E-TIVITY 9: "STILL WORKING ON THE WIKISPHERA"

Hello everybody!
This week as well we are supposed to work on wikis because we have to improve our contribution to edutech wiki. The wiki administrator Daniel Schneider sent an e-mail to Sarah and asked her to tell us to improve our contributions adding some important pieces of information.

From this experience I understood that the world of wikis is governed by some important rules which contributors are supposed to obey. In order to give a good and useful contribution to the wiki, the writer has to:
- write a clear and concise text;
- paraphrase and summarize the source text intead of making long quotations;
- quote someonelse's words just to support his ideas and statements;
- make internal links (like this: [[blog]]) to other pages of the wiki if there are words which can be connected to eachother;
- cite the sources correctly;
- use paragraphs, divisions and bold in order to facilitate the reading.

To improve our contributions Sarah gave us an useful link which explains how to quote, how to cite electronic sources correctly, how to paraphrase, how to be concise etc.

I am in my fifth year at the university and in a few months I have to start writing my thesis. I think that in wikis I can find some interesting arguments for the topic I will choose (I still don't know what my thesis will deal with).

Well guys, that's all!
See you tomorrow!
Barbara

OUR CONTRIBUTION TO AN EXISTING WIKI

Dear all,
as you can see from my previous post, this week we still work on the "wikisphera". The task of this week is to contribute to a public wiki on educational technologies. In particular, we are supposed to go to edutech wiki, to choose a topic clicking on All Pages button, searching for academic papers on our topic, and finally, to write and edit our contribution in edutech wiki. This e-tivity is supposed to be carried out in peers.

Giorgia and I decided to give our contribution to the page of blogs; in particular, we analysed teachers' and students' approach in educational blogs. My analysis concerns the students' approach.

In my opinion students have a positive approach concerning the use of blogging as learning technology. Many researches demonstrate that blogging can be very useful for students. As a matter of fact they can express and exchange their opinions and interests in an unusual way enjoing themselves, they can reflect on course material in a public way and provide feedback on the activity, they can improve their writing and reading skills and learn from each other, especially as regards the grammar mistakes they make.

Eric Wiltse, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wyoming, in his study "Blog, Blog, Blog: Experiences with web logs in journalism classes" confirms my opinion, that is, blogging is very useful for the students' learning process.

If you are interested in this topic please, click here and read Barbara and Giorgia's analysis.

Well guys! See you tomorrow in the lab!
Bye
Barbara

E-TIVITY 8!

This week we are supposed to analyse a subject inside http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Main_Page.
Giorgia and I decided to comment on blogs as learning technology. In particular, we are going to analyse teachers' and students' approach in educational blogs.

Well Giorgia, what subject do you want to comment on?

Exploring THE WORLD OF WIKIS!

Hello everybody!
This week we are supposed to explore the world of wikis. In particular, we are supposed to analyse their audience, their language, their characteristics and especially, to understand what they are and how they work.

According to the authors of Wikipedia, one the most common and used wikis on the Web, a wiki is "a type of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove and otherwise edit and change some available contents..."

Ananlysing the home page of Wikipedia I realised that the structure of this website is very simple. At the top there is a welcome message and on the right there are some portals. A portal is an introductory page for a given topic; in Wikipedia we can find Arts, Biography, Geography, History etc.
At the centre of the page there is an article ("Today's featured article"), some news and curiosities ("Did you know..." and "On This Day..."). Furthermore, in "Other Areas of Wikipedia" you can find some important and useful links. In my opinion the most useful ones are: "Help desk" (you can ask questions about the use of Wikipedia), "Village pump" (you can find discussions on Wikipedia) and finally, "Site news" (there are announcements, updates and articles on Wikipedia).
At the bottom of the home page there is "Wikipedia's sister projects" (a section dedicated to the other projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization), and "Wikipedia languages" (a list where you can find Wikipedia in other languages).
On the left there are some links ("community portal", "featured content", "current events" etc.), the search button, a toolbox with many links and, finally, the list of the languages in which Wikipedia is available. I clicked on "deutsch" in order to see if and how this version of Wikipedia differed from the English one and I realised that the contents were the same but the structure of the page changed a little bit.

As far as the language used in Wikipedia is concerned, it is very simple and clear. In my opinion this is due to the fact that everybody can use this website (everybody can add, remove, edit or change the contents of the pages) and therefore, everybody has to understand the contents of the page or pages. Therefore, in my opinion there isn't a specific audience Wikipedia is aimed at; everybody can use it.

Searching in Google I found many other interesting wiki sites:
- TWiki- an Enterprise Collaboration Platform (a wiki and an enterrprise collaboration platform);
- WordPress WikiItaly (a WordPress Italy Blog, Forum, Wiki and Start);
- WikiHow (a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest how-to manual);
- Wikitravel (a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide).
All these wikis differ from each other only in their contents. The language used is very simple and the kind of structure of their home page is very similar.

Well, that's all for the moment!
Have a nice week!
Barbara