Wikis are cool. No seriously, I love them. Wikipedia is probably one of the more useful things the Internet has brought about. Everyone always says it can't be trusted, but that's baloney. Anyone who's seen the editing forum for one of their pages knows people fight to get the right information posted. The only thing I could possibly compare it to is the King James translation of the Bible. The King assembled 47 men that comprised 6 committees. Each committee translated a chunk of the Bible, which took four years. Then, each of the 6 groups "proofed" each others work. That took another 4 years. The scholars bickered and fought with each other for 8 total years. The King would not authorize the translation until there was unanimous approval from all 47 translators. In the 9th year, 1611, the KJV was published and printed.
That's kind of what Wikipedia editing forums look like. Admins keep users from becoming venomous. For high-profile pages, there are long discussions before something is changed and only veteran users are allowed to change information. Wikipedia has become a viable source for information.
The Voice Thread was... odd. It was kind of like the day after Christmas, when all the family is still over but there's no more feast or presents or football. Everyone's just crowded around a photo album chatting about a whole lot of nothing. Depending on which relatives are with you, it can be an awesome nothing or it can be a boring nothing. Voice Threads seem to be an attempt to widen our perception of community, when really it just dampens it. There's a disconnect in human interaction that is inherent to the Internet. I think it would be a good tool for a classroom, where everyone already knows each other. The Internet should never replace the live presence of real people. Otherwise, what's the point of being alive?
Of course, the great irony of all this is that this blog is for an online course. Not my preference to take this class online, but necessity dictates as such.
==>Daniel
