Profile Wiki Reflection

I guess the first week for most universities is much like a “getting to know you” kind of experience, where you would chat amongst one another and talk about what you expect the course to be etc. Then progressively through the weeks you would learn more about one another as your contact stays consistent through the semester. However, what if like in the case of the GDLT Flex student degree your face-to-face communication ended at week 1? How would that crucial information you need to deceiver if the persons argument is valid or frivolous be found? Then again what medium could you use to effectively distribute the information for others to view and make the decision if you’re a loony or not?

Wiki’s to the rescue?

A Wiki is a simplified online website which allows you and other to work collaboratively to edit and save information on numerous pages. Of course, the most well known Wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia where any user from around the world can input information into their website. Wiki’s are a great way to exchange and update information efficiently between groups of people. It could be seen as the “new black” of the technology world, taking over the use of e-mail to correspond between groups of people.

In our first activity we were asked to become acquainted with Wiki, by setting up our own page linked from a homepage where we could input information about ourselves for other to view. For GDLT students a Wiki is a great tool to use to aid learning and in completing this activity we were able to learn the basics of how a Wiki works by adding information about ourselves to a profile where others can view it. However, in this basic giving of information one would wonder if a simple webpage would suffice? I guess the lecturer has set-up the activity in a connectivist way, where once the activity is completed others can find the knowledge that is known/provided about others. This in turn could scaffold our learning in a constructivistic way, where our prior experience/knowledge of Wiki’s could enable us to use the Wiki in other ways for future activities.

I found the activity to be a great introduction into the basics of how a Wiki works, in turn also gaining a database of knowledge about our cohort. Of course, at this early stage with our minimal insight into Wiki’s the activity could not be fulfilled if it wasn’t for the scaffolded material given by the lecturer for us to fill out. This included the homepage with links to pages we could claim as our own, as well as a template for how the information could be presented on our own pages. Hopefully in future weeks we are shown further into the creating of Wiki’s and how to design them and use them in other ways.