Tabitha+Ginther

When we were assigned this project, I planned to look only very briefly at Cohort 2's page. I did just that, and then I started a Word document in which I saved various links that I came across throughout the semester (Bonnie and Ami did something similar as well). I did not want to feel trapped into the original group's organization and content. I knew I could very easily find myself with a one-track mind: theirs. In hindsight, I think this was a good idea. Bonnie, Ami, and I knew early on that we did not want to organize our page by presidents, as the previous group did, because we felt this organization compartmentalized the period more than necessary. Once we made that decision, we all began collecting our content and formulating ideas. As other group's presented their wikis, Bonnie became an official note-taker, jotting down any ideas that might be helpful to us later. It was the preparation early on that made this project more streamlined later. What was it that Abraham Lincoln said? If he had eight hours to chop down a tree, he'd spend the first six sharpening the ax. I think we had a finely sharped ax when we finally began the editing process.

The editing process began by deciding which of the original group's content to keep or discard. Ami was especially efficient at this! We found that a majority of their links were youtube videos. We kept some of these, and we also kept some of their historical links, such as the Interactive Presidential Timeline. Then, we began working on how we would like to organize our page. This was a case of trial-and-error. Once we had this (mostly) figured out, we began adding back the content that we'd decided to keep from the original group--beginning with our very comprehensive historical timeline. Then, we added in what we had collected throughout the semester. And then we filled in the blanks. It was much more complicated than I am making it sound, so I was very happy to be working with Bonnie and Ami. The three of us work well together, I think. We found that the other group was missing many crucial elements of the assignment, which could have been a result of changes in the assignment. This meant we had to add quite a bit from scratch, such as the demographics, information about classrooms, and the thinkers and philosophies of the time. Additionally, we felt the need to remove some of their political cartoons as they were more politically historical and less about educational history--plus, some of them offered biases which did not seem relevant to this assignment. Also, we decided not to add to the references page any content that were already linked to another site on the Internet, because this felt redundant and was cluttering the references page. Instead, we allowed those links to serve as their own references and then added to the references page additional resources that were not direct links on our pages. Other groups mentioned that, at some point, you just have to stop. The desire to continue making changes is a difficult one to overcome.

Also difficult was some of the technological issues with wikispaces. I have used it before and experienced the same issues. Having this prior knowledge was helpful and prevented our group from accidentally losing information (except for one occasion!) and allowed us the know-how about adding images and links. However, there are aspects of wikispaces that are very frustrating. Wikispaces seems to randomly change font sizes and styles and limits how a page can be organized. It makes consistency very difficult. And, of course, we had to be careful to avoid simultaneously (and unknowingly) editing the same page at the same time. This required consistent communication, which can be difficult with our schedules. Thankfully, the three of us have developed a strong rapport and were able to do so.

I liked the idea of the historical timeline, so I assigned one to my British Lit. seniors this year. It is a simple one--no linked pages within pages. But here is the site if you'd like to look at it: https://britishliteraturetimeline.wikispaces.com/.

Overall, this was a very time-consuming process. And extremely tedious. I feel like I learned quite a bit about our time period, and I hope this site remains available to us for quite some time. I can see myself referring back to it throughout this program.