User talk:Rachel Howie

My name is Rachel Howie and I am using this page as part of an educational class project. I will use it to gather knowledge about Wikipedia and reflect on how people use wiki pages. Rachel Howie (discuss • contribs) 13:19, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #1 - What Makes A Good Wiki
In in my day to day life, I use a number of different social media platforms to communicate and engage with my peers and catch up on what is going on in the world. The ones I use most often are Facebook and Instagram and I use them by either posting updates and pictures or by reacting to my friends updates or pictures.

In contrast, Wikipedia is not a site that I visit often as it has a more educational purpose in comparison to Facebook or Instagram which is used mainly for social purposes. I have never posted or edited anything on Wikipedia however, I am often brought to the site via links on google and in these situations I have found the exact information I am looking for. With this in mind, my interpretation of a 'good wiki' page is somewhat basic. In my experiences, I have required a Wikipedia page to include clear information about a topic and perhaps more detail about where this information came from.

I expect that as I gain more experience in using Wikipedia, I will also gain a better understanding of what makes a good 'wiki' and I hope to use this information to aid me in future assignments.

Rachel Howie (discuss • contribs) 11:48, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Marker’s Feedback on Wiki Exercise #1


Posts and comments on other people’s work, of this standard, roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor. Depending on where your actual mark is in relation to Understanding and Engagement elements, it should give you an idea of strengths and weaknesses within the achieved grade band overall.


 * Satisfactory. Among other things, satisfactory entries may try to relate an idea from the module to an original example, but might not be very convincing. They may waste space on synopsis or description, rather than making a point. They may have spelling or grammatical errors and typos. They might not demonstrate more than a single quick pass at the assignment, informed only by lecture and/or cursory reading. They may suggest reading but not thinking (or indeed the reverse). The wiki markup formatting will need some work.


 * This post is at the lower end of this grade band, so there’s clearly room for improvement here. I think in order to engage with the wiki exercises a bit more, it might be useful for you to look at the Grade Descriptors and (especially for this, perhaps, the Understanding) criteria in the module handbook to get more of an idea of how to hit those targets. Less instrumentally, and more in relation to this particular post is rather descriptive, and perhaps referring to relevant reading would have helped you to engage this in much more depth.


 * Re: responses to other people’s posts – these are fairly good, if a little brief. Remember that the comments are "worth" as much as posts themselves. The reason for this is not only to help encourage discussion (a key element of wiki collaboration!) but also to get you to reflect upon your own work. This can all, of course be used to fuel ideas that might form part of your project work. You are beginning to discuss in an open and critical way (that is to say, you've responded to what other people are saying and are contributing meaningfully to discussion - arguably the civic element of wiki that you ought to be thinking about, which you clearly are). However, these posts need to be framed with more detail and more effort to engage other users in discussion. Lastly, one of your comments wasn't signed! I can track these, but the task is made more difficult (and your work can be very easily missed) if you don't sign contribs on the discussion pages.

GregXenon01 (discuss • contribs) 12:05, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #2: Visibility and Data Trails
This assignment has required me to consider my own personal data trails that I produce when I post on the social media platforms that I use. I have realized that most of these data trails are left without me even acknowledging the fact that what I am doing can be monitored by numbers of people. On sites such as Facebook, being 'visible' could be seen as the main purpose for posting - you want people to read what you have to say. Without even becoming online 'friends' with a person you can still find out all sorts of information such as their age, contact information, where they are from and sometimes even your relationship status. For most people, including me, the availability of their information is not seen as an issue or given much thought and perhaps this is because we have not taken the time to consider just how 'visible' we are to such a large scale of people.

A fairly new platform which is used extensively by most young people today is Snapchat. This is an app in which you add other users and send them pictures. You can choose how long the person gets to view your picture or video for and then it disappears and can not be viewed by them again. A good demonstration that most people are naive when it comes to our own online visibility and data trail is the use of this app when it was first created. The idea that the picture would disappear forever, suggests that no data trail would be left and people felt safer. However, soon after it was discovered that the other user could take screenshots or save your 'snaps' before they deleted and this shocked a lot of people.

When it comes to visibility and data trails, I believe that a lot of people, including myself, should probably put more thought into what information they are putting out into the online world and more importantly, who they are allowing this information to be shared with.

