Wiki Lore and Politics in the Classroom

Before reading this piece, I was pretty familiar with wikis. Like many Fort Lewis students, wikipedia.org is often the first place I go when researching a topic. I'm glad that wikis in general are being recognized as a trustworthy source of information. The fact that they can be peer edited actually makes them more complete than some scholarly journals because they incorporate different points of view.

Not much surprised me about this article; it's pretty self explanatory. It did help me understand wikis better because it used real life examples of students using them in the classroom. It gave me a sense of how peer editing could be beneficial for collaborative projects, an area which I think may have been lacking on my part for our first assignment just because I am not too familiar with the process of creating wikis yet.

Some of the disadvantages of using wikis are that they can increase anxiety by adding a competitive side to assignments. Looking at some of the other wikis, I feel like the one I created is quite inferior. However, I feel like the topic I chose did not have a lot of material that could be covered, so in that sense, wikis are less of an intellectual creation and more of a collage of information.

The advantages are that they decentralize the classroom and provide students with a virtual workspace that can save time and energy. They provide an archive for students' work that can be reviewed as needed. Wikis also resemble a lot of the mainstream media that students use in their daily lives, so they are more familiar with the format and function. Wikis can help students become more involved with the world of social media and integrate their expertise into the work world.