A reflection on wiki-ing...

Throughout the first semester I learned to create and use blogs to express my ideas about coursework and share them with my peers, through the comment function, whereas now I’m writing on my personal blog, my ‘online diary’, to express my thoughts without my classmates being supposed to read what I write. In a few words, I am blogging in a reflective way, translating my ‘flux of thoughts’ into words. My last post, for instance, was focused on stereotypes, simply because in that moment I felt like thinking about “stereotypes” and discussing a little bit about that particular topic. Now I feel like reflecting on wiki-ing, in particular on how difficult collective writing is, how delicate and challenging… This is precisely what I think wiki-ing is: a ‘collective challenge’.

Challenges can be both ‘personal’- if they affect your private life - and ‘collective’, if they involve a group of people, for instance a band, a team of doctors, researchers or… a wiki group! These two kinds of challenges may imply different ways of facing the problem, different approaches, strategies and solutions, but there is one aspect that binds these two categories together: they both require great effort and determination.

In the case of a ‘collective challenge’, if it is true that every group of people working together has its peculiarities (its goals, problems, etc.), it is also true that all kinds of collective activities require a specific approach, based on co-operation, collaboration, negotiation and sometimes it’s not easy for all the members to integrate in the community and find a common ‘line of action’.

Perhaps, this is the basic problem university students encounter when dealing with wikis and I think that it is mainly due to the fact that at school students are not accustomed to working in group, they are entire of themselves and compete with each other. On the contrary, wiki-ing wants each student to be a piece of the wiki world, put his/her knowledge at the class’ disposal and accept that his/her contribution might be questioned. If these ‘rules’ are respected by all the contributors, collective work turns out to be highly constructive, but, unfortunately, collaborative writing can end up being highly destructive as well, if within the group there is someone who is not motivated to be ‘a part of the main’.

That’s why I really appreciated the fact that last week Sarah divided us into small groups of 2-3 people to edit the wiki page Alternative Energy Sources in Italy. That way, I think that each of us can carry out a better work: as we pay more attention to a smaller piece of writing and collaborate effectively with a few classmates, we are ‘unconsciously’ more motivated to improve the wiki page. We can better ‘control’ our work. At the end of the whole process, however, what counts is the overall work, that is, the sum of every single contribution.