Rachel Howie (discuss • contribs) 01:18, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

I agree that with your comments regarding visibility - we often don't realise we are as visible as we are. Even after we delete things, there will still always be a trace of what was once there. You've commented on Facebook and Snapchat in relation to privacy and I was wondering if you thought either was more secure or if you feel that both have the same security levels? I'm also curious as to what you post on each app - would you post something on facebook that you wouldn't on snapchat? I assume that you have different audiences on different social media platforms so would you feel more secure posting on a certian site? Kaitlineaston (discuss • contribs) 18:18, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

I think that Facebook may appear more secure as it allows us to control our security settings ourselves. We can choose which of our friends get to see which posts or we can open our profiles up and allow even people we are not friends to view our posts. This being said, however,  no matter what our privacy setting are we can always be found with just a search of our names. Snapchat is slightly less obvious when it comes to our own privacy settings. Although there is an option to allow people nearby to find your profile, if this setting is disabled then the only way people can add you is if you give them your user details. This brings me to your next question about whether I would post different information on different platforms. The general information that I post is the same for example when I am on holiday I would post a picture on Facebook and I would send similar pictures on Snapchat. However, due to the fact that on Snapchat you can chose specific people to send your pictures to,  I would use Snapchat to share a picture that maybe wasnt perfect quality. This is different to Facebook because I know my posts will be viewed by all my friends and so I would ensure it was a good quality picture.

Rachel Howie (discuss • contribs) 13:28, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

I understand your views but I have to disagree with the idea that Facebook is more secure than Snapchat. You've said that we control our own privacy setting and this may be true but an array of information is still available to people we are not friends with. If you were to type my name into Facebook you could still find out my age, where i'm from, where I live and what I study at University. This information can be accessed even though my profile is set to private. Personally, I feel that Snapchat is much more secure as you have the option to choose who you want to send snaps to - you choose how long they last and you can also see exactly who has viewed your snap chat. You are also alerted when someone takes a screenshot of any snaps you put up, whereas people can freely take screenshots of your Facebook. Kaitlineaston (discuss • contribs) 20:23, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #3 Information Overload
Anytime that I need to find information on something, whether it is for university work or just something that I am interested in, I turn to the internet to find out. From past experiences of using the library to get my information from books, I found that it can take quite a lot of reading before you can determine if the book you are reading is even relevant to what you are trying to study. Unlike this, the internet is quick and to the point. A simple google search can bring up thousands of sources and all you need to do to ensure each source is relevant is to make your search phrase specific. When attempting to build up knowledge, I have found that it is very important to use a wide variety of sources. When writing essays especially, getting information from different perspectives is important in order to remain objective. Gathering these in physical form would be so time-consuming whereas on the internet we can easily gain access to academic books, journals, articles and blogs without much time being wasted on switching between them.

There is, however, some problems that can occur when searching on the internet. The sheer amount of sources available could also be seen as a disadvantage because narrowing them down can be tricky. Similarly, not all sources on the internet are legitimate. This poses a problem when finding out information for educational assignments. For example, the Wikibook project that I am currently working on with my group requires us to find sources which we can reference and share with the rest of the class. The topic we are doing is 'the fear of missing out' which could be seen as quite a personal and subjective topic and many of the texts that can be found online regarding this have been written from a personal perspective. Although these types of sources can indeed be used, it is important to establish the credibility of the text. A way in which we can avoid this problem is by following the resource list which was given to us as these have been approved by the university already and so we do not need to worry about it. Furthermore, because we are working in a group we have been able to share credible and relevant sources with each other.

Rachel Howie (discuss • contribs) 11:33, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

I like the link you make between the internet and books and how, while there is a lot more information online, it can also be a lot easier to find the piece of information you are looking for than in books. I also agree that we need to look at many different sources online to become aware of the broader picture and to allow us to decipher which content is accurate and relevant. How often do you find yourself questioning the legitimacy of internet sources? I myself found that that I thought more about this when I began submitting University work. I think that it is interesting that you make the point about the group topic involving some personal research and I think that it is an important factor of the internet to include such a diverse range of sources. These allow our Wikibook project to have more depth and fully explore the topic at hand.

