Resource Wiki

I'm not entirely sure whether this post is supposed to be about the experience of collaborating on a wiki when I did not regularly see the other collaborators or about how I plan to use the resource wiki/the new resources from the resource wiki, so I suppose I will cover both topics.

The collaboration wasn't that bad, really. Both of the other Latin students (Michael and Leigh Anne) are also in my Latin class this semester, so I see them three times a week if I want to ask them questions. I did reorganize the Latin page by topic when we started (Michael had misunderstood the directions and created a new page for each of his entries, which I corrected). I also formatted several of the pages according to Dr. O'Bannon's exacting standards, although that wasn't difficult, merely tedious.

On that note, is there a way to set the wiki to automatically apply a standard font and size to all the text on all the pages within that wiki? I noticed that unless I changed the font immediately when I created a new page - before I typed anything - the page kept changing it back to whatever its presets were, which I found irritating.

I feel that the assignment was slightly frustrating because the other sections seemed to not have the same rigorous formatting standards as our section did, so they didn't bother to enter items alphabetically or to use the prescribed font and size. Of course, I do tend to be a perfectionist over such small details, so perhaps that was just me.

I need to go look at the resources which Leigh and Michael posted, as well as the ones on the "All Languages" page. I am already familiar with the links on the "Grammar and Translating" page, but I look forward to exploring the other links. A resource wiki like this is a good way to share resources and classroom ideas with teachers from other schools (or even other states), especially since a field like Latin will only have one teacher per school, possibly even one teacher per small city. (For example, the French and Latin teachers in Maryville both travel between the junior high and high schools.)

A resource wiki could also be used with students to point them to interesting sites for research or further learning opportunities, although I will repeat that in Classics, our best resources tend to be print resources, not the internet.

Exhibit A: the Latin books which live on my desk full-time.

Exhibit B: the Latin and Classics books which I have in my apartment - maybe half of my full collection.

Obviously, the drawback of print-only resources is that they are only accessible to one person at a time, and only if that person is in the same place as the book. That does not negate the fact that our best resources are still almost exclusively in print format.