Reflections on the Wiki Project

One of our greatest challenges in completing the group Wiki project was communication. We had started using our wiki as a “chat room” but it quickly dwindled down to only two people. These two members, obviously needed a lot of reassurance that the project was being completed with plenty of time for review and revision of each other’s work, but even they eventually resorted to e-mail for greater candor. Since I really wanted this to be a true group project, I constantly asked for feedback but received very little in return, although people were posting their work in the files on the site. When the format of the wiki changed suddenly, I just assumed that someone else had changed it without telling anyone and I tried to find out why. It took me over a day to realize that I had probably changed it accidentally myself when I was revisiting the Wiki start-up page over the weekend.

We also differed in work styles. I expected this group process to take longer than solo work and therefore felt that we needed a work plan that would help keep us on task and also clarify the project for Bolu, who had missed the class session in which we set up the wiki in the first place. Tom was very anxious about the presentation itself and so created a PowerPoint presentation early on while other group members posted their work much closer to the time it was due.

A third challenge arose from my obsession with finding a way to use the wiki to create our presentation. Had we watched the tutorials on Tuesday, as we almost did, we could have saved ourselves a lot of frustration. By the time I went back to them to learn about WikiWords and linking pages, there was so much already on our site that we needed to create another wiki to present. Still, I would not suggest telling the students about WikiWords. Instead I would urge them to use all of the tools available to them and let them have the thrill of figuring this out. I was so surprised that we were the only ones to “discover” WikiWords, that I felt compelled to teach everyone else about them, which I hope was not too out of line.

It appeared, given what the other groups presented, that we made too big a deal of this whole thing. I was disappointed that our group did not collaborate more and sometimes this assignment felt like payback for all of the group projects that I have assigned to others over the years and especially last year in Contemporary Biology. However, it was good to get to know Tom more, since I really knew little more than his name and department before this project. Also, even though we obviously didn’t rehearse, I felt very good about our presentation in the end and satisfied with my level of participation.