Tuesday, March 9, 2010

The World of Wikis

Last week in class we participated as a group in creating and using a wiki.  The weird thing for me was conducting an online discussion with someone who was sitting 20 feet away from me.

The purpose of the exercise was to familiarize the class with this particular technology and to explore the possibilities.  We discussed a current event related to technology, in this case a pending law suit by Apple Computer about copyright infringement on their telephone technology. After an bit of an awkward start my wiki partner and I had a fun discussion.  I am not always up to date on all technology current events, but we both made interesting observations that followed our individual points of view.

My point of view was based mostly on the practical need for the Apple product, and what their litigation really meant to me. In a nutshell my opinion is that the law suit would no doubt be settled out of trial, simply because technology these days seem to become outdated in about a years time, then companies are on to the next generation of product.  I have other opinions, but they are not important at the moment.

My need for a practical use for any new technology seems to take the high priority over just accepting or adopting a technology because it is new. Generally I view something new from a comfortable distance, deciding in time if it is for me or not.  In the case of wikis, my experience last year was positive, in that we used it to communicate together on our ideas for a group web design project including the sharing of graphics files. This to me served a more practical use, then simply posting of ideas.

I would continue to use the wiki that we started last week, provided there was a need for it in the class.  Outside of this class, I would probably use new wikis on an as needed basis, perhaps as a way to communicate with a future client on a web site, where we needed to share files when an FTP site is not available.

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