Monday, December 18, 2006

The travel around the wiki world continues...

Hey everybody!

I'm very very proud of the work we did in Edutech wiki... It's surprising to see that now I am able to do things with my computer I didn't even imagine I could do before starting this English course...^_^...it's really stimulating for me!

But let's come back to the 'wikisphere'. This week we went on working on Edutech wiki. We were supposed to improve our contributions to the articles we had chosen dealing to what we discussed in class last Tuesday. Sarah (our teacher) wrote a post on our course blog with a lot of useful links in order to help us in this difficult work of improvement. For example if you want to learn more about quoting sources, paraphrasing, summarizing and how to cite your sources, just visit these links:
As I had already said in my previous post, contributing to an article of the 'wiki world' is very useful but at the same time very difficult because there are many things to learn. The most important rules you have to follow if you want to give your contributions in a good way are:
  • write a clear and concise text;
  • paraphrase and summarize the source text;
  • avoid long quotations;
  • quote someonelse's words only to uphold their theories;
  • where it is possible, make internal links to other pages of the wiki
  • cite the sources correctly;
  • put the key words in bold in order to catch the reader's attention;
  • make a clear paragraph division in order to make the reading easier.

Besides this list of "rules" I've discovered that contributing to a wiki is not all a bed of roses. The biggest problem I have to face is that of originality: it's very difficult to add new thigs if your impression is that everything you thougght to add has been already written! Another point is that of quoting: it's hard to avoid quotations if the quotation in question is really well written and you don't know how you can write this idea in a better way.

But when all is said and done and you look at the result of your work you can only be satisifed...^_^

Cheers

Alice

Sunday, December 10, 2006

The wiki experience


Good morning everybody!

The picture I put in this post says that Wiki is an easy way to collaborate on the web...
Well, this sentence summarizes very well my impressions about the wiki experience.

I think it is very useful for me but for other people too. For me because using it like a learning method I have the possibility to "train" my writing skills by editing some articles. For other people because by writing an article I offer my knowledge to the world...cool isn't it?

This week for my e-tivity I had to choose an argument in Edutech wiki and then contribute to it by editing the article. I decided to work on e-tivities with Chiara and Marco. We explained in our article why e-tivities are useful and how they are structured. Then we also put an example of an e-tivity we did during our course (the podcasts one) just to give a concrete example of the way an e-tivity is structured. So, if you want to see our work just click on the "e-tivities" upper link and then comment us!

Cheers

Alice