Social Media Project

Our group researched IBM's social media presence and practices. Our wiki is located at http://ism3004socialmedia.wikispaces.com/IBM. This was an interesting collaboration project. My second project at the University of Florida, but my first project that involved a wiki. On my previous project we just emailed Word documents to each other with tracked changes. I prefer to work with the wiki because you can see the project grow in front of your eyes in almost real time. Even with wiki collaboration it can still be difficult in getting everyone engaged in the project. To see how an almost perfect collaboration effort occurs see the Microsoft projects in history video at this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/office-documents-in-history/

I especially like the Declaration of Independence collaboration in word. Unfortunately, our project did not go as smoothly as that -not that any project in the real world could, but our team performed pretty good for our first stab at a wiki project.

Our team (team 5) began our exchanges on April 13th when I sent out an email as a “call to arms” and to select a company. At first we only had five team members, but then others joined in later. Our team consisted of me, Mathew, Elizabeth, Shelby, Kees, Jordan, and Karl. Mathew and Elizabeth were the first to respond. Mathew Archer was an excellent team member. He was always quick to respond and produce, and he was very helpful. I sent out a breakdown of assignments for our deliverables on the 17^th and the initial five members began contributing. Later in the week two more members logged in and helped out.

The wiki was coming along quite nicely, but we were missing some assignments (Wikipedia and Flickr). I did not realize until the due date that Kees did not have access to the wiki. We were able to get his information through the discussion board in order to submit his work to the wiki. All in all it was a good learning experience. I’m glad we got started on April 13^th (Friday the thirteenth) and didn’t wait any longer. Who knows what would have happened if we had. I have one suggestion though. This project may work better in the middle or beginning of the semester. Students may not put as much effort into the project later in the semester if they already have a good grade locked up through extra credit. This may be a disadvantage to the other students who are not in that position.

From this experience I want to learn more about creating and maintaining wikis. I’m going to create one at work so that our technicians can use it as a repository of system knowledge. They’ll be able to update and correct information as needed. Overall this was my favorite project of the semester.