Sharing sources, as you mentioned is a very good way of dealing with the workload, and by sharing sources relevant to the work other people are doing, I think that we are managing to deal with the issue of information overload reasonably well. While I, for one, do spend time looking at search results that aren't exactly what I needed, I think it is a good idea to remain open to the topics that other people in the group are researching, and maybe even in other chapters of the book, to help out with the project as a whole. I also agree with you that by using the resource list, as well as our own findings, we can ensure reliability and relevance of our sources and our overall project. Ailsaharv (discuss • contribs) 19:24, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

I agree with what you have said about we can easily gain access to academic books, journals, articles, and blogs on the internet without wasting time and very good insights on contrast and compare the differences between the internet information and book resources. Also, I agree it is very important to use a wide variety of information is very important, but I think although using the Internet to find information can be very fast and convenient, but some resources and data are mixed, which is very difficult to find the exact information that we needed.

I am interested in what you have mentioned about narrowing the sheer amount of sources down can be tricky and not all resources on the Internet are legitimate. Because I also think that the amount of information we have online is immense and sometimes are very difficult to arrange. Besides, it is difficult to find and verify the sources of the information are legal or not. So what do you think about how can we avoid this problem to get the information? For your Wikibook project, it is good to share credible and relevant sources with each other, because people are working in a group, so everyone's interaction and help are very important. Shekkkkk (discuss • contribs) 03:18, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Similarly, I never started to question the credibility of sources online until I came to writing pieces for university assignments. Before that, I would believe most things that I read online were legitimate. Looking back now, this was definitely nieve of me as there are so many ways in which false information could be shared or even credible information that has been exaggerated can give a false impression. Rachel Howie (discuss • contribs) 13:29, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Avoiding these misleading sources can be very tricky, especially online. One thing that I do look out for is sources that have been peer marked. This gives me some piece of mind that what I am reading is at least credible. Rachel Howie (discuss • contribs) 13:29, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #4 Reflective Account
Compared with all the other assignments that I have completed for University, the Wikibook Project has proved to be the most challenging. This is due to the fact that it is so different from the rest, which have mainly been submitted in the form of essays. In addition, Wikipedia in general is not a platform that I was previously familiar with and so getting used to navigating around was my first obstacle. The second and biggest obstacle that I came accross was communication. Since we were working in a group on a topic that other groups were also working on, it was important that we communicated effectively with each other. The discussion page proved very useful for this as I was able to have discussions with people who were working on the same topics as me under subheadings that were relevant to the research I had done. Similarly, we had a section in which we could share information on which sources were useful and also tips on how to work Wikipedia and add in things like references. The problem I had with this however, is keeping up with the sheer amount of conversations that were going on. I did not receive notifications when somebody made a new edit to the conversation unless they tagged me in it so I felt that I needed to be constantly checking the page in case I had missed anything. Ironically, this was very relevant to the research I was doing on the topic 'constant connectivity and the fear of missing out' and helped to give me a better understanding of what I was learning since I was experiencing it myself.

Another factor which I would say influenced my writing greatly, was that I knew that everyone could read my work. With other assignments it has just been the marker that has read my essays and so I felt that there was a bit more pressure to make sure I was writing well and clearly. During the assignment I had a lot of trouble with adding in a reference to my section and even after getting help from one of my team mates I could not quite get it to look right. Someone else picked up on this mistake that I had made and pointed out to everyone that it looked messy. This extra pressure made me determined to work extra hard to get it right since my mistakes were being pointed out to everyone who was reading the discussions.

