Blog #4-Disrupting Intellectual Property

After reading about Intellectual Property and Wikis, I had some new insight to the conversation. One thing I realized while reading this piece was that wikis are assembled through a team. Even though everyone has their own ideas and thoughts put in, people still have to work together in collaborating those ideas in order to make that wiki really functional and visually stunning. This reading connected me with our wiki projects now, in the fact that we're working together. If we had to do individual wikis, yes it would be possible, but not nearly as good. Ideas from others, using each other as peer revisers, editors and idea thinkers really expands the amount of quality work we can put into our wiki project. I also made the connection that with growing technology, copyrighting is intended to be enforced ten fold because it's probably harder to regulate online. However, now with Limewire Kazaa, and other downloading sites, stealing music from the internet is now as easy as clicking a button. The connection there is that we're learning what is legal and what isn't (in terms of copyright infringement) through this wiki project, yet here we are using technology (similar technology) that we can use to very quickly and easily illegally download music.

The authors claim, "They must also accept that the wiki document or entry does not belong to them individually, which in many ways goes against how students are trained via tests, grades, and papers to view their work" (Vie and deWinter 114). After reading this quote, I learned the realization of that truth; this is not fully your work. You will either rise well as a group or fall together; but regardless of time and effort put in, it's harder to tell your individual work progress with a wiki. In addition, I learned that some teachers really try to avoid using wikis because of the potential problems it may have, (such as people deleting information, kids not putting in the effort they would otherwise, and it's unlike old teaching styles that have been around for centuries).

I believe that these authors possibly struggled when collaborating with one another while writing this piece. It's hard to tell, but I would assume they did considering the main focus of this piece seems to be the complexities when collaborating with others. In addition, everyone seems to be very opinionated when it comes to wikis. Therefore, I feel that writing this work could have been difficult; are these people advocates for wikis or not? While we do see insights and arguments in both favors, it's hard to truly form an opinion about a wiki because of that fact. However, regardless, I still feel I learned more about wikis and the processes to complete them, which overall is a good thing for me as a student to know.