Week 8- Wiki means quick

This week I furthered my collaboration tool knowledge and touched a bit upon a tool I really didn’t understand very well at first – wikis! I’ve obviously used Wikipedia many, many times (and knew it was a wiki) but now I can explain to you what a wiki actually is. A wiki is a collaborative tool that allows multiple people to edit and save or link other information in a web page. I also learned that the word “wiki” comes from the Hawaiian language meaning quick or fast – a little fun fact for you!

I found this video by Common Craft to be really helpful with understanding just how a wiki works and its true collaborative capabilities. While wikis keep a history of the revisions made, provide a space for discussion and has settings that enable different users to do different things (view, edit, etc.) I personally still like Google Docs better. This may be a completely biased point of view given my total familiarity and experience with Google Docs and lack of experience and familiarity with wikis. However, I find that most of the collaborating I do at this point in my life must ultimately end up in a document or PDF format, making Google Docs the better choice for me.

With that being said, I also really enjoyed reading Donald Clark’s blog post on wikis and the various things they can be used for. I thought Donald’s point about how wikis teach you to be collaborative within a given set of rules where decision-making and agreement are ultimately necessary was a really great one that can be applied to collaboration tools across the board.

This week, one of our other tasks was to come up with what we think are the three most important digital rights and responsibilities. The three I chose are the right to cite, the right to privacy and the right to stop and report cyber bullying. For starters, it's so easy to search for information and pass it off as your own, but this would be completely digitally irresponsible. Other people put lots of effort into the research and work they put out onto the Internet for us all to access; the right and digitally responsible thing to do is give them the credit that they deserve.

The right to privacy is important because although we live in such a digitized age where information is so easy to come by, when someone exercises their right to privacy by locking various accounts, for example, they also have a right to assume that Facebook will respect their privacy wishes and maintain the privacy of their account. Lastly, the right to stop and report cyber bullying is very important. Part of being digitally responsibly is "treating others as you would like to be treated" over the Internet just as you would in person, even though you cannot see their face. Everyone should feel safe when using the Internet!

Merdzan, C. (CC) 2016.

This week’s interesting Feedly find…

Every year I’ve been at Brock, there have been students sleeping outside of Taro Hall for one week every March. Organized by the Business Students’ Association, 5 Days for the Homeless is a great campaign that helps to raise awareness and donations for the great issue that is homelessness. Every year when I walk by the students sleeping outside who have given up things like electronics, warmth, showers and clean clothes for the week, it really opens my eyes to the fact that there are so many who deal with these issues for much longer than five days. Read the article here and keep an eye out and some spare change handy for these students outside of Taro Hall this week!