Rachel Howie (discuss • contribs) 12:21, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Comment Hey! I can relate to the pressure of knowing everyone can read your work, it can be intimidating. I found it useful getting out of my comfort zone because it forced me to reflect more on my work, more than I usually do when I am just submitting to a marker. I also found it gave me a better understanding of the benefits of collective knowledge. I feel like I have a much clearer understanding of the subjects as a whole after reading the perspectives and ideas of others. I understand your struggle with the amount of conversations on the discussion page, I found it easy to get lost and miss conversations. How did your group tackle this problem? Did you find face-to-face meetings beneficial or did you use other online platforms for communicating? KGilbert (discuss • contribs) 12:35, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi! It definitely did help me to be more reflective of my own work aswell. I found that meeting face to face was definitely helpful and in our group we had discussions in a facebook group chat. This helped when we were speaking to eachother directly as well as sharing with the rest of the people who were assigned the same topic as us. Rachel Howie (discuss • contribs) 14:15, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Content (weighted 20%)
The Introduction section here is a little perfunctory, but the main Concepts section is where all of the key sections are mapped out. Each section has its own descriptive short paragraph, summarising the discussion and concept in fairly neat and concise ways. The overall effect of this is that the chapter is given a sense of narrative and structure from the outset. Whilst the discussion in various sections doesn’t always live up to this, and there are one or two inconsistencies, this ought not to diminish too much for the achievements evidenced here.

As mentioned, the sections themselves generally contain good content, but there are inconsistencies regarding the strength of argument, and citation of sources. An obvious example of this would be the first history section, for which citation of sources doesn’t occur until the paragraph on the 1990s!

The unusual step of including a survey and posting the results here is an extremely useful one. Something that absolutely HAS to be thought through in ALL future work is that if one is conducting a survey (even if for demonstration purposes, as included here) or indeed ANY work with people, one must go through an ethics approval process – this is to ensure no harms (relative or absolute) occur for researchers or participants. This process will become more apparent later in the degree programme, particularly in final year projects. The use of interwiki links connecting all of the sections of the chapter together is both very useful and evidences good levels of project management, delegation of workflow, and joined-up collaboration. One thing that would have benefitted the chapter enormously, is if these interwiki links could have been extended to include more reference to other chapters in the book. For example, you have a subsection on Surveillance uses – there could have been interwiki links to various relevant sections in other chapters (especially, perhaps, Privacy in a Digital Age chapter).

Plenty of evidence of reading, secondary research and application of ideas from peer-reviewed sources, as well as other sources from popular culture and journalistic materials. This does tend to vary quite considerably from section to section, however, with some sections oddly drawing from newspaper online articles around topics for which there are materials available in the further reading lists (the subsections on internal effects, the Google effect and others, where there are some obvious aspects of that reading e.g. Vaidhyanathan and his book on the Googlization of Everything). Excellent section on FOMO.

The references section evidences research, reading and sharing of resources. However, the depth and range of sources could be considerably improved.


 * Satisfactory. Your contribution to the book page gives a satisfactory brief overview of the subject under discussion in your chosen themed chapter. There is a fair range of concepts associated with your subject, and an effort to deliver critical definitions. There is evidence that you draw from relevant literature and scholarship, however your own critical voice in the building of a robust argument is slightly lost, perhaps due to a variable depth of understanding the subject matter or over reliance on rote learning. The primary and secondary sources you found about the chapter’s themes cover a somewhat circumscribed range and depth of subject matter.

Wiki Exercise Portfolio (Understanding weighted 30%)
Posts and comments on other people’s work, of this standard, roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor. Depending on where your actual mark is overall (and particularly in relation to Understanding and Engagement elements), that should give you an idea of strengths and weaknesses within the achieved grade band, relative to the descriptor


 * Satisfactory. Among other things, satisfactory entries may try to relate an idea from the module to an original example, but might not be very convincing. They may waste space on synopsis or description, rather than making a point. They may have spelling or grammatical errors and typos. They might not demonstrate more than a single quick pass at the assignment, informed only by lecture and/or cursory reading. They may suggest reading but not thinking (or indeed the reverse). The wiki markup formatting will need some work.


 * Reading and research:
 * evidence of critical engagement with set materials, featuring command of a fair range of relevant materials and analyses
 * some evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material
 * Argument and analysis:
 * articulated and supported argument through judgement relating to key issues, concepts or procedures
 * some evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position);
 * some evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections);
 * some evidence of independent critical ability

Engagement (weighted 50%)

 * Evidence from contributions to both editing and discussion of content to a variable standard (i.e. volume and breadth of activity as evidenced through contribs)
 * Satisfactory engagement with and learning from other Wikipedians about the task of writing/editing content for a Wikibook
 * Reflexive, creative and fairly well-managed use of discussion pages using deployment of somewhat limited judgement relating to key issues, concepts or procedures