks of our English course we focused on wikisphere. First we spent some time exploring it, trying to understand what kind of genre wiki is and finding its main characteristics. Then we gave our own contribution to a wiki, entitled edutechwiki, writing on its pages real articles.

The questions of this week is:
What have I learnt from these last e-tivities?

Wikisphere is a big community of people who are motivated and interested in sharing their knowledge and researches with other people. This is the reason why they spent their time to write something on wikis. The fact that I wrote something in one wiki makes me feel a little bit important. ^-^

But, on the other hand, it makes me reflect a lot, because it was not so easy to be part of this big community.

As we discussed in class it is always very hard to write something original that other people can read and find interesting. Perhaps the real problem in this case is our innate lack of confidence. We are never sure about the quality of our own work, especially if we compare it with other people work, which appears always better and more interesting than our own piece of writing.

Even though I was very insecure about what I was doing, at the end I gave my contribution to a real wiki. I wrote on the page “Learning Language” and focused on Second language learning and technologies: wikis and blogs.

One of the difficulties of this kind of work is quoting. Instead of putting many quotes I decided to elaborate them and integrate them with my own thoughts about the topic in question. Quoting is important because it gives more credibility to a work, but it is important not to exaggerate with quotations. I know that it is much more easier to put quotes but I think that it should be a good exercise for us, as English learners, to reword them.

Other difficulty is the layout, that means how to organize the article on the page and how to attract readers attention in that way. At first, I don’t spend too much time on the layout, because I was convinced that what really matters is the content. But, after our discussion in class and after having a look on other articles I became aware of the importance of the layout. Therefore, I reorganized my article by creating more paragraphs (it facilitates the reading), by putting key-words in bold (in this way the reader is not obliged to read every single word but can read only key-words and then chose if he wants to read the all paragraph), by adding more links, either internal or external.

Looking at my peers' works I have also learnt some other things. I chose to add my contribution on a quite empty wiki, but some of my colleagues added their articles on already done pages. In my opinion that is very difficult, because you have to pay a lot of attention on what other contributors have wrote in order to avoid repetitions and to be able to put your article in the right order.

I am curious to know if somebody else will add something else on the same page where I have added my article in order to see if they will change my ideas or correct some mistakes or simply add more information. I think that the main aspect and the most interesting one of this sort of community is the collaboration.

This is all for now.
Today I have an exam and the day after tomorrow I have another big exam. I am really tired…Tomorrow I will miss the class because I have to study (the problem is that I live far from Pd and will spend too much time to come to the lesson and then to return back home) and I really can't spent all afternoon…I am really sorry for that…
Therefore, I want to wish to all of you nice holiday, and especially Marry Christmas and Happy New Year to everybody…
Bye, bye.