Peng,+Paul+(Yuh-Chi)

=__Welcome to my Contribution and Analysis & Reflection page for CCT 333__=

**__Content Contribution__**
1) Major content contribution on "Constraints" (Approx. 700 words) - Oct 31 2006

2) Contributed a paragraph to the posting "Car Fascination" - Nov 3 2006

3) Contributed a paragraph and two pictures to the posting "Mapping" - Nov 3 2006

__Community Building and Maintenance__
1) Contributed a link that provides internship opportunities for CCIT students in the "Interesting Links" page. - Nov 3 2006

2) Added a full table of content for the "Survey Page" and organized the postings in the alphabetical order. - Nov 4 2006

3) Added a picture to the "F1 Racing CCT 333" page. - Nov 4 2006

4) In the CCT 333 "main page" I organized the recent news and announcement section. I underlined all the dates and use lines (horozontal rule) to separate the news and announcement postings according to the date. I also used bullet points beside each posting to separate the postings. - Nov 9 2006

5) Posted an announcement at the CCT 333 "main page" under the news and announcement section. This is to inform people that there is a survey page under the navigation section where they can post their surveys. - Nov 9 2006

6) In the CCT 333 "main page" I organized the navigation bar to give each sub headings a bigger font and underlined each sub headings. I also spared a space between each sub headings so that all the heading won't be crammed together. - Nov 10 2006

7) Added a banner picture in the "Table of Contents" page. - Nov 12 2006

8) Added a video link (razor raymon) in the "Fun Video Links" page. - Nov 16 2006

9) Added a banner (created the banner using Adobe Illustrator) on the "Wikispace Alias" page. - Nov 19 2006

10) Added a banner (created the banner using Adobe Illustrator) on the "Lectures" page. -Nov 19 2006

11) Added a video link (razor raymon - yahoo episode) in the "Fun Video Links" page. - Nov 30 2006

12) Change the topic headings to large fonts and put dividers between different topics to organize the page for the "Car Fascination" page. - Nov 30 2006

13) Added a picture in the "Mapping" page. - Nov 30 2006

14) Added a new banner (made the banner using Photoshop) on the "Recent News" Page. - Nov 30 2006

15) Organized the "Recent News" page by using larger fonts for each date and added a missing divider between nov 19 and 23 postings. - Nov 30 2006

16) Added a picuture of Bittorrent interface on the "P2P (peer to peer)" page. - Dec 2 2006

17) Added a sports section and contributed a video on vince carter in the "Fun Video Links" page. - Dec 2 2006

18) Posted a video on LeBron James in the "Fun Video Links" page. - Dec 5 2006

**Part 1**
I have used Wikispace in other courses that I took in Sheridan, so I am familiar with Wikispace. I think collaborative learning is a very good way to receive and contribute information. You can contribute the information that someone else doesn't know and vice versa, such that it generates a mutual learning communication tool that I think it's wonderful. One thing I like about Wikispace is that it gives user the power to edit those information that aren't correct. This prevents other people to receive false information. One thing that I feel irritated is when someone changed the layout of my page the way how he/she prefers. This feels like someone is using your personal belonging without your permission. The expectation for myself would be try to edit Wikispace as often as possible to participate actively in this mutual learning environment. I have learned most of the functions that Wiki offers from previous courses such as edit, create a new page, create table of contents and etc. However, I would like to expand my understanding on Wiki by working with other experienced users and ask them questions to gain more knowledge about Wiki. As an experienced Wiki user, I will try to answer those questions regarding on how to use functions within Wiki to help other users. I’ll also try my best to organize the contents in the public spaces such as the main course page, navigation bar, table of contents page and etc to contribute to this Wiki learning experience.

**Part 2**
Upon choosing which postings to contribute, first of all, I usually look for those topics that interest me the most. Secondly, I look for those pages that the layout of it needed to be further organized in terms of putting headings, sub-headings and titles. In addition, pages that are lack in content are the ones that I would choose as well. When I add to other people’s work, I’ll try to find as many information as possible to backup my content. If I cannot find adequate information (2~3 sources) on a certain topic, I’ll choose not to contribute to that specific topic. I think it’s important that the content you add doesn’t repeat what the original creator already has. I think the added content should add values to the original topic. When I edit others’ page, I try to avoid deleting the user’s original content and try to rephrase what he/she is trying to say. Sometimes I find it offensive to delete other people’s posting to replace it with your own idea. When I edit others’ posting, I’ll look at the history of the page. If the user is still in the process of contributing to a topic, then I’ll edit when he/she is finished. I think it’s impolite to add information while someone is still working on it. As for re-arranging others’ page, I will first look at other pages and observe the most popular layout and re-arrange it according to my observation. I think it’s selfish to re-arrange someone’s page according to the style that you prefer. I try to log on to Wikispace as much as I could to check who edited my postings. One user re-arranged one of my postings to make the texts in single space format. After I saw the change, I was a bit angry at first place. As I looked at other people’s page and most of them use single space format. After all, the single space layout looks a lot more organized than the double space layout. Therefore, I decided to leave my layout using single space text.


