Another kind of collaborative writing: wiki-ing

Wikis are “special” websites that allow the users themselves to add, revise, delete and modify some content. All the texts available in theses virtual spaces are the “visible fruit” of a collective work: though the contributors “meet” in a virtual space, team collaboration is the most significant aspect that lies behind this kind of social software.

Wandering around some wikis listed in the WikiIndex I found out that this world is just as vast as the “blogosphere”, the “sitesphere” and the “podcastsphere”. In particular, I’d like to draw an analogy with the maze-like world of blogs, casting light on the similarities, as well as on the distinguishing features of these two Web services.

As far as their “common denominator” is concerned, the most striking shared feature is that both blogging and wiki-ing aim at creating an online community as large as possible. Wikis are not something already “given”, but projects in progress, a never-ending process. They may be compared to a sort of “virtual round table” where all the contributors – who, generally, don’t know each other - place a piece of their knowledge about a specific topic at the group’s disposal. It is an active discussion interface that forms the basis for a growing virtual community. What counts is the overall work, made up of all the single contributions. Therefore, wikis are characterised by a multiple, collective dimension, rather than by an individual one. It is a sort of “potentially endless puzzle”. As is the case of blogs, a wiki is a way to share information of interest. Nevertheless, while blogs seem to invite to an intersection of the private and public dimensions, in the world of wikis there is no room for confessional writing.

As regards the audience, most wikis, such as Wikipedia, are open to the general public, but there are also private wiki communities, especially within companies. As anyone can join the wiki community and provide a “brick” to “build” this open content encyclopedia, wikis constitute a further example of “Web democracy”.

Another significant feature of wikis to be accounted for is the language used, which is more formal and accurate than the one used in blogs. The “colloquial tone” typical of blogs is missing: rather than an “online diary”, wikis are a sort of “world database” for searching updated information given by multiple people.

Other central characteristics that make a wiki recognizable and functional, characterising it as a new genre, are:

-its non-linear navigational structure: all the texts you find are interspersed with links. A list of external links is also provided and generally placed at the bottom of the page;

-its “multilingual nature”: most wikis are available in a large number of languages;

-its table of contents: most wikis provide a detailed index that allows you to click on the content of interest.

Last but not least, it has to be pointed out that wikis imply a very delicate procedure, as the contributors come from different countries and backgrounds and, therefore, are used to certain cultural patterns. This is why it is important to respect everyone's views and points of view in order to collaborate effectively. Working toward agreement should be the key principle according to which all the contributors can “build knowledge”. In order to achieve this purpose, it is necessary for all the team members to pay attention to other people’s criticism: if someone disagrees with your edit, you should explain why you’ve decided to give that sort of information, rather than ignoring the comment, or offending the comment’s addresser. Constructive criticism is a key aspect of wikis, as is the case of blogs.

In my opinion, the real pivot of interest with wikis lies in the fact that they imply a sort of “circular project”: you have the great opportunity not only to reflect upon someone else’s contribution, i.e. try to understand why that person has decided to select those pieces of information, but, most importantly, to think about what you have written. It may be a cacophonous expression, but I think that wiki-ing is a very “active activity” for it unceasingly fosters interaction among the users, thus functioning as a very effective tool for peer collaboration.

P.S. Have a look at UniLang, an online community website made up of people interested in languages! It contains a number of resources dealing with language learning and provides many discussion forums aimed at creating a wide virtual community. It may be quite helpful for all of us!

Exploring a new world: podcasting

Hello everybody!

Wandering around the world of podcasting I've found three interesting websites providing a series of audio files about a wide range of topics.

The BBC website "Learning English" contains a number of audio files divided by type: you can listen to conversations and discussions dealing with History, Music, Religion, Science, Sport, etc.

The other two websites, "English for everyone" and "English as a Second Language", are particularly interesting and helpful as they provide not only a series of audio files you can listen to but also exercises and questions thanks to which you can test your comprehension. So you've got a sort of feedback on your work.

