Using what I know with my wiki

After re-reading "Blogging and New Literacies" I have started to reevaluate my wiki. After looking over it today, it is not very appealing. After all of our studying about blogs for the last 10 weeks or so, I still forgot that web 2.0 is not just about words but also about format and design. This project is going to be a lot harder than I had thought. How am I going to grab the interest of individuals who may not know or care about Greenpeace? I have pictures and videos, which are always a plus. Tomorrow I am going to work on the color and size of the font.
I have also noticed with the wiki that I am more cautious, or at least more aware, of my grammar. Although I perform well at editing other people's papers, it is very hard for me to edit my own. I know what I mean inside my head, so when I reread a paper, I seem to skip right through my errors. Because the wiki is open to the public, I find myself going back over my writing even days after I entered my information. Unlike a paper, it is not just a teacher or a few of my peers reading my work, but possibly the entire world. (Okay, that sounds a little extreme, but it is open to all.)

Using the tools we have

I was re-reading some of the blog articles and realized that one of the reasons blogging has began to catch my interest is because one is able to add their own style. I felt that in high school, student's writing was grounded by so many rules. Don't use fragments! Stay away from passive sentences! Always use the five paragraph format! With blogs, those rules are for the most part thrown out the window. By not having to worry so much about breaking the "commandments of writing" one is able to express themselves more freely. This is when great writing starts to appear. I use to hate the five paragraph format in high school. I am glad that I was taught it, but I resented being held down by it. I often think about how I would teach a middle school English class. They have to be taught the writing rules but how far would I enforce them? Or how would I go about enforcing it? As discussed in one of our classes, I would definitely require the kids to journal at least 15 minutes everyday but on the computer. I honestly feel that writing on paper holds back one's thought process. (Unless you are a horribly slow typer.) If we have the tools, why not use them?

convergence of technology

I was reading the article about media and technology convergence and although I agree with the author that convergence of different technoliges are making a fast progress, I disaggree that convergence itself is that hard; at least as far as finding out what to converge. THat has more to do with marketing and finding out what the consumers want. For example, the cell phone companies always amaze me by their convergence of so many application of the available phones. The author discusses how he was laughed at when he went to purchas a cell phone that was able to just make calls. Ironically, I hardly use my cell phone to make actual phone calls. However, the device itself is my life. It is my alarm in the morning, my entertainment with its games during certain classes, my communication metod at class and work through text messaging... Honestly the only person I actually "call" anymore is my mother and that's because she doesn't know how to use text messaging.

Beginning my wiki

It's official. I'm in love with wikis. I don't think I am going to be able to write another hand-written resource paper again knowing that using a wiki as a project/paper can be so much easier. In one click I was able to copy and paste my sources.
My biggest problem with research papers is trying to stay on track. I always seem to jump from one subject to the other. With the wiki it keeps me organized and all together! Who would have known that I can be an organized person!
Today I worked on the welcoming page. I'm doing a wiki about greenpeace. This was an issue I was assigned in my political science capstone. Since I already have all the information, I figure I might as well use the wiki to help me organize the information and help me to write my hand-written report that I will have to turn in for my political science class. I was also able to add video and pictures! What kind of paper can do that?!

Reasons for my resources

In "Worship at the Altar" one of the author's main points is that we use each other as sources because one person cannot store all information. Instead each of us knows a little something and then we are required to interact with one another to put it together. One problem I have with this is that it requires on to have to trust that the information from an individual is correct. Actually, trust plays a huge role with Web 2.0 in general. It goes back to our discussion on the reliability of sources such as Wikipedia. It sounds strange but I am more likely to look up information on Wikipedia then ask my neighbor, even if I know that he/she knows the information. I feel that there are two reasons for this. One, like I stated before, I question the accuracy  of my neighbor even though I realize that he/she maybe a part of my primary source, Wikipedia. Number two: It requires me to swallow my pride and admit that I do not understand something. Or I do not want my peers thinking that I'm uneducated about a certain topic. However, because of interactive classes, it does become easier to use my peers as resources once I form a bond and trust with them. 

