Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Wikispaces


The best thing about communication on the Internet is that is virtually fluid (pun intended) - especially today where the boundaries of being privileged to know and share content is no longer favored to a particular group of people. Today, people take pride in being the owners and controllers of the information available on the Internet - and applications and social networking websites encouraging those freedoms. Wikispaces, an open collaboration website tool similar to popular encyclopedia based website Wikipedia.

Wikispaces appeals mostly to those trying to build communities surrounding education, business, and social change platforms. In the interest of this blog, we will focus on how Wikispaces facilitates new ways to communicate for educational purposes. Many students, especially of higher education, are familiar in some capacity with a wiki and the Wikispaces website. My first introduction to the website was during my sophomore year, where a professor needed a trustable application to monitor the participation of users in assigned groups. My professor was particularly interested in the feature of the wiki that showed the procession of published pages; the timeframe of edits and who those authors were. If there was any way to monitor the participation of someone in team, especially online, would be through timestamps.

Another feature of Wikispaces that appealed to my professor was Wikispaces integration of other applications - like powerpoint slides, chat widgets, and other forms of multimedia. If you ever needed a centralized platform, to share special file types, that can be accessible to almost anyone then this computer medium would apply to you. While Wikispaces boosts all these great features, the core of it that is for everyone. Communication, no matter the medium that it transmitted through, depends on the development of interaction and relationships between people. Wikispaces understands this core concept, and provide tools for people, educators especially, to consume information in a unified way.

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