Collaborating Online

It is becoming a common trend to have collaborative writing in today's online websites. In PTC 605, my classmates and I have worked together on the MSPTC wikipages by editing each other's work and have shared ideas for our final projects via chat, e-mail, and Moodle forums.

Of course, collaboration is better suited for certain communicative features, such as collaborating on the wikipages which gave every member of the classes the chance to review, critique, and edit each page to make the entire wikisite uniform and coherent as a whole. The process of collaboration is practical, and though there were no solid parameters established, there was a seemingly common trend that the only edits that should be made are ones that enhance or add information via multimedia (audio, video, flash, or graphics); no one deleted large chunks of the original information posted per page. This was not only determined by the list of comments posted per classmate (under the tab entitled "history"), but also there is a feature on the wikipage to assess what revisions were made by which member by the highlighted text.

In collaborating within chats, my classmates and I have collaborated at scheduled times to discuss the contents of our final projects. Though I find this to be a helpful tool, it seemed to serve as an inefficient method for my class at the beginning since many of us seemed to not do enough personal research to contribute ideas to the chat and inspire the development of good content for our projects. There was also a technical problem with the chat room that caused a delay in the typing and entering of dialogue within the chat interface; one of my classmates and I ended up logging in and out of the computer because our computers kept freezing; therefore, the immediacy of the chat was not as beneficial as I've experienced in other instant messaging services (such as yahoo IM).

The forum was a more helpful for me than the chat rooms since it recorded all the discussions of the class; I therefore had a permanent, typed "transcript" of all the ideas, questions, and answers about the final project. The only feature that I did not particularly like was the lack of organization within the forums. Multiple forums were posted by students, and it made it harder to find the information I really needed. Perhaps a way to improve this is by having only the professor be the one to create new forums.

Though collaboration was not required as part of the assignment, I found the all the online features above as well as Michele's wikipage (entitled "kr3cmarketing wiki") to be helpful. However, out of all these features, I find the wikipages to be most beneficial, efficient, and practical. I am currently working alongside with Yvonne on the advertising campaigns, while adapting ideas, styles, and logos to make my project uniform with the rest of the class's work.