Last week our teacher Sarah received an important message from Dr. Schneider about edutech , in which he suggested us how to improve our wiki contributions.
In order to do it properly we visited the website Owl at Purdue, which explains how a paragraph should be built up and how biography should be written.
As Dr Schneider wrote we had to pay more attention on references and on sources, but also on the layout, in fact the web pages should capture the reader’s attention, not make him bored! These elements are extremely important for the accuracy and quality of a wiki.


Annalisa, Francesca and me chose to deal with podcasts, we thought indeed it was easier to talk about because we had already done it during the lessons. Actually it was more difficult than we thought, the first time we saw the page it was almost empty but in the following days it became more and more full of considerations and ideas of blogging 1 members’-so in our page we repeated some concepts, already used by other group and we didn’t use a very effective layout.


This week we tried to improve it, we started by reading carefully the whole text so that we could easily identify the repetitions. Then we focused on the different paragraphs, chosen by our bloggingenglish colleagues and we integrated them with other original information, which hadn’t been mentioned before. Finally we adjusted the references but to be honest is not really clear to me yet how to rightly cite sources. Another problem was the one of using own words, because it comes spontaneous citing other’s sentences and it also sounds to us better than we could ever do, but this is not the purpose of contributing to a wiki! Obviously you can use other people’s ideas, but you have to express them with your own words, otherwise you risk plagiarizing.


I found this experience really useful because first of all we worked in a team and we
compared our ideas and then because we were producing something that everyone can read! Frankly I was a little bit worried about it, I thought that everyone could see my mistakes and than another thought came to my mind:” If I write something wrong and if my sources are not reliable?” Fortunately a wiki means overall COLLABORATION, and now I’m sure someone will correct it.
I think that working on a wiki is really thought-provoking because every collaborator tries to give his/her knowledge in the best way they can, so why not do the same???