Wiki Reflection 3

Although I liked working in the wiki environment and I had a great team to work with, I am ecstatic to be done with this assignment. No matter how hard we tried to be timely with all our work, it seemed we could not avoid working through the weekend. I not only learned the expected things (i.e. my research topic), but I learned the most I ever have about references and citations. Since that was the section of Galvan’s checklist (Galvan, 2009, p. 117) that I was responsible to cover in our peer edit, it only seemed right that I should also work on the citations and references in our paper. I feel a little more confident in that area after working on this wiki. The wiki is easy to edit. However, since this was a team project, I did not set it up, so that is something I still haven’t experienced. When you work in a group, you rely on the more experienced team members to do the tasks you feel less comfortable performing yourself. After teaching middle school writing for several years, I am adept at finding mechanical and spelling mistakes. However, when my Word document changed formatting in the middle of an edit, I did not know what caused it, nor could I seem to restore the original formatting, leaving me with something new to learn.

This was a valuable experience, even though it got very intense at my house these last three days. There were too many different threads that all needed to come together at the same time -  editing a peer’s paper, receiving my edited paper, changing my paper according to comments, getting all five documents ready to submit in exactly the same format as my teammates’ papers. I have survived, and I believe the experience as a whole was constructive.

Reference:

Galvan, J. L. (2009). Writing literature reviews: A guide for students of the social and behavioral sciences. Glendale, CA: Pyrczak Publishing.