e-tivity 9

Cleaning up the wiki

You all did an excellent job during your first week of wiki-ing but I think it’s clear to us that we all still have a lot to learn and that there are improvements to be made. We will, therefore, dedicate another week to cleaning up and fixing up your wiki contributions. Fortunately you all seem to enjoy it and see how it can be useful, even if it’s not necessarily easy! I’m sure your wiki contributions will be very professional and academic in the end.

Just think, guys, you’ve almost made it to the end of the course and you’ve done everything so far. You can do it, just two more e-tivities :-)

Sarah

Purpose: To improve your wiki contributions based on the message from the wiki administrator (Daniel Schneider) and what we discussed in class in order to make excellent wiki contributions.

Task:

1 – Let’s do some more reading. Go to Purdue University’s online writing lab (OWL) and click around. In particular, since some of your difficulties are not copying and quoting sources, I would like you to read the following pages:

Quoting, paraphrasing and summarising

How to paraphrase

Paragraphs

Conciseness

Avoiding plagiarism

Evaluating sources (hint: it might be helpful to save sites that are good resources in your del.icio.us page, of course with the bloggingenglish tag!)

Citing Electronic sources

Searching the World Wide Web

2 – Go back and take a look at what you’ve written on the wiki. Ask yourselves the following questions (for example):

- Is my contribution a series of quotations or is it my own paraphrase and summary with the addition of my own ideas and thoughts?

- Have I quoted sources and cited them correctly?

- Have I compiled a correct bibliography?

- Have I made internal links to other pages in the wiki (e.g. if you use the word “wiki” have you made it a link like this: [[wiki]])?

- Have I been clear and concise?

- Have I used paragraphs, divisions and bold to make selective reading easier?

3 – Edit your contribution making any necessary changes.

Respond: Please make your corrections by Friday. Write a comment to this post with a link to your contribution. Go and analyse your colleagues’ contributions. Write a post back to the course blog providing feedback (both positive and constructive criticism) on the other pages. On Monday write a post to your personal blog in which you reflect on if and what you have learned in the past week.

Timeline: Friday, December 16 (task), Monday, December 18 (respond)