So far, 2020 has been an interesting year for me. We had severe earthquakes & cricket invasion in Turkey in addition to the famous coronavirus. Meanwhile, I had a rapid increase in my academic workload. I am not sure if I managed to choose the worst class combination possible for Spring 2020, but it seems like I did. Multiple lab reports for the labs we didn’t actually do, online midterms, many homework without getting any feedback, and (my favorite one) professors who are trying to explain things on a whiteboard while using a 2MP webcam with a bad internet connection to record the board… Well, we are close to the end of the semester, and that is my point: the time flies. I hope to survive while having little to no free time.

Wikipedia

Anyways, it is time to talk about Wikipedia! I actually remember using physical encyclopedias in primary school. The internet was a thing back then, but I didn’t know how to use it. We had a computer and internet connection at home, but there is nothing much you can do if you don’t know how to use them. One day, my teacher taught us how to use a computer and the internet. It was a magical moment. You type a question & hit enter, and literally thousands of results appear on the screen. Of course, Wikipedia was always the first in these search results. I used Wikipedia to do homework and learn things I didn’t know. I still do use it to learn new things every day. The way I use Wikipedia changed over time as well. I used to copy and paste results without questioning their validity. Now, I am more cautious, and I understood the importance of being