My Mid-Term Reflection
We have finally made it to the midterm of this semester. It has definitely not been the easiest. Many of my classmates and myself were not aware of wiki writing. It was something that was hard for me to grasp at first. I wanted to know why couldn’t we just write essays, bring them to class for peer editing, revise them, and turn them in. I figured that was the simplest thing to do. When writing, I usually try to go the simple route because I really do not like to write. Dr. Conner really worked to try and explain to our class that you can not define wiki. You just do it. There is no template. There is no guideline or outline. You just have to do it. So I was thinking, “No, we must have some type of guide to help us understand what we‘re supposed to do.” We were given the guide. It was all in the syllabus and our course calendar. Now the real question became present. What next?
Our main goals were to incorporate the McGraw-Hill Guide Book with our issues of our Lead, Learn, Serve Community. So my first paper did just that. My main purpose was to explore an issue that I was passionate about. I wrote about how can I try to make a difference in the community around me. To show rhetorical knowledge, I needed to find out who my audience was. By displaying a blog of what I wanted to write about on the wiki, I received good feedback from my classmates and others. They gave me examples of how I should attack the situation. I also learned that my audience became everybody on the wiki. I knew that this consisted of not just my own class, but a class of older students as well. I wasn’t too sure about that because I didn’t want them to see that I was still a young thinker through my writing.
When the idea of critical reading, writing, and thinking came about in this class, it was crucial. I felt that everything I read or thought about was necessary to be really read or thought about. I mean that it wasn’t just a skim through because I might have missed something important. Also, the things that I read from other people’s writing, I had to think deeply about them. I couldn’t think in my own way anymore. Dr. Conner shows that you have to think outside of the box and your realm of normality. Earth Democracy would never be the first choice of reading for myself. Since we had to read it for class, I figured I would have to take all of this intellectual thinking and break it down so I could think more about it. Then to write, I thought about other situations and how people may feel. Once I figured out where I wanted to go with my writing, I went looking for information that would show my readers what I was talking about. The wiki helped and I was even assisted by my peers when they saw something that they knew about. I was able to highlight words and attach a link to them, so that the reader would be able to get another example. My critical thinking really came into play when I began blogging. We have to blog on our subjects, but I decided to begin my own separate blog. I would only write on my special blog in class because it was on whatever came into my mind at that very moment. Sometimes my words became awkward because I was just jotting down words that Dr. Conner said in class. I think this helped me a bit more to get accustomed to the way of wiki.
To bring my work all together from the wiki might have been one of the coolest things to do. It amazed me how I started out with one subject and let it expand. My writing to explore showed this very well. I had a subject. Then I began to write down my ideas and blog about it. Next came all the input and feedback from my peers. I also gave feedback as well. I went back and revised, added, and shredded my writing the way I thought it ought to be. Then we were on to the next subject. I was able to keep it organized my creating different pages and then adding links between them. By creating links and pages, I could immediately revise. Ehle has come on a few of my pages and given me direct feedback to help me improve my papers. I was able to go through and research some things that I was not particularly sure of and even add more to expand my paper. Also, John Boda commented on one of my blogs saying that I needed to fix some grammatical errors. This helped me a lot. Wiki helped me go further and I believe I felt better that we were all working as a team. We started out as a team of lost individuals, but I feel that we are beginning to just get it!
Knowing how to go about editing and drafting was the easy part. Since most of us were already giving feedback on each page, it helped that we could actually do it directly. I have seen different changes being made on my writing and it wasn’t me doing the changes. It was Andrea or another classmate. I didn’t mind. I knew they were only trying to help. So I accepted it.
Writing technologies was probably the most evident skill that I used so far this semester. By the presentation of wiki, I was always on the internet and using technology. We were shown how people can go on a section of Google and just write together at the same time. There were different colors representing each person that joined and they were able to edit one paper at the same time. That was really interesting to me. Also, thanks to wiki, people were able to just edit my page whenever they wanted to. They were even able to “steal the lock,” if they felt what they wanted to say was important and urgent. It was somewhat hard trying to accept that people could change your page and do whatever with it.
Considering all of these elements, I will be able to successfully get a better understanding of the world around me through my writing and the writings of others. We have to remember that writing doesn't stop when we're done with our topics. It doesn't stop with ourselves either. It's here. It's now. Composition is a community happening.