Saturday, January 19, 2008

I'm not a natural publicist!

I've just added a few more thoughts to the Musings page regarding Prensky's Digital Natives. As I was doing so, I thought that this guy gives so much fuel for argument that I might try and entice FET8611 people in to have a look, and hopefully add a comment or 2. As usual, I can't just ask directly, and I added the "only if you have time" angle as well. I'm not sure if this is a ploy on my part or not, but I genuinely hate asking people to do me favours. I think this is one aspect of using the wiki for assessment that I might have questions with. Really, to do well, we have to force/entice/bribe people to read/edit/add to our site when perhaps they have no real interest. It makes me think of double-glazing salesmen that are so persistent and clever with words that you end up spending money on something you don't need or could have got a better deal elsewhere. My feeling about the wiki pages is that you should make people aware that it's there and leave it at that. If they really need it or are genuinely interested, they'll come back to it. And if no one visited my page during the 12 weeks of the course, or visited it only once, got what they needed and never came back, does that make it a bad page? 50 people might visit it 10 minutes after I submit my report (not very likely, I must admit!!)
I'm slightly worried that I'm not worried about how many people use my pages. I know I'm missing something on the self-promotion front, but it's not in my nature. Cheesy as it sounds, I'm taking from this course what I need - a familiarity with wikis and blogs - as I do intend to use both in the future, mostly with regard to my teaching. At the same time, it's a real buzz if someone comments or adds to my page, or contacts me to say they liked it. Everyone likes to be rewarded for their work, no matter what form that reward takes (now I sound like Prensky with my sweeping generalisations! Time to get off the laptop :-))

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