Examining Our Processes and Our Results
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
If this is an experiment, what are we trying to learn?
I guess this question can be divided into two parts, what the faculty wants us to learn and what we want to learn. I don't know the exact goals the faculty wants us to learn by the end of the quarter, maybe they can answer that. As for us I think the question is subjective, "What do you want to take out of this project?"
I think this has been a useful experiment and like most things in life you get out of it what you put into it. Most people respond to lack of direction in about the ways we are seeing with this wiki. We also have a "Power Law" going on as well, some are going to do much more than others for any number of reasons. I personally have not felt frustrated by the lack of direction, but rather the clunky interface and code it takes to get anything done, not intitutive at all.
If this is a project to construct useful knowledge, how will we know if we've succeeded?
This is a hard question to answer to answer at this time because of a few things. First (the easier one to answer) is what we have learned out of this project. Whether it's learning the technical knowledge of putting information on a wiki, looking through people's questions and learning the different aspects and perceptions that comes with the internet and technology today, or just seeing how we can apply what we have learned in class.
Second is much harder which is how this project will be at in the end of the quarter. A lot of us are confused, frustrated, and demotivated on how this wiki is suppose to be or turn out with the lack of direction and structure. But that's the point of this project in which Doug and Steven told us "Build us a library!" with only the foundations laid out and nothing else. As a class we had to fill the shelves with books and articles, even though some of the book's pages are blank. We don't even know where some of the books are supposed to be files under to a point where the Dewey Decimal System can't help us. There also suppose to be book clubs where people are to talk about that book and see if they can enrich it through discussion. The co-workers don't know each other very well and there are other problems that can be listed and put into a lame library metaphor, but the point being is that despite all this we did make some final product and we did put some information on what we thought was important in this library.
In the end the point of the library is to have other people use it and when this quarter is done, we won't be the only ones using this wiki. This will still be an ongoing project for a while and at the end of quarter what we have is what we have. This might not the answer some of us want or expect but, "Que sera sera." Instead of asking ourselves "what the final product will be like?" we should ask "What information or questions I think is important to pass on to others?"
