Ami+Lenderman

When we were presented with this project, I was not as excited as Dr. Reffitt seemed to be in presenting it to us. I am pretty good when it comes to the manipulation of technological tools, so that was not the root of my hesitation. My main concern was that we were challenged with editing the work of previous students and I did not want to offend the original authors of this wiki page. I would have been more comfortable with starting from scratch. This created a difficult starting point for our group. Bonnie, Tabitha, and I decided very early on that we would not look at the previous page too much in depth before doing our own research of what we would like to include on the page. This way we had a more clear direction we wanted our wiki page to take. This also made it easier for us to justify our decisions to remove some information used by the previous group. Each of us did some exploration of what we wanted to add to satisfy each of the content requirements for the wiki. We also took notes and suggestions from our classmates as we watched other wiki groups present their pages.

After collecting our own materials and gathering ideas from other groups as they presented we then sat down together to attempt to put all of the pieces together for our page. The editing process began by exploring the previous wiki page in greater depth comparing the information we had gathered to what already existed on the page. One of the first tasks we tackled was formatting/organization. Wikispaces makes this a difficult task in itself. We knew we did not want to organize our time period by president as the previous group chose to do because we felt in was too compartmentalized. We discussed various formatting ideas and decided that, as in most cases, consistency is key. We feel that if there is more consistency between time periods for our cohort’s wiki page the reader or visitors to our page will be able to navigate through our content more easily. We found two pages from previous groups that looked similar in organization so we followed suit.

After the formatting and organizational decisions were made, we tackled the tedious task of checking links and references from the previous group’s work. We found that a lot of the links were opening window after window after window, and majority of the links were to YouTube videos. This seemed very redundant and one-dimensional. This led us to our decision to make our links open in the same window to avoid clutter that could be unattractive or even overwhelming to visitors to our page.

My mindset was to make our page informational, useful, and appealing to visitors of our page. This created a fine line between too much text on a single page and adequate information of the topic on that page. It was a difficult task, but I think we found a good balance. There are user-friendly paths to greater depths of information, but there is also sufficient coverage on the first page to gain a basic understanding of the content being addressed without following links to outside sources for more information. I believe this makes our page conducive to differentiated instruction.

This was a very educational, yet tedious task. The formatting issues were not pleasant (to say the least) for my mathematical brain that appreciates symmetry. I found myself agitated by wikispaces random changes in font and formatting. I also still have not given up on figuring out how to properly place photographs in a visually pleasing manner. We were warned that we would become addicted to editing our pages, and would just eventually have to make ourselves stop. I did not think this would be the case for me, but it definitely was.