A5StarbirdButler

A5StarbirdButler

To Do

• please work as a group (minimum: 2 members; max: 6 members) and submit one answer as a group (clearly identifying the members of your group)

Task 1

Wikis fall into this category. Compare Wikis as meta-design environments with another meta-design environment of your choice for which user-generated content is the defining feature.

Task 2

Analyze in detail the following two Wikis:

• the Wiki used for our course with which you are (or at least should be) very familiar http://ngw.cs.colorado.edu/
• the Wiki for the research community in "Creativity and Information Technology" at: http://swiki.cs.colorado.edu:3232/CreativeIT

Group response

1. Members of the Group

Stephen Butler and Kate Starbird

2. Task 1

Part I - Spore as a meta-design environment

Meta-design environments allow users to co-create their use environments to meet and adjust to changing needs over time. The meta-design philosophy can be used to provide tools for a range of different activities, allowing for both user-generated content and design. These activities can take many different forms. In our minds, most of this content creation can be placed into one of three distinct models: system-provided tools and editors, end-user programming environments (S4SL), and classical programming or system-specific scripting languages (HTML, Java, LSL). Each activity category requires a different level of technical understanding and provides a different range of user-tailorability.

Wikis falls into the first category. The design environment provides end users with tools to create pages on the fly, link between pages, add new content, and edit existing content. Many systems now allow for tagging and graphical content manipulation. All of this is completed using the tools and editors provided, though knowledgeable programmers can sometimes incorporate HTML scripts into their content entries. Wikis provide a framework for end users to work and create from within, allowing for flexible design and use. They rely on the 'network effect', where their value increases as more active participants are incorporated. It is therefore vital that individuals take an active role in content production and personalization of the environment. Without end user contributions, wikis would not exist.

Another meta-design environment that falls into the category of system-provided tools and editors is the new Electronic Arts video game, Spore (http://www.spore.com). Spore was designed by Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, SimEarth, and other simulation games. In Spore you start out as a single celled organism in the ocean who needs to evolve through the various phases/stages of life on earth. You progress from to a multi-celled organism, then to an organism that can live on the land where you begin to develop intelligence, tribes, and civilizations. This continues into space exploration. Along the way, you have the ability to add evolutionary enhancements to your creatures. You can shape their bodies, add eyes, ears, arms, claws, noses, etc. Though Spore is a single-player game (players do not interact with each other inside the system) it also functions as a cooperative meta-design environment. Game play results in content creation for other players in later stages. The evolved worlds of every player are available for exploration by other players. Through in-system game play, users create content for other users to share. Players can also use system-provided tools in an active process of creation and sharing, through the creature builder program. These are uploaded into a management system and distributed into other players' game experiences. This program was distributed in advance of the overall release and within days more than 2 million people downloaded the program and created millions of creatures (Terdiman, 2008). These creatures were already available for populating worlds that didn't yet exist. Users are all too willing to aid in the creation of their entertainment environments. Though the Spore content and distribution is far different from a wiki, the meta-design concepts of end-user environment co-creation are the same.

Daniel Terdiman. (2008) Will Wright on the origins of 'Spore'. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10021750-52.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5. CNET. Retrieved on 9-26-08.

Task 2

Task II

Xwiki is an advanced wiki tool used by us in the Digital Social Systems class. It provides advanced features like: activity charts, recently modified, recently visited, and popular pages. It also provides advanced editing features, wysiwyg editing, tagging of pages, questionnaires, RSS Feeds, PDF Exporting, and customization through skins. From experimental use it is more aesthetically pleasing that other wikis, but it suffers from slow page displays, inconsistent editing features (based on browser), difficult tagging procedures, more complicated page creation procedures (as you are expected to know the structure of the system better - what domain or class does it need to be filed under), and loss of connection to the domain or class when you view users. It seems to be geared more towards software designers than the end user. Wikis are, at their very essence, social entities. The best wikis are active, organic communities, held together by mutual effort and trust. It is hard to mandate the existence of a wiki in a classroom environment, as the tools and design of the Wiki are often of secondary importance to social processes that do no necessarily link classical wiki participation to class wiki participation. For instance, it is hard for a class participant to read the homework answers for every other group in the class, but it would be nice to be able to read answers relevant to our own work. If the class evolved a system of tagging our answers with keywords, and then these tags could be displayed (even visually displayed with highlighted associations) then the wiki would be a far more valuable tool to the academic community.

The CreativeIT community wiki is designed to bring together creative and scientific individuals from different disciplines to work together on solving problems. The wiki has chosen colors and styles that make it look unprofessional, which might tie in with the creative focus of the wiki. It provides visual tools, displaying connections between topics, researchers, and posts. We found the navigation difficult on this site. We are use to having a consistent navigation scheme, while the CreativeIT site changes the navigation based on where you are located, thus impeding the capabilities of short-term memory. The URL ends in a specific number based on your selection, but doesn't allow for a more human centered vocabulary (The galleries page is: http://swiki.cs.colorado.edu:3232/CreativeIT/62, instead of http://swiki.cs.colorado.edu:3232/CreativeIT/galleries). While it is difficult to truly get a feeling for the wiki without repeated, and active use, we did notice that it includes RSS Feeds, history, discussion forums, image galleries, and blogs. It feels like it is designed to create smaller sites from within the larger site wiki site and to be the central starting point for ideas and topics.

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Kate Starbird and Stephen Butler worked on this assignment together through email, word documents, and face-to-face discussions. Our postings are based on the completed work, and only one person posts the results.