EDUC 639 Wiki Reflection Blog

Working on a project using a wiki is an interesting experience.  Before this literature review I had never used a wiki beyond the occasional trip to Wikipedia.  None of us had designed or worked within a wiki.  I think that this is apparent in the simplicity of design in our team’s wiki page.  My initial contribution was laying out the wiki for each of us to input our reviews.  It was interesting to see how our topic came together.  Each of us had a completely different idea for the review.  After some discussion, and a little guidance from the instructor, we found the common thread in the areas of professional development and collaborative learning so we called our wiki Training-4-Sharing.  The funny thing about our topic is that we were actively demonstrating the need that is supported by our literature review.  None of us had received any prior training on how to use or create a wiki.  I must admit that for a good portion of the time we were working on our individual contributions, I had my doubts about how useful and functional the wiki was for our project.  When we finally got to the point of combining our review and editing the combined review, the usefulness of the wiki began to show.  Each of us could edit and save our contributions at the same time.  We were able to make incredible strides towards completion in a short amount of time by capitalizing on collaboration, networking, and cloud computing.  These were all points discussed in our review.  I think that the biggest impact working on this project had on me was that we didn’t just read about our subject, we experienced it firsthand.