on 'working together'

In many ways this project was a total disaster. It started off really well though. I loved our topic, and we were both quick to set up our respective blogs, and A-M the wiki. She put up a couple of pages to get us started and I set myself up an account and tried it out and found it really easy to use. I wasn't that impressed with it, but it was easy to use, and that was significant for me.

Because I knew *nothing* about wikis prior to this, and because we were meant to compare wikis to blogs I thought I had better get my head down and do some background reading about them. I was happy to do this in the privacy of my blog. We had agreed to use the wiki as a discussion board and to keep an eye on each other's blogs. A-M was not able to post anything in her blog except the first entry, and then make a couple of contributions in the wiki.

I just kept on working away at my blog, building up a compendium of articles I'd read, and thoughts I'd had about the subjects I was researching. However given the lack of input from A-M (and not knowing when she was going to return) my research had no focus and went all over the place. I covered subjects as wide-ranging as RSS feeds, learning styles, lurking, wikis, blogs, discussion boards, online communication. They were each related to the previous post, but they did go off on a tangent. Our remit was to compare what was good about blogs with what was good about wikis. But I found myself have to define what 'good' was. And everything fed into everything else. As a result I went off on a couple of tangents that ended up being wastes of time. An example is the RSS feeds. I honestly read about 8 articles on this cos I thought it was a common element between blogs and wikis and that it was crucial that I understood it. I still don't understand it, except to know that it isn't crucial!

I was never completely certain how the wiki was to fit in, and I sort of resented doing my private thinking in my blog (which took time and effort), and then (potentially) put it up in a wiki to have the same conversation over again. However, had it worked, and had A-M been able to commit then I might well have different ideas on the subject.

I learnt a lot about myself in this project, about what works well for me, and about how I work with other people. I did also learn a lot about blogs, wikis, online communication, lurking, learning styles and various other things through my research. And I really enjoyed it.