Ross The Intern Mathews TALKY BLOG: the very 1st one.

This is the guy from Jay Leno!

"Computer Geek!"

  I have mentioned in previous blogs how I wanted to start a wiki for my final project for my Political Science Capstone. I am in a group with five other people and our time restraints make it very difficult to get together to discuss our project. Our teacher allowed us ten minutes today to meet and discuss with him our progress and to agree on a time when we could all meet again. When we tried to bring up what time would work for all of us, I mentioned making a wiki. Not only did I receive stares but I was actually laughed at! Responses like "What's a wiki?" "Do you mean like a blog?" were thrown upon me. When I told them about this class and how helpful a wiki is for projects such as this one, the only response I got was a few snickers! I reassured them that I wasn't some "computer geek or anything" which just led to more chuckles. Although I was slightly embarrassed at first, I realized after that I had no reason to be. I was the same way when I heard that this class was on blogging. I began to think about were this stereotype of having blogs and using web 2.0 made one a "computer geek" and how I became a "computer geek" now myself.  I am still determined to convince them to do the wiki because I really think that it will make the project a lot easier. But I'm first going to have to show them how cool they actually are in the process. Who knows! Maybe I can turn everyone into the "computer geek" that I've become!

Wikibooks

So in my search to find a wiki that I enjoyed I came across one called Wikibooks at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page. For all you book lovers out there or those of you who love to learn this is definitely the site for you. It is a free library full of information that anyone can edit. It has different subjects that one could easily use for homework or research questions. the site began back in 2003 and is run mainly by volunteers. There are over 28,000 pages to its users. It is very user friendly and even has a guidebook on how to use and edit wikibooks. The difference between Wikibooks and Wikipedia is that Wikibooks is made up of actual textbooks, which unlike encyclopedias they instruct and teach the reader. Like a regular textbook they seperate the textbook pages into gloassries and prefaces just a normal textbook. They have a variety of different subjects and even have cookbooks and a Wikijunior for younger kids. 

The downfall of this site is that it does not use links a lot. The creators wanted the site to be like your normal textbook and believed that links in the middle of the sentences was too distracting. I personally like the links in the sentences better so that if I do not understand the word or concept mentioned, I can just click on it and find the answer. Overall though it's a great site and amazing for those of us who are too lazy to walk to the library. :)

Youtube and Wikipedia: Liberal Bias

politics and web 2.0 mixed together

Trailer 1 from

a trailer of a movie for a wiki nerd like me

Democracy equals popularity

One of the reasons I love wikis so much is because I'm a strong believer that two heads are better than one. As much as I love the world of wikis through, it frightens me how someone can go in and just change something someone else has written. For my final project, one of my ideas was to have blog where someone could submit their writing pieces and other could critique them. But I enjoy wikis a lot more (for some reason they just seem cooler...) The problem with the wiki though is that I don't like the idea of someone else being able to change what someone wrote. I know that's why many teachers tell student to stay away from sites wlike wikipedia when they do research. I personally trust wikipedia more than I do other websites. So how democratic do I have to be when it comes to my site? Could it be more like MediaWiki wehere administrators have special serves.

Further on in the chapter of "infortopia" it discusses how Wikipedia has become more popular than the New York Times. I do not feel like this is a fair statement. As much as I love Wikipedia, it breaks my heart when I heart about the decline in  traditional publishing. Maybe it's the conservative in me who hates change but I feel like Wikipedia and the New York Times is hard to compare as far as both research sources and popularity go. As a research tool, I would argue that Wikipedia is better because of the speed of the search method. But if one is looking for an intellectual opinion over a certain topic, the New York Times is a better tool. If the number of visitors to each site calculates the amount of popularity, then Wikipedia would be the winner. Looks like the New York Times needs to become a little more democratic if they want to win this popularity contest. 

the wiki nerd in me

I've had a slight obsession with wikipedia since I first discovered it a few years back when I was studying for a test I definitely was not prepared for. I had the notes from the class and I read the book but I just was not understanding the concepts. I got onto the Internet and began searching for some terms. I opened up wikipedia and it was love at first site. All I had to do was keep typing in words I was not familiar with and up popped my answers to links to any other word or concept I did not understand. I'm a complete nerd in the sense that I love to learn, so you can understand why wikipedia makes my heart skip a beat. Almost everyday I log in just to read some of the articles on wikipedia. If I have a day off (which is almost never) instead of completing my projects on the to-do list of things I have not completed in months, I instead head to the wikipedia site and just begin exploring.

