Krishnan,Ramesh

=Contributions and Community Building= 1. Added the examples heading and the BMW 7 series example to the Ergonomics page (some jerk deleted my example grrr....). 2. Added the "Importance in Design" heading and BMW 7 series example to the Usability page. 3. Added the Psychological Theories Affecting Design page to the website as well as the James-Lange theory description and image, Cannon-Bard theory description and image, the table of contents link and Resources heading. 4. Fixed many grammar and spelling errors under the Youth and The Wired World section of the Wired World page. 5. Added "The Use of Concepts in the Automotive Industry section to the Conceptual Model page. 6. Added more content to my Psychological Theories Affecting Design Page.

=Analysis and Reflection= 1.

I think the wikispace approach to learning course material will prove to be extremely useful to many students including myself. This collaborative learning environment is excellent since people can add to work you post and you can do the same to other people's work. This interactivity makes memorizing material much easier than just reading through a text book or attending lecures.

CCT333 is the first course I have attended that required use of the wikispace. My personal experience with wikispaces is that it is a little difficult formating information and material. I found it extremely difficult to number points or even add bullets to your points. I found a way around this by just formatting my material in Microsoft Word and then copying it into the wikispace. This works for the most part but I still have not figured out how to center images on the wikispace. Also, I still cannot indent my paragraphs properly on the wikispace.

Since I am not that experienced in dealing with wikispaces, I think it will be best for myself to stick to large information contributions and corrections of grammatical and spelling errors. Reformating and redesigning pages would be difficult for me since I cannot even center images. All in all, I have great expectations for wikispaces in helping me learn the course material through its interactivity.

2.

The main way I choose which contributions to add or change is by looking at the contributions of others. I may try and clarify the idea covered by adding an example or developing someone else's ideas a bit better. I feel comfortable adding to other people's work but I try not to edit out their work, unless they are completely way off. Furthermore, I have not encountered any contributions that required rearrangement. This is probably because I find formatting information on the wiki quite difficult so I leave this to other students. Another way that I will try and contribute to the wiki is by reading the textbook. I look in the table of contents and try to see what important information is missing, then I will create a new page for this information. I do regurlary check back on my postings to see how people have edited and manipulated it. This sometimes helps me if another student adds more material to my page or if they fix errors. Once, another student completely edited out my work and I did not think that this was good use of the wiki.

3.

Looking back at my first reflection of wikispaces, I completely agree with what I said if not even moreso after the use of wikispaces throughout the semester. I still feel as though the collaborative learning environment is great it I feel as though posting my own interpretations of topics as well as reading other people's contributions has greatly helped me throughout the duration of this course. Learning the material is so much easier and participation on wikispaces is actually a little entertaining.

A few things that I would suggest to make the wikispace assignment better is have a better outline on what to post on the board. I felt that a lot of pages posted encompass a lot of opinion rather than fact. This can make it a little frustrating to read through, especially if you strongly disagree with these opinions. Don't get me wrong, I still think pages with humor etcetera are great but where these opinions pose as facts is where the problem lies.

The most productive section of the wikispaces in my opinion has to be the lecture and lab summaries. Although these were very limited and only over a few lectures, I found that they were very useful, especially if you had missed a certain lecture. I think that adding material like this should have more incentive to perpetuate the generation of them since I am sure that they would help many other students as well as myself.