Blog week 11

                For the blog post this week I wanted to discuss my thoughts about the wiki. At this point in the class we have used this program substantially in different regards, both for the midterm as well as the literature review. While there are both positives and negatives to this software, I wanted to talk about my personal experience with using the wiki in both areas.

                First, I understand that this site looks like a great place to connect with other classmates considering this is an online course and that can be a daunting task when we do not meet face to face on a regular basis. With that said however, the wiki page used for the midterm was more of an overwhelming process than a helpful one. I found myself sifting through years and years of posts on theories and becoming defeated in trying to find information that I could include that had not been mentioned already. Then, once I felt that I found an area to be discussed on one page that was missing this information, spent a great deal of time adding what I felt was a strong contribution, three days later of sorting through the abundance of information, I found that it had been mentioned already embedded deeper within the wiki. It was a very time consuming and somewhat discouraging process, especially to engage in right before the midterm when time could have been more effectively used to prepare.

                Second, I have found that using the wiki for the literature review has been a better experience, although still not altogether a great one. Having a place to upload all of the articles my partner and I are using allows each of us to have a better understanding about the articles we are researching. This allows us both to critically evaluate all sources we are contributing and we are then able to decide which are most applicable to our topic. In this regard, the wiki was very helpful and a useful tool.

                For a group project that requires writing a document together in order for it to flow and be cohesive, I have found google docs to be the best tool. My partner and I still used this software in conjunction to the wiki in order to avoid constant uploads of paragraphs being added as we wrote and edited them together. This is especially true once we found that once posted, items cannot be deleted from the wiki.

                I also found the wiki had a significant amount of technical issues. For example, when trying to join my own wiki, my join code had expired even though it was a month before the due date of the project. Then, when trying to access another group’s wiki for the peer review process, access was restricted. I know that many peers faced this same issue as well. Being someone who has a very demanding schedule, spending days at a time on technical errors hindered progress on some of the assignments related to this class.