After the presentation on Thursday, I think I have pretty much decided I'm going to do my political science capstone project wiki style. It's comical because I've been dreading to do this project since I was informed about it at the beginning of the semester. I love to write, but the organization required for research projects is just not my forte. Now that I have my wiki as my tool, I'm actually pretty excited to get started on the assignment. 

blogging vs. posting

I loved the article by Richardson about blogging vs. posting because I feel that is where I am right now. When I look over my older posts, you can tell which ones I have actually put some deep thought into and which ones I put up because it was time to post. But is that necessarily bad?

I mean, no it's not as good as blogging but one is always going to have those days that, let's be honest, you just don't want to think anymore. I've always been told in any writing class where I've had to keep a journal that when one's brain get like that to keep on writing. Anything! One teacher even told me to just keep writing, "I don't know what to write" just so the blood in my brain would start pumping. I feel like it's a slow process and hard to do when one hasn't written a lot in awhile. Kind of like dieting. One is not able to run four miles when they ahven't been to the gym in years.

I'm also like Richardson in the sense that I read to write. Looking back on stories and essays that I have written from previous years, I can tell what I was reading at that time because I always try to mimic different styles. (Or at least test them out.) And of course for ideas. When I was taking three sociology class one semester, it seemed like the topic for all of my papers (like the ones in my other classes) I would base it around the study of gender and race. I guess you are what you read.

my winners

I went to Technorati and reviewed their top 100 blogs. (I also did some Internet exploring and found some others that sparked my interest.) Here are the one winners with small explanations of why. Many have to do with my own interest but even more had to do with the organization of the blog and the visual aspects. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

This blog satisfied the political junkie in me. The big pictures and organized appealed to me visually. There was not a lot of advertisements, which I believe distracts from the rest of the blog and man times causes to much confusion. They place their main stories along the page but also broke the news up in different categories both at the top and bottom. It respects your normal newspaper but one in which the reader can also state his/her own opinion.

http://icanhascheezburger.com/

I enjoyed this blog because it certainly was able to tickle my funny bone. The downfall was that I felt that the advertising got in the way. Although most of the advertisements are set to the side, for someone reason a lot of advertising turns me off. Also the colors could be brighter. A delightful blog like this one with such a comical concept such be presented in a brighter color instead of brown and yellow. A little to retro for me...

www.tmz.com

This blog represents the celebrity gossip queen in me. I admit I'm a sucker for any interesting or new news on celebrities. Like http://icanhascheezburger.com, this blog also has their advertisements on the side but the difference is that it is separated off by a line. That small line really makes a difference in the organization. The black and red of visual appealing and it has videos!!! Like your typical lazy American,   watching a video instead of having to read is always a plus. (Very sad, I know.)

http://www.bookslut.com

I love this sight and the articles on books they have to offer. They also have a really cute header also! It's easy to follow the links to figure out how I post my own comments. Granted I'm a little slow when it comes to technology, but I feel that it is important for blogs to be clear for even those who, like me, aren't as familiar with the blogging world.

http://www.themovieblog.com

This blog lacks a bit of color but it has enough movie clips to makeup for it. Most of the time, I enjoy many bright colors but this blog's color scheme of just red, black and white works. It brings more focus to the videos and the reviews. The structure of this is very organized. They have their advertisements to the side separating it with a vertical line. (I swear that simple line dividing the advertisement from the rest of the blog does wonders!)

http://beatle.wordpress.com/

This blog is a favorite of mine because I am completely obsessed with the Beatles. But the organization of the blog is great too. There is not a lot of advertisements; it's easy to read and there's great pictures that go along with the discussion. Every Beatle fanatic's dream!

So those are my winners. The one thing they all have in common is bright colors and organization.