yuenvivi

//__**Contributions**__//
October 21 - Major contribution on Affordance October 30 - Added a paragraph to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) November 4 - Helped create a table of contents for easier navigation for Research Methods November 4 - Added a link to the Interesting Links page November 9 - Added a paragraph of information to the Data Mining page November 17 - Created a banner (on Photoshop) for the Analysis & Reflections page November 28 - Provided internal and external links for the Design Process page December 1 - Added an image of a computer mouse into the Ergonomics page to facilitate understanding of the concept December 4 - Fixed formatting of page layout for the Study Notes page and corrected spelling mistakes of the contents within the study notes December 7 - Created a table of contents for the Quantitative Research Methods page December 8 - Added a paragraph to the Folksonomy page; corrected the formatting of the navigation bar for consistent appearance

**//__Analysis and Reflection__//**

 * [[image:icn77.gif]] 1. Saturday, October 21, 2006 [[image:icn77.gif]]**

This is my first time using Wikispace. During the first few weeks of navigating wikispace, I found myself confused in the midst of all the new features available to me. Despite the clean, organized layout of wikispace, the first impression it gave me was one which can be described as intimidating. I felt uncomfortable to do any editing because I feared that I would click the wrong buttons and accidentally ruin someone else's work. However, after a few days of "warming up", I felt less overwhelmed and was surprised by how effortless it was to edit contents within wikispace. I expect myself to be able to contribute to this virtual community by trying to build upon the work of other students and editing pages to make them look neater. I also look forward to any discovering any new features and tools which I have not yet come across and to improve my wikispace skills throughout the semester.


 * [[image:icn77.gif]] 2. Thursday, November 2, 2006 [[image:icn77.gif]]**

When deciding between which postings to contribute to, I tend to choose pages that I find does not have an adequate amount of content or content which is still weak in quality. However, I choose not to edit pages that I feel the "original author" is still in the phase of frequent editing because I want to see what the him or her is trying to get at before interrupting to express my ideas. I hope that my contribution (e.g. adding paragraphs, changing fonts) will help improve the overall quality of the page. Somtimes I would feel a little uncomfortable editing other people's work because of the fear of lowering the quality of the page or making people feel that i'm "intruding" into their space. I check my wikispace postings every few days to see if there are any alterations made by others by so far no one has altered any of my work yet. On the other hand, I save my work to my own disk for a backup because of the fear that others would accidentally erase my work or even delete my page. I have heard some stories of fellow students' pages being deleted and not being able to recover the work, therefore I think it would be in my best interest to backup my own work in case the unexpected happens.

//**Update (November 23):**// There has now been two fellow students who have made modifications to my work. Although they were both minor edits, I feel that they were helpful in terms of providing the page with more content and making it more useful (the internal linking and table for navigation).

//**Update (November 28):**// There were no edits for my page (on Affordance) since the last time I visited it from a week ago, I will still continue checking back on it regularly because I am eager to see more edits appear on my page. It's an interesting feeling and experience because I'm excited to see what updates there will be next time I check on it.


 * [[image:icn77.gif]] 3. Friday, December 8, 2006 [[image:icn77.gif]]**

The past few months has been my first encounter with wikispaces and i must say that it has an absolutely fascinating experience for me. As a collaborative, community-building medium, wikispaces gave me the chance to learn how people can share and distribute information across the internet while working together to improve this online community. I am no longer intimidated by the idea of wikispaces (as I was a little in the beginning) and I must say that I have learnt a wide array of community-building and interacting skills along with general and specific knowledge about the CCT333 course, thanks to the dynamic features of wikispaces.

Despite the various advantages of using wikispaces, there are a number of limitations which keeps it from offering a superb user experience. The first major limitation included wikispaces' lack of a spell-check feature. There exists to be an abundance of spelling errors within pages since it is more difficult to detect spelling mistakes when working without a spell-checker. In addition, another limitation of wikispaces includes how its inability to provide users with the option of changing font colours. With pages containing often extensive content with lots and lots of words, it would be useful if fonts or headings are in different colours to facilitate the search of information or just to provide users with a more enjoying experience through the freedom of customization.

Finally, the CCT333 course is in my opinion very different from other CCIT courses I have taken in the past. I enjoyed how the lectures and course materials draws from contemporary system design topics and how they apply to course concepts. The group project allowed me to gain a much deeper understanding into current issues of technologies' designs than was possible if I was not required to do any research (eg. only reading textbook material). The textbook readings were a little too heavy in my opinion but nonetheless most of the material were interesting to know about and relevant to the course. On the whole, wikispaces has been both an enjoying and rewarding learning experience for me and I am eager to see what impacts wikispaces will be able to bring forward to society and education in the future.