User:Eml4500.f08.team.foskey.ckf/hw7a

Media Wiki vs. WebCT (Wikiversity vs. E-Learning)

Choosing A Medium To Work With
By the time students reach EML4500, most if not all, have used or at least seen E-Learning or its predecessor WebCT, which worked in the same manner E-Learning does. EML4500 went in a different direction, choosing to use MediaWiki through Wikiversity.

Essentially either of the methods would have accomplished basically the same thing, but they can be compared on several issues. E-Learning and MediaWiki have an obvious difference in the way they present material, with MediaWiki presenting everything up front, and E-Learning displaying folders and files. This difference in presentation is not discussed because the content is there for both, just presented differently.

Media Accommodations
MediaWiki allows for text, images, equations, video, and audio to be displayed on one page all at once, available for immediate use. E-Learning presents the media in file or link form. Text, equations and some images are commonly presented as Word documents on E-Learning. Video, audio and some images are presented as separate files, or as links to those files. Both E-Learning and MediaWiki can present any media type; they just differ on how it is presented. E-Learning has its advantages by presenting the material as files. Printing documents is simpler when they are already in document form, as opposed to trying to print a webpage. Also, if any of the video or audio files were wanted to be on an mp3 player or some other portable device, they can be moved quickly and simply with E-Learning’s file format. If MediaWiki allows for its video and audio files to be saved, it is not obvious.

Slow And Downed Systems
Both E-Learning and Wikiversity are at the mercy of the servers and networks that make them available over the internet. If their systems go down, then students are not able to complete their assignments.

In terms of the frequency of system problems, Wikiversity has proven to be more unreliable. During the entire time E-Learning or WebCT has been used while attending UF, only a few times has the system been down and caused an inconvenience. During the one semester of using Wikiversity, there have been more times a downed server has caused a problem than all of the times with E-Learning and WebCT.

In terms of the impact a system problem has, Wikiversity is again more of a problem. For the most part, anything submitted through E-Learning has to be a completed file. This file can usually be completed without any internet access. To be submitted, the student only requires the system to work long enough to log in, upload the file, and submit it. Even in the event of extended system down time, the student can email the professor the completed assignment as an attachment, or physically turn in a hard copy. With Wikiversity, even if the data is created using Word or some other program, it still requires some time to copy and paste the data, upload any images, and create any equations. Then the formatting of the article has to be checked, and an archived link to the article has to be created on the submission table. If the system goes down during any of these processes, then the student potentially must start the process over. Worse, if the text was typed directly into the edit area, and the system goes down before the page is saved (or during the saving process) then all of the work is potentially lost.

Essentially, because E-Learning does not require extensive use of itself to complete assignments, it is less affected by a downed or slow system.

Location
E-Learning is a system that is maintained and used by UF, while Wikiversity is available world wide. This is a completely pointless observation because both are available over the internet. As long as one has internet access, one should be able to access either system. Both E-Learning and Wikiversity work equally well in this regard.

Durations Of Availability
Things created using MediaWiki on Wikiversity will remain so long as Wikiversity continues to exist. Things on E-Learning are available for at least the semester in which they are uploaded. This is only an issue if one wanted to review material from the past. If a student wished to have guaranteed access in the future to something on E-Learning, then the student merely needs to save the file to their hard drive. For EML4500, handwritten notes are the basis for the homework reports that are later created on Wikiversity. Those notes are available in the future even without Wikiversity.

It is not horribly common to need to review material from previous classes. When it is needed, typically students will reference their handwritten notes, or the textbook. It is very doubtful that students will look back at the homework reports created this semester in the future, due in large to the fact that there were “many mistakes made in the reports and that no report was perfect”. Even looking at the “best of” sections, there are still errors that were, for the most part, left uncorrected or unidentified. It seems pointless to review past material that is incorrect.

Learning Experience
It has been stated that many large companies have some collaboration software, MediaWiki based or otherwise. If someone was to begin working at a company using a collaboration software that the person was expected to use, then someone in that company would help explain to the next employee how to use the software. If the company used a MediaWiki based program, then a new user could be shown how to do everything done to create an EML4500 article in less than thirty minutes. MediaWiki is not a horribly complicated piece of software to use. While it is true that using E-Learning will probably provide no beneficial knowledge, but using MediaWiki probably won’t provide much either.

As for listing MediaWiki experience on a resume, this is a very minor thing. The MediaWiki software is not difficult to use. MATLAB experience, C++ programming experience or web page design experience are far better things to have and list on a resume.

Contributing To Other Wiki Articles
By using Wikiversity in EML4500, students have gained knowledge as to how the Wiki-system works, and are able to make contributions to other Wiki articles, or vandalize them. While it is true that the students have learned how to make Wiki articles, and edit existing ones, the question remains “will anyone want to?”

Collaborations
Using MediaWiki allows students to work together on a single task. So does pretty much anything else. For almost all group projects, tasks are delegated to each team member. Each member does his part separately, and then the parts are combined into a single completed project. MediaWiki is not necessary to do group work. In fact, it made things more difficult in many cases.

The Connotations of “Wiki”
Every single person that was told that EML4500 was using Wikipedia/Wikiversity that was not a part of the class (or another class using Wikiversity) immediately thought that they were being told a joke. Wikipedia is not accepted as a legitimate resource, and in some cases, even listing it as a resource is grounds for an immediate failure for the assignment. Anyone familiar with the Wiki-system will not accept it as being a credible source for anything.

E-Learning Features
E-Learning is more than just a medium to convey information. It allows for chat rooms with fellow students. Student grades can be posted on the system. E-Learning also has an internal calendar and allows notifications to be sent to the students. Since the system is available only to UF students, the material is fairly secure. Grades are confidential because a student can only access his own grades under his own account. Wikiversity is available to everyone, and anyone can tamper with a page.

Conclusions
Overall, using MediaWiki and Wikiversity was not beneficial to the overall learning experience. Most of the time dedicated to this class was spent transferring the notes taken in class into Wikiversity articles. A particularly large amount of time was spent in just creating the images and the math equations. Creating those by hand in class takes only a few seconds, but creating them for the homework articles took an absurd amount of time for no more than what the end results were.

The underlying concept of having several groups make their own reports was so that information could be shared amongst the class. Unfortunately, the bulk of the information available was the same information everyone was given during the lectures. Any additional things groups added had to be accepted as being accurate, which was not always the case. Correct solutions for the MATLAB assignments were never given, and since the best groups were told that their projects were only “mostly correct”, we were unable to learn from a correct example.

While the MediaWiki software is simple enough to use, it is frustrating at times. Small typos in code syntax resulted in error messages that require reviewing the entire article searching for a misplaced bracket. Creating the articles became frustrating and annoying as something simple ended up taking a long time to do nearly nothing.

Ultimately, the course boiled down to a few MATLAB projects that were poorly described, and really never gone over, and spending several hours typing up our notes and posting them on the internet. The end result was several “mostly correct” MATLAB projects, and… our lecture notes. The time spent working on the Wiki homework reports was time that was not well spent.