First time for everything
This is the first time that I have actually collaborated on an assignment with my classmates. I have heard of people using drop boxes and Cloud storage to edit files but I have never worked with it firsthand.
For my contribution to the assignment, I defined the word passivity in relations to Digital History. Before I started, I looked up the definition of passivity on Merriam-Webster but I realized that the definition would not suffice for the purpose of Digital History. I re-read the prior assignments and even though it mentioned passivity very briefly, I was able to infer the author’s definition of passivity. I did further research and found another definition of the word from North Carolina State University’s Wiki page and I incorporated their definition with my own.
For what it’s worth, this assignment frustrated me a great deal. I tried to edit the doc file but it was being edited by the same person for over 40 minutes. As a suggestion to anyone who reads this blog entry, if we end up doing another collaboration assignment, please, please have your contribution written out before you decide to edit the document. Once you have everything written out, just copy and paste everything in. Save it and let another person contribute.
Thanks, William, for your post. I’m glad to hear that you are getting your feet wet with group editing; get ready to dive in! It is helpful that you consulted other definitions and worked those into the mix. Can you say more here about how the definitions differed from one another, and how they compared to that used by Cohen and Rosenzweig? What decisions did you need to make when merging them together with your own definition?
Thank you for your frankness in describing your frustration editing the doc. In class we can discuss strategies for avoiding editing conflicts.
Thomas, thank you for your comments. I’ll post my edits as a reply so I can look back in the future and see how my work progresses instead of just editing my post.
Cohen and Rosenzeig’s definition of passivity deals mainly with the writers of the information on the Internet, whereas the other definition that I found incorporates the other, equally important, side of Digital Media, the end user. I feel that in order to truly understand Digital Media, we have to consider the views of both the source and the user. This is similar to any form of history in which we should not only consider one side of a story but both. For example, it is very important for us to learn about disputes between the United States (in terms of war or others) in the point of view of the United States but it is equally as important to understand the other side’s perspective of the event. If we do this, we can only truly fully grasp the idea of history.
Also, thank you for understanding my frustration about the collaborative work. I certainly hope that we can come up with a solution in class.