Week 7, Thing 17

Playing in the sandbox—would have been more productive if I had something specific in mind, but I could see how easy it is to edit a wiki. To be comfortable setting up a wiki, I think I need to just do it, so I am looking at the possibility of a family event planning wiki with my 20-somethings.

I went to post one of my ideas for using web 2.0 on the Calcurriculum wiki and realized that the ideas that seemed so clear when I posted on my blog were too vague to be useful, so I had to go back and clarify them in my own mind before posting them on the wiki. Collaborating on wikis might encourage that same kind of self-editing in students, too. Once an idea seemed ready, I went to the site and uploaded my idea. I found that the formatting needed to be cleaned up when I pasted the idea I had copied from a Word document. This was easily done, because all I had to do was paste it in the pop-up box and let the program reformat it to match the other entries. I found I had somehow inserted my idea at the top, causing it to become the page heading. This was also easily corrected, because deleting what I had accidentally put in restored the page's proper heading. All together, it was not an intimidating experience and I will repeat it when I get my next good idea. I will also go back when I have time and read the other entries more carefully, because the ideas looked useful.