reflective writing

[NicholasM_tigs]

The digiteen project involved two main areas of work. These were the wiki pages and the ning. For the ning each student had to personalise their web “my page” for which other students could access. The ning contained forums and blogs about the wiki site and I was able to post and reply to other students (or teachers) discussion. The wiki pages had to be edited by these students and answer a particular topic. E.g. my topic was collaboration and literacy. The subtopic wiki page consisted of two questions to which you had to answer depending on your topic. Each subtopic wiki page had team members to assist each other.
Over the course of our involvement with the digiteen project, collaborating with other teammates proved to be difficult with the subtopic wiki page, as team members failed to include information and insights on the topic of our page. This lack of collaboration meant that I had to shoulder the work of the subtopic wiki page by myself. I couldn’t help noticing that there had been no indication that they had viewed the messages. Ironically our norm was digital collaboration.
During the time spent on this wiki¬¬¬, I was able to send messages through the discussion tab on the wiki. Unfortunately my messages seemed to have little effect, mainly because they hadn’t been read. However the discussion tab on the main wiki site was more responsive, and was easy to communicate with other students. The advantages were the simplicity of the discussion tab and the fact that you can access any of the messages that you think could be useful to you.
Feedback from other students proved to be amazingly polite, and provided both information from wiki pages, and responses to forums posted on the digiteen ning. Responses made by the other students were productive to what we were doing and provided suggestions on work labour. Even communicating with our teacher proved to be beneficial as he was able to comment on our reports, and give suggestions on how to improve them.
So far all of the things I have mentioned have revolved around communication, proving that a project like this one involves a lot of collaboration from the different team members involved. I think that this is necessary if we are to grow up in a world where communicating over the internet will become important with our day to day lives.
However our class was disturbed due to school events for two and a half weeks, and this impacted our ability to communicate and work with other students. These disturbances occurred due to the school camp, exam week and excursions. Looking back I see that through these disturbances, our class was able to post a large amount of discussion to our respective pages.
In future I believe that there should be some small changes to the digiteen project. For example, there was some confusion when the structure of the main wiki page had been changed where the team members posted their names and links to their ning pages. I believe this could be avoided by finalising everything, so that there would be no confusion later on.
Right now Joshua, Jackson and I are working on our action plan. We have yet to decide on our method of communicating with the audience (e.g. PowerPoint, video etc) but we plan to aim our ad at senior high school students about digital literacy and citizenship. We aim to finish in 2-3 weeks.
The RSS feeds were organized by the teachers as links to help students with their work. During the time I spent using the wiki I did not access any of these feeds. In hindsight I believe that it could have been proved useful if I had accessed these feeds to further my knowledge on my topic.
During my time as a digiteen member, I noticed little discriminative behaviour. The citizenship between students over the digiteen site was friendly and outgoing. However when I was looking for a forum to reply to I noticed a forum that mentioned students misbehaving over the ning chat room. I ended up replying to this forum and I decided for myself what digital citizenship was. In my personal experience with the digiteen members, I noticed that they provided good digital citizenship, but I can’t be everywhere.
In general I believe the digiteen project was a challenge and provided good experience to setting up and organizing a wiki page. However, I didn’t use the ning page much except to post replies and information onto my page. The digiteen project really focuses on communicating with other people, and working together to finish a subtopic or main wiki page.