My Etec 565a Portfolio

Here are the issues as I saw them last week:

1. Documentation versus discussion. The Wiki is a better forum to collaborate on a document even though I am more familiar and comfortable with using word and a version control system like SVN. We did not use the wiki in this way where we would collaboratively work on a topic. We used it too conversationally, which is better suited in a forum where we can respond to each other and deliberate certain points.
2. Encouraged voting.We decided in the discussion page to each post strategies and challenges and we would then vote to find the top 5. Most of the participants wrote in a casual format and many of the points were repeated. This means that one person had to clean up, remove redundancy and make sense of it all. It felt like we should have discussed the vote, but there wasn’t a clear forum to do this in the discussion page.
3. Better for working on smaller pieces. We should have created multiple Wiki pages with the top challenges and top strategies. We could have each worked teamed up to work on one. If we were working on smaller pieces I think we would have come to a better result.
4. We did not edit. Since we did not create separate small pages we did not improve and edit each others work. This is the big advantage of a wiki, to perfect the documentation, find sources, fact check information. We did not do this.

I think our biggest challenge was that we were so used to using a forum as a team, that we carried our behaviour over to a Wiki. As a teacher, I think it is critical that we ensure that each tool is applied to solve the appropriate problem.