ISSUES ON THE WIB
What was the purpose of the WIB?
The WORLD IDEAS BANK (WIB) was used as a database for the science of
social psychology. The WIB collected and maintained data about a variety
of societal concerns. The WIB was started by G-3 and was supposed to be
maintained through out the successive generations. You may well know that
it is no longer active due to many problems that were not resolved by G-3.
How successful were the students
in creating a viable database?
Being a member of that particular database my response may seem biased,
but I believe that I have pretty good insight into this issue because I
was a part of it.
Even though the site is no longer active I do not feel as if it was
a complete loss and I do feel that we were successful. We did succeed to
put up a reasonable database complete with relevant links, indexes, homepages,
reports, etc. We also succeeded in collecting data, even though it was mostly
coming from members of our own class. Nonetheless, we succeeded in going
through the motions of creating, erecting, and maintaining a database. Just
like with all great things they start off slow, plagued with problems, but
in time those problems will help refine it into something greater than expected.
What were the problems?
There were many problems that were encountered when first started the
WIB site.
One problem was motivation.Some people in class were not happy with
their assigned database so when it came down to doing the nitty gritty side
of searching for relevant pages they were not to inclined to put in the
time. That of course, was only one probem.
Another problem, was the time factor. Learning how to use the internet,
e-mail, ftp, pico, seach engines, transport, html, ect. is a task in itself,
now compound that with the creation of a site, homepage, index, contribution
page, and data collection with searches and you have a whole lot of knowledge
to swallow, understand, and implement. That's a lot if you ask me and it
took way over twenty hours online a week to do this!!! Every weekend morning
I was at the Click lab, then in the weekdays I was at keller, then at night
I was at porteus. This process took so much time a lot of people didn't
have and unfortunately it showed. Luckily, We laid the foundation for the
future generations to build upon.
How would I devise a plan that would allow G-5 students
to continue the online database?
I would first have to stick to my guns on giving topics out because
if you let students decide on what topics they want to do, then there would
be no direction or order. I would however, make the topics broad and then
allow them to pick a specialty within that topic that interests them. This
way there can be order and motivation in thier work.
I then would assign these data bases and then have them immediately
put up their WIB pages in order for them to start the html proccess. Then
I would spend the next two weeks having them search throught the net for
information related to their topics and I would also expect them to e-mail
at least one member in class with something that would benefit thier topics.
This way they would work as a community and not as solo scientists (One
has to remember that this is a learning community). This will also
increase the productivity within the group on the assumption that the knowledge
would be shared and used amongst the members in the group. Finally,
I would have weekly status reports, about two minutes long per student,
for the students to report to the class on their status. This way it should
increase the coehessiveness of the group and also bring up problems so they
can be discussed, solved, and benefited by the whole class.
BACK TO THE TOP?
E-Mail ME here!!!
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