I am back again this week to talk to you about a topic that I am quite familiar with. This site is one that I have been prone to peruse from time to time, but have also had experience creating pages. Of course, if you read the title of this blog, you would see that the topic this week is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an interesting site because you can create your own page about anything you would like for the public to see. This tool also allows you to easily add pictures and references, while integrating a coding component, which is fantastic for tech savvy individuals. Unfortunately, as I have mentioned many times, tech savvy are two words that are not associated with me.
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| Wikipedia. (CC) 2016. |
I have created two separate Wikipedia pages within the span of a year and found that I absolutely hated my experience. Both of these projects did happen to be group projects, but it was not my partners that made my experience so awful. Although I do see how Wikipedia can be useful, I was always taught that it was not a reliable site because anyone can create a Wiki page. I understand that you can virtually find any topic and can incorporate various components such as images with a variety of texts, while being able to have multiple people input data at once. However, it was the coding aspect which I absolutely despised. As coding is very sensitive, if you are off by one slash or character, you cannot complete the function you were trying to accomplish. There are various errors that you can encounter while coding and you may not know how to fix them, which makes working with Wikipedia incredibly frustrating for me. I very much prefer Google Docs, both when working solo or with groups because I find it to be more straightforward and it is easier to understand.
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| Wikispaces. (CC) 2016. |
I think that Wikipedia could be a great tool to gather information for a project, but I also do not like how anyone can create a page. I think this makes the pages suspect, as you do not know how accurate some of the information is. I also would not recommend creating Wikipedia pages as a project because I do not think it is fair to mark someone on designing and coding, if that is not their forte. I could understand if the class was specifically aimed at coding or websites, but I think it is unfair for a class that does not involve either. I do see the importance of becoming more tech savvy, but as my experiences with Wikipedia have been awful, I would prefer to learn in other ways.
To end this week's blog, I wanted to share Lisa Nielsen's article this week called Don't Waste Student's Time with Note Taking. Something Better. I felt this was a relevant article as a fourth year student, that tackles the issue regarding student note taking. The article stresses the importance of children being supplied the notes prior to class, so they are better able to focus on what the teacher is saying to create meaningful connections. If you are interested in this point of view, feel free to check out her article!
Nicole
Hi Nicole,
ReplyDeleteYou note "I have created two separate Wikipedia pages within the span of a year and found that I absolutely hated my experience. Both of these projects did happen to be group projects, but it was not my partners that made my experience so awful."
I wonder if any of your fellow learners have had a similar experience. This may be a good opportunity to connect with blogs from classmates.
Sheila
Hi Sheila,
ReplyDeleteAfter doing some reading, it seems like I am the only one who has had a experience like this, judging on the handful of blogs I have read.
Nicole