Monday, June 11, 2007
Using Wikis for Group Assignments
Some of the readings this week mention using wikis for group assignments. What a great idea! As MLIS students we have many group projects and I’m sure most of you would agree that sending e-mails with various edits gets totally confusing. A wiki is the perfect solution. As Farkas’ notes, a document “can be edited in the wiki rather than having different versions of a word processing file going back and forth through e-mail” (Farkas). I really had never thought of this before, but it makes perfect sense. Initially setting up a wiki for a group assignment may cause some worry, but Brian Lamb says that “new users need to learn a few formatting tags, but only a few” (Lamb). Learning just a few formatting tags probably wouldn’t take that long. I noticed that this week’s group presentation was on a wiki (it looked great, by the way). Did you guys find the setup difficult? What kind of tags did you have to learn?
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6 comments:
I'm with you! Wikis seem an ideal way to get around the constant emailing of multiple copies of the same project. Having it in this more accessible wiki format might even lead to more detailed and frequent editing. Putting something into a wiki seems to inherently encourage editing whereas emailing a completed document and accepting comments on it does not. Certainly, it would not result in the same level of collaboration.
I wish I'd known a bit more about wikis earlier in my FIMS career...
Yes! Earlier in the career would have been better. Is there such a thing as internet garbage though? Think of how many wikis would be created and discarded, once the assignments are done!
Hi group, So what do you say to our group giving wiki-ing a try for our presentation
Sounds good to me! We need to start thinking about dividing the work...
sounds good to me too!
Also, a good thing about wikis for group projects and the like is the "history" being able to see the progress and reverting to any previous change or update to a document, file, or whatever that is posted. It is very neat as you can see the progression and can always turn back the clock, see who has done what, etc. If anyone vandalized the wiki with "junk" you can always easily revert back to a previous version.
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