As my wiki page develops, I am searching to find what makes a good wiki. It seems that the assessment criteria for this course is that a good wiki is gets as many contributers as possible. This drive for popularity reminds me of 'virtual friends' on FaceBook, and the need by some to collect as many as possible.
Should a good wiki be based on the number of people you can solicit to visit and comment on your page? Are students in this course driven by numbers rather than content?
To find the answers to what makes a good wiki, So naturally I look to the most famous of them all, wikipedia. This blog article sugggests that "It’s just like my high school English teacher said — the secret to writing well is to “rewrite, rewrite, rewrite" It suggests that collaboration helps to underpin the value of wikipedia, and that there is a correlation between article quality and number of edits.
So collaboration is key. The trick is to find collaborators who are truely interested to build knowledge on the topic, not just to accumulate the highest number of 'friends'.
2 comments:
Hi Kate,
I agree with your last paragraph entirely. Surely it's the value/quality of wiki contributions that counts for more than the number of editors...?
I think in this course context, however, students are looking at assessment criteria and seeing that evidence of collaboration is necessary. So we get the "please visit my page" requests. kG seems a bit contrived in that respect.
Cheers, Steve (kG:sjpalnz)
Hi Kate,
I've been asking myself the same questions about this assignment and I have to agree with both you and Steve. It seems as though the connections you have outside of the wiki can determine how popular your wiki might be. If you have a strong network within the course discussions or on the tutorials then you might have have a better following for your page.
I do have to say that the KG pages that are getting contributions are interesting and have been organized well but then, so are ones that have been ignored. I really hope that our grades are not only reflected by this fact as it does have the slight ringing of a popularity contest to me.
Post a Comment