 * Update (Nov, 30 2006)**

I have noticed some users edited and formatted my major contribution on (Constraints). The user added a table of content and single spaced all the texts to organize my page to make it easier to navigate. I really appreciated this cooperative editing and learning environment such that we can edit other people’s page to make it more organized and visually appealing. In this case, I really appreciated whoever edited my page to make it more organized and easy to navigate for other Wiki users.

Part 3
It has been a wonderful experience working collaboratively with our CCT 333 classmates in this Wikispace learning environment. However, there are some challenges that I have encountered while working in this Wikispace environment. The editing tool and the editing page offered by Wikispace don’t come standard with the formatting tools. Every time I want to organize a new page, the organization of spacing between texts and pictures are very hard to manipulate without the formatting tool. Spacing between texts and pictures has to be done the right way at first time. Once the edit has been saved, the editing tool won’t accommodate any spacing changes if the user decided to go back and edit the same page again. Instead, the user has to manually click on the desired spacing between texts and pictures to organize the layout of the page. When every time I want to contribute text material, I would normally type up the content in Microsoft Word and copy and paste the content onto the Wikispace editing page. It would be nice if Wikispace offers features such as spell check, grammar check and automatic formatting function. These functions are very handy to help users to edit or contribute text on the editing page. This saves the trouble of using external software such as MS Word to do the formatting job. As a personal experience, I think the save button function on the bottom of the page doesn’t work very well. Sometimes the Wikispace system doesn’t perform the save function even though the save button has been pressed. Instead, the old version of the page will still be displayed on the website. This happened to me several times in which the material that I contributed are lost because the save function doesn’t work. I hope Wikispace can make some technical adjustments to make sure that functions work properly, in order to provide a convenient and user friendly collaborative learning environment for users.

Despite those technical deficiencies mentioned above, I think Wikispace is a very effective learning tool such that people have the chance to share their knowledge and learn from each other. Since new edits are constantly updated, users have the advantage of learning new knowledge on a specific topic every time they log on to Wikispace. Wikispace offers a collaborative community contribution learning environment such that it’s best used for team projects. As an example, one of the projects in the course that I am taking this semester (CCT 325) requires team work. Our team members decided to use Wikispace as a communication tool to share ideas and thoughts to formulate this project. Indeed, the whole project was done based on exchanging information among team members on Wikispace. By participating in this Wikispace environment, team members enjoy the benefit of sharing and coordinating the whole project efficiently online without holding real meetings. This proves that Wikispace offers a very efficient collaborative learning environment for team projects. People can also benefit from Wikispace by learning how to organize online text material through observation, in which people can learn how to organize contents by referencing how other people organize their information to create a mutual learning experience. All these benefits offered by Wikispace makes it a great tool for online learning.

As for this course CCT333, I think it’s a very unique course such that we learned a lot more than those theories in the lecture and the textbook. In addition, we also learned some practical skills in the lab such as the Wikispace team work project. This course is more than theories such that we actually applied those knowledge in our assignments and projects. I also enjoyed the lab time such that the professor provided many helpful tips and suggestions to help us to finish our assignments. However, I would really appreciate if the professor can post assignment outline earlier so that students have more time to work. Other than that, I think the whole course structure is very well designed to allow students to learn from many aspects.

Suggestions for Future Wiki Makers
For the future CCIT students, I would suggest that it would be a lot more organized if one standard format can be agreed upon posting your own personal essays on Wikispace. I realized that a lot of essay postings are very different in format, in which some people decided to write in double space and some people chose to write in single space. Also, some people choose to put a table of content navigation bar within their essay page and some people don't. As for the future, I think it would be a lot more organized and uniformed to come up with a standard format for posting your essays on Wikispace. I would also suggest that it would be helpful to use color fonts for headings and subtitles so that it stands out from the rest of the text, to make it easier for users to read and navigate. As well as using underline and bold for letters on titles and subtitles for the same purpose of easiness on navigation.