Weekly Reflection #8

In this week's session we explored another useful online tool called a wiki. I like some of you have never fully experienced all of the capabilities of a wiki because I never really knew how to use one. Almost everyone that has ever looked something up on a computer has used some form of wiki, most notably Wikipedia which is a handy tool for looking up quick information on almost any topic you can think of. Although the information found on these types of websites cover almost any topic, they are not considered to be a scholarly source due to the nature of wiki's, making them slightly less useful in formal settings, but still a great way to find quick facts and gain some basic knowledge.

Wiki PD. (CC), 2014 Retrieved from: https://wikipd.wiki.farmington.k12.mi.us/

After learning about wikis this week, I think that I will be more active in adding information that I know on a subject so I can share my knowledge with other people. I don't think I will be using wikis any more than I already do to get information because as I said earlier, it is not always a reliable source and usually shouldn't be used as a key citation in an academic setting. I think wikis are a great way of sharing knowledge in an easy to access way across the digital landscape, and I would say that in my experience it is even more widely used than blogs for sharing information. I think that wikis have the perfect combination of blogging tools (connecting to an audience all over the world) with the ease of use of Google Docs, which makes it a significant web tool.

The majority of papers that I have written since beginning my university education over three years ago have required at least the majority of sources to be from scholarly or academic sources. This make it difficult to directly incorporate information found on Wikipedia or other wikis, but they can still be helpful. I find one of the most effective ways of using wikis other than just to build information, is to look through to find out related topics to research. Finding scholarly articles on a certain topic is much more difficult because there are significantly less available compared to blogs and wikis, so finding related topics may help to find additional academic sources that can be used as primary citations!

In this weeks session, we also took a look at some of the digital rights and responsibilities required to be a digital citizen. Here is a diagram of some of the rights & responsibilities:

Wassink, A. (CC), 2014.

The three points that I decided to expand on as my top three most important rights & responsibilities are the right to privacy, citing sources, and reporting cyber bullying. I think that the combination of the right to privacy and the responsibility of citing sources will allow people to use the internet without fear that their personal information can be made public without their permission and citing sources ensures that ideas are credited to the rightful owner. The final responsibility of my top three is reporting cyber bullying, which is extremely important as this effects many young children all the way up to teenagers and beyond. Reporting cyber bullying could help save a life, so please report it, and if you are a victim, you can learn more about it on stopcyberbullying.org.

Unfortunately I couldn't find anything in my Feedly related to our topic of wikis this week other than a fellow classmates blog; check it out here.