Assignment 4

Assignment Question:

Contribute and build this wiki: Discover SCSJ

Each student will be given a particular topic/section to focus on, but they are encouraged to contribute to other students' work. Cooperation among students is vital to produce a coherent wiki.

You will be graded based the following:

• Collaborative effort (30pts) - You are expected to work with you classmates and contribute meaningful work to the wiki. Revisions either improve the editing or add additional content. You do not delete the content of the other person unless that content is found to be in error. If such error is found, you are to communicate via discussion your reason for deleting the information. Each topic to be discussed will be created under a different thread under discussions.
• Multimedia elements (10 pts) - Graphics, photographs, sound, and videos are used as needed and add to the content.
• Organization (5 pts) - Table of contents and heading must be appropriately used. Information must be organized in a categorical manner. Additional pages are added if needed.
  
• Hyperlinks (10 pts) - An effective wiki hyperlinks sources and gives readers additional information about the topic.
• Original writing (10 pts) - The effective wiki summarizes information but never copies it. So, remember to cite your sources.
• Content (25 pts) - Do your research and provide sufficient information about your assigned topic/section.
• Coherence of wiki (10 pts) - The wiki must be coherent as a whole and should NOT contain repeating and contradicting information.
  

Assignment Specifications:

• Work individually on your assigned section, but contribute and collaborate on the wiki as a whole.
  
• Weightage: 35%
• Duration: 3 weeks

Introduction to Wikis

A Wiki is a collaborative Web site that allows users to create, add to, modify, or delete the Web site content via their Web browser. Most wikis are open to modification by the general public. Wikis ususally collect recent edits on a Web page so that someone (like the moderator or owner of the wiki) can review them for accuracy.

But you might be thinking - we can already collaborate on a document online using e-mails! If you look at the next image, you will understand why using wikis is a more efficient and quicker way to write collaboratively. All the information is stored at a central location. No more e-mailing everybody after a tiny update.

Alright then, what about blogs? Can't we collaborate using blogs as well? Well, the difference between a wiki and a blog is that users cannot modify original posts made by the blogger. In a wiki, provided you have the necessary permissions, you can practically edit and change anything on the wiki. However, the older versions of the same document will be stored in database, just in case somebody is spamming the wiki and we need to revert to the previous versions.

A popular wiki is Wikipedia, a free Web encyclopedia. You can obtain more information about wikis at this Wikipedia Wiki page.

Just to get you acquainted with the wiki software, you will go to this trial-scsj wiki to personally experience what you can do in a wiki. Spend some time to familiarize yourselves to the user interface and start editing this wiki to your heart's content!

Referencing Web Sites

I'm posting some supplementary information here about how you should properly reference web sites for your assignments. Please learn them and use them in your assignments.

These two links below will tell you how to use properly cite a web site:

• Harvard Referencing for Electronic Sources
• How to Reference a Web Site at the End of the Text

The following link here will give you a complete overview of the Harvard Referencing System:

• Referencing - The Harvard System