Assignment5ZacTaschdjian

Assignment5ZacTaschdjian

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

Zac Taschdjian and Amanda Porter

2. Task 1

Nice work! Only, I am not completely sure what the other meta-design environment of your choice is.

The wiki as a meta-design environment is deceptively simple. This is probably due to the proliferation of wikis; they are socially acceptable and ubiquitous with many examples easily at hand. In short, the word "wiki" has entered the popular lexicon. Without the success of sites like Wikipedia, the form would probably have remained obscure. An argument could be made that the degree of meta-design falls on a continuum, ranging from environments where users extend functionality by "customizing" something (Facebook, Myspace, etc.) to environments in which users perform complex tasks and contribute to solving wicked problems. (The Gnome project, Wikipedia). Another interesting example is the utilization of widgets on personalized homepages. On iGoogle, for example, users extend and customize functionality by populating their page with useful widgets. This raises the interesting question of how users actually participate in meta-design; do they customize or create? Edit or extend? The fundamental problem, as outlined in this weeks assigned reading, is how to create tools that address the discrepancy of usefulness from design time to use time. Generally, users are interested in the computer as a tool, not as an end-in-itself, and most likely are unwilling or unable to perform "hacks" to achieve functionality. If this assumption is true, then the role of meta-design is to provide avenues for extensibility which are meaningful to users (making user and task modeling essential). In the wiki environment, the task is fairly clear; add to, create or update content. Users configure the environment by changing the content. From an administrative view, the user becomes the webmaster (to the degree they are allowed). Based on this, one might speculate that there are a few non-exclusive avenues in which users engage in meta-design: 1) customization 2) content generation 3) true extension. An example of customization might be a myspace page in which the creator follows a template, but extends it by adding code to include a hit counter, music player or other feature. Of course the page would also include user generated content like photos or editorial text. Wikipedia is an example of content generation. A user simply adds to or edits content within an existing framework. The environment itself (the Wikipedia interface) isn't significantly changed. Unlike customization and content generation, true extension would involve a different set of incentives and skills on the part of the user. Members of Sun's Gnome Project extend the application by joining a group based on their interests. They can create code to extend functionality or address bugs that have been reported. In this case the extension of the application takes place on the development level and contradicts the model of an uninterested user who values the computer only insofar as it allows accomplishing a task. These users would generally have all the skills of developers, truly blurring the distinction between them. While this is probably the lowest level of extensibility (i.e. the level of programming), it is also the truest example of meta-design since it is the most configurable.

Task 2

In examining the course wiki, many of the elements of a meta-design perspective are apparent. As a design philosophy, it seems as though the major requirements of systems that consider both social and technical complexity are flexibility and participation. It is important that in a healthy system that functionality is supported, providing necessary flexibility to users; similarly, users must have a stake in negotiating the meaning of the space, providing the incentive for participation. We believe that the course wiki accomplishes the necessary functionality for flexibility. Our experiences with adding pages, modifying and posting content, and viewing others content have been mostly positive. We certainly feel that the functionality is there; however, we would argue that the meaning negotiation process that is described by the meta-design perspective has not come to fruition in our wiki. It seems as though the incentive to participate has not been tapped into yet, and that the visibility of our class community is hindered by they layout of the wiki. That is, we cannot visibly see other users' profiles as well as we would like. It would be great to have a "User Community" page (maybe there is already one, #bubblec("I just have not", "Well, we certainly need to improve the user-overview page. You can list all members, but that includes members of different class wikis.") found it) where there is a list of all of the users on the wiki and links to all of their profile pages. We also think that our course wiki being embedded in a larger wiki project makes it more confusing. We have wandered to pages that are not relevant to our class and this has confused us. Perhaps we do not understand the broader social network of this wiki well enough to see any meaning in being able to go to these other pages. In this sense, our course space could be more well-defined visually and tailored more to our course. Finally, the issue of incentive to participate is one that is directly linked to social aspects that are incredibly complex. In my own experience, there is a "learning curve" for being comfortable with any kind of participation, whether online or in person. In this respect, we think that more features that can make this wiki seem like a unique space just for our class, the better the participation will be.

The creative IT community wiki also seems to accomplish many of the important aspects of a socially and technically productive space. What is most striking is the appealing layout of the wiki with all of the visual resources such as drawings and pictures. The space provided to upload images and visuals i also appealing. Furthermore, the layout of the home page, in terms of creating a sort of "content ring", makes the site very visible and is much easier to process than just having the content listed. We think it is critically important to make visible the changes that are being made to the site so that other users feel as though this is an active space. This wiki does this quite well with the prominent "recent changes" listing. Yet, we really like the graph that we have on our course wiki that shows the recent activity as access versus edits. This visual might be a nice addition to this wiki.