Models and Theories in Human-Computer Interaction/D.Cog as Applied to WikiBooks

D.Cog as Applied to WikiBooks (Chris Vermilya)

WikiBooks is a collaborative platform for the storage and sharing of information, usually specific to a topic as determined by the owner of said WikiBook. It can be viewed as a functional system where, for our purposes as an HCI class, HCI information related to our studies as a class is stored and thus retrievable for later consumption. In this system, we as students (and our professor) act to provide the input – HCI related information – from our book and other documents to the WikiBooks page, when we submit new information to the wiki that data is processed and stored out on a server, when we visit a page on the wiki the data is retrieved and represented on our computer screens, and such information is represented as output to us.

WikiBooks encourages participation in the pools of information stored in an administrator’s page but unfortunately, with our current class usage of the system, I believe our WikiBook page does not fully encourage interaction between posters/classmates and even in some instances discourages it. To start, transparency in viewing who has made what edits to the wiki is not obvious and can even be difficult to track down. Whereas we have been including our names with each posted assignments, WikiBooks would benefit from the automatic inclusion of some footnote that said who last edited any given section of text.