F2F Project Reflections

For the Special Topic facilitation assignment, I chose to focus on wikis. From the start of the course, I thought this might be a useful topic to research further and would be very applicable to the course. In addition, I had a secondary reason to learn more about wikis, as I want to implement one in my job.

To keep true to form, I started my preliminary research on Wikipedia.com. I thought it was a little tribute to wikis and it definitely helped me understand how wikis were originally created, what they were intended to be used for, and an overall background on the topic. Although Wikipedia.com should not be used as a valid source, it’s a good place to get general information on a topic to follow up on later.

The later research that I did really focused on how wikis were used in either organizations or educational settings. There were many articles on wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies used in organizations. Most of these articles came from technological magazines or organizations, as it was difficult to find specific academic research articles on wiki technology. This may be more prevalent in the future (hopefully) as more and more organizations begin to use wikis as collaborative tools. However, I was very surprised at the amount of organizations currently using wikis and what they’re using them for. Not only the amount of organizations, but also the caliber of these organizations, such as Xerox and federal agencies like the CIA. I think this shows the very importance of using Web 2.0 to better facilitate not only learning within organizations, but also general efficiency improvements. The traditional educational uses for wikis was surprising as well. I hadn’t really thought of how wikis could possibly be used in educational settings previously, but I found that there are many uses and opportunities for wikis to be implemented in these settings. However, through our class discussion, it did become apparent that wikis, when used for more of the collaborative writing technique, may not be fully accepted by students. This may be particularly true for high school or college situations where students could be more protective of their own work and not want it available in an open format such as the Web. However, I think that prior to implementing such wikis in educational settings, several factors need to be evaluated.

Overall, I feel that the topic and assignment was a useful opportunity to learn more about an interesting topic. Allowing us to keep our choice of topic and how we organized the presentation was beneficial, particularly in relation to our class activity. I thought it was important for my class activity to be interactive with an actual wiki, since they’re easy to create and edit. I was happy that the activity seemed worked out well, to show how easy wikis can be added to, edited and how quickly it can happen.