The next module which I have to complete as part of a year long dissertation through research is called “Validation and Defense”. One of the conclusions stemming from the online exhibition, and taking some of the comments into consideration, is that if the subject is supposed to be related to web2.0 in any way, then it isn’t really appropriate to offer a set of read-only pages with one-way podcasts and diagrams. Provision for engagement and feedback was via the comments functionality of a blog post, and while that did capture sufficient critical commentary, it isn’t fully appropriate.
For example, Derek said
“the exhibition seems to be content only, no tagging, no intereaction (I like content and intereaction to be close
and Stephen Powell wrote
“a downside … the ‘broadcast’ nature of it – that is I wanted to ask a ‘real time’ questions when I listened to the audio.”
After some thought, I entirely agree. In the past I did fleetingly toy with the idea of staging the exhibition on a wiki. Linda and I discussed it as well. Indeed, embracing the barn raising idea as part of the exhibition went some way towards that, but I would have held back from planning the entire thing to be hosted on a wiki for fear of pushing the innovative side of things just a little too far. My experience with institutional attitudes towards wiki has not been positive on the whole, and at first thought there would seem to be problems with attribution, drawing the line between collaboration and plagiarism, and presentation. I now believe that none of these drawbacks is unsurmountable so my defense against the above criticisms is to repond by writing the whole of my next assignment, (the work for assessment that is, unlike the exhibition itself which wasn’t formally assessed) as a page or pages on a wiki.
The page is initialised on the DARwiki here:
And at midnight on May 8th, 2006 the page(s) will be locked and handed in. That means it will no longer be editable until after the work has been marked and finalised, although the parallel discussion pages will remain open for commentary indefinitely.
So with that done, now I’m off to seek any precedents I can find online.
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Thesis on a wiki
