Scratch the Wikipedia

1. The “power law distribution” or “long tail” phenomenon, as seen in behavior online on the Wikipedia, suggests that the concept of an average user of wikipedia is meaningless. Support your answer: how do you think a local, “JMU only” version of the Wikipedia would compare to the worldwide version? Would it be very similar? Higher quality? Less quality? Why?

I think that a JMU only version of Wikipedia would be somewhat similar to wikipedia, but with far fewer results. While we do have many scholars that know a lot about diverse topics, I believe that there would still be far fewer posts onto JMU's wikipedia site for a number of reasons. First of all, the number of potential JMU wikipedia "posters" would be far fewer than if it were open to all people to post. For example, there may only be one or two professors at JMU who have a lot to comment about, say, Irish literature. If neither of these two professors have any desire or knowledge about a JMU wikipedia, the quantity and quality of the potential information on Irish Literature becomes limited to students who are not necessarily experts within that field. When wikipedia is open to all internet users, the liklihood of an expert user within the field of Irish Literature is much more likely to post something with much better quality than a student at JMU.
Basically, the quality of a worldwide wikipedia will be much better than one isolated to JMU just because of the number of potential experts and people willing to give input is much higher and the information would be much broader than if it was contained to a small sample of individuals.


2. After reading the article about Scratch and exploring the Scratch website, what are some observable benefits in creating a space to share student work?

In one word, remixing. Having the ability to take the work of someone else and expand upon it to make it even better is probably one of the biggest benefits that I see from creating a space for students to share work. It's like the epitome of creative learning. Younger students are no longer just learning things being taught to them, but with programs like Scratch, they now have the ability to create and expand on programs that they are interested in. Not only that, but it creates a sense of pride because after you create something on that site, other people have the ability to use it and the creator can feel a sense of accomplishment at being the one that provided it for other people to use and "remix." I believe that the ability to share and expand on others' work easily is revolutionizing the way that we learn and teach.