In my opinion, their most striking feature is that the podcasts they offer are recorded at a slow speed and use everyday expressions, so that users can listen to conversations and discussions they can easily understand.

If you want to know something more about my first impressions of podcasting, please listen to this audio message!

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Linguistic and graphological strategies on the Web: a genre analysis of two websites

As suggested in the reading "Front-of-house: institutional websites" (taken from "The Language of Websites"), the Web can be metaphorically conceived as a series of "interconnected buildings": users enter this complex as visitors, walk through the reception area (the front-of-house web page) and then go into a maze-like structure, walking through several corridors (hyperlinks), until they find the office that stores information about the topic they are interested in.

The way the different "offices" are placed within the building strictly depends on the way the front part of the website is designed.

The front-of-house web page is the first "text" the user/reader/viewer need to analyse carefully in order to understand what kind of journey he/she might embark on. As far as a web page structure is concerned, there are two websites, among those we saved on del.icio.us, that present a good opportunity to reflect upon the central features that make a website a website.

For example, "Learning vocabulary with games" is characterised by a series of linguistic and graphic devices that immediately generate a sort of map of where the user/visitor can go from this reception area.

Five noun phrases function here as portals to key areas ("Geography Games", "Animal Games", etc.). It is notable that the noun head "Games" is the same in all the phrases and pre-modified by means of another noun. If, on the one hand, the titles of these key areas are constructed according to the principle of "syntactic minimalism", on the other their content is described through complete sentences introduced by the exhortative verb form "Learn", which can be considered the key word of the text.

The constant use of imperative and dynamic verbs creates a sort of hammering rhythm: "Learn...Learn and test...Learn...Improve...and boost...Master...". This verb pattern is also used to express the final exhortation at the bottom of the page: "Click to explore".

One further interesting feature is the use of exclamation marks to express a certain degree of enthusiasm so as to invite people to take part in the game.

Particularly noteworthy is also the pragmatic use of the second person possessive determiner "your"("your brain", "your increased knowledge", etc.), which is used in a generic way: it seems that the creators want to set up a sort of face-to-face interaction with the audience, who might either be made up of casual 'surfers' who are killing time or people who have been looking for precisely this kind of elearning activity.

The use of tenses is a further interesting linguistic point. The present tense used in the concise, but very effective, opening sentence "We make learning fun" signals a sort of "timelessness", or rather a fact, a permanent characteristic of the website. The creators' aim is twofold: help people to learn vocabulary and amuse them. Significantly, they also use the future form "will" ("Our learning game will give your brain a workout!", etc.), which, in this case, seems to cover the meaning of promise.

A sense of immediacy and "friendliness" runs throughout the text: through the conversational form "Let's play!", the authors seem to speak to their imagined audience, trying to transform the "asynchronous writing" typical of web pages into a "synchronous dimension".

Last but not least, there is an important feature of page design that is worthy of comment: the use of images. Each of the five key areas of the site are symbolised by an image, which represents the content of the hyperlink: therefore, as suggested in the reading, there is a "semiotic relationship between text and graphics".

The use of images is also a noteworthy feature of the website "The Digital Age". Its front part is an interesting hybrid of visual and linguistic semiology. The image of the bulb, already found in the previous site, is particularly interesting. However, while in "Learning vocabulary with games" the relationship text-graphics was quite explicit thanks to the sentence "our learning games will give your brain a workout!", which functioned as a sort of explanation, here the whole image, besides being quite small and placed almost at the bottom right corner of the page, is constructed in a very subtle way: the wire inside the bulb is also the initial letter of the verb "Illuminate", immediately followed by the short sentence "Where Bright Ideas Meet". As you have to click on the image if you want to clearly read the sentence and understand the meaning of the whole image, it seems that the creator wants to conceal to some extent the overall structure of the website.

The front page gives us little information about the "real" structure of the site and the possible "tours". The complex array of possibilities is, in a certain sense, concealed: as the website is "a very large building", the web designer provides a site map in the reception area. If you click on the site map, you will see a number of hyperlinks introduced by an -ing form ("Starting", "Enabling", etc.). All the hyperlinks consist of simple or post-modified noun phrases and lexical pairs/triads, such as "Adoption/Promotion".

It is notable that the framework of this website is far more "sophisticated" than the previous one. The key word "learning" is basically the same, but while in the first site its semantic importance was highlighted by the repetition, here the author exploits a sort of "colour code" in order to cast light on the significance of "learning". The word "elearn" - which can be extrapolated from "elearnspace", the noun phrase "everything elearning" and the complete sentence "If you are interested..." are all red, thus creating a sort of lexical chain that runs throughout the text.

One further example of this fundamental hypertext is noteworthy: the close relationship between the word "space" and the big graphic depicting the planetary system, placed at the bottom of the page.

The body of the text is made up of three short paragraphs containing an interesting deictic feature ("This") and a series of dynamic and imperative verbs ("Click...Read...Skim...").

Last but not least, the already mentioned sentence "If you are interested in how learning is changing, please visit my connectivism site" is particularly worthy of comment for two reasons: it is the only sentence typed in bold and italics and is explicitly addressed to the online community ("you"). As in the first website, a reader/viewer of this site could be anyone: either a casual 'surfer' or a person who is particularly interested in elearning.

In my opinion, all the linguistic and graphological elements analysed so far sum up the three central features that make a website a website: the emphasis on information access with links to numerous sites of interest; the use of accompanying images; the fact that the sites are aimed at a potentially large, though imagined, audience.

These key elements "prove" that if it is true that content is the main feature of a website, it is also true that what immediately grasps the viewer's attention is the way this content is presented and organised.

Therefore, web pages may be considered "online brochures", as they combine words to give information about what they offer and pictures to capture the visitors' attention.

The more you explore the more you learn: my impressions of social bookmarking

As my learning process goes on, I happen to reflect upon the kind of tasks the teacher assigns to us: which is their primary function? Why is it necessary to read as many websites and blogs as possible? Is my exploration of the blogosphere useful exclusively for me, or can it be somehow of interest to a larger number of people? Bookmarking gave me the answer to all these questions.

Social bookmarking is basically a service available on the Web which places a "list" of "special" websites at the users' disposal. What renders these websites so "special" is the fact that they are selected websites, picked out by the users - and not by the computer - because they can be useful for the whole virtual community.

Therefore, this kind of social software can be considered as a sort of "storeroom" filled with a number of interesting "objects" - the users' favourites - which are kept there until thay are needed. It is not an "outlet store" where we can find "a little bit of everything", but rather a collection of websites and blogs deliberately chosen by the users after being carefully "scanned", for their primary function consists in providing a web source from which anyone can gain benefit: the entire online community is the potential beneficiary of this service. It is precisely in this process of classifying and sharing bookmarks where, in my opinion, the real pivot of interest of this social software lies.

I think that this activity is particularly helpful for us because it "obliges" us to reflect upon what we read online, in order to "perceive" its usefulness (or uselessness): each of us is, in a certain sense, responsible for the success of the whole process, as every single contributor classifies a set of web sources deemed to be of common interest. Therefore, what is initially a personal choice becomes inevitably part of a wider project.

As a matter of fact, the websites selected by my classmates all deal with a series of topics that can be useful for the whole group. Just to cite a few examples, Svjetlana picked a very interesting website entitled "Blogging for beginners", where we can find different but complementary definitions of 'blog' that can help all of us to understand more deeply what the object of the course consists in.
Marco, Francesca and Barbara chose some websites centered on the development of writing skills, whereas one of the web sources classified by Annalisa focused on the improvement of listening skills. Noteworthy is also the website "Learning vocabulary with games and quizzes" chosen by Alice. Last but not least, I'd like to mention the online "Dictionary of English slang and colloquialisms used in the United Kingdom", catalogued by Lucrezia. It can be a useful means of getting used to the informal register which characterizes all languages.