In the BuddyPress.doc “Digital History Lexicon” document, we were asked by the professors to define terms associate with digital history. This was a new experience for me because this is the first time I was ever assign with a task to edit a document with my peers.
When I first visited the BuddyPress doc page, I saw a lot of the words has been fill out except for hypertextuality/ nonlinearity, so I decide define it, by rereading Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History, 2005, “Introduction,”. Next, I gave an example of hypertextuality by creating a link from that page to facebook.com. Following that I decide to add to inaccessibility because I felt like there’s could be said on that word.
I believe that using this tool for collaborative work has both negative and positive. The positive is that the different view people bring to the table. The diversity of people can bring a new perspective on an idea and issues or in this case, a definition of a word and the concept the author uses it in. The negative of this tool is that only one person is able to edit it at a time. It’s a negative because if everyone log on at the same time to edit the document, it would create long wait. Like traffic, no one likes to wait.
Overall, I find that editing the document with my fellow peers is an interesting and new experience.
When delving into the group edit assignment; I began to think about the credentials one needed to post an edit in the classes assignment. We have to log into a Baruch blogs account and be added to the sites user list. Now imagine if everyone on the Internet had access to our document. We would ideally like to think that these users interested in our assignment would provide us with helpful definitions and direction to our goal, but it’s naive to think that many people would not simply try to sabotage our assignment for a quick laugh at our expense.
A website like wikipedia requires less credentials than our Baruch blog to begin making changes on the site. All that is needed is an accessible email account; that’s it. The reason why a site like this can become and remain a source of quality and consistent information, is the utopian idea of a group working together for a common goal. Wikipedia has a large userbase that is committed to providing the Internet with a reliable open source enclyopedia. So in order to be successful in working on something that can be touched and accessed by so many people without checking credentials; is to have both a moderating staff and a dedicated group of users who are all working toward a similar goal.
In this case our class is looking to provide concise and correct definitions for our assignment. That is our common goal that we are working towards. Without a framework being provided for our assignment, I’m not sure how concise or correct we would be able to make a list of important key terms based on our reading.
Edited out some information and included pieces to Readability and Passivity.
The BuddyPress Doc lacks the ability to allow access and edits denying real-time interactivity and sharing of information.
However many basic functions are available to provide users with a tool with potential to create and grow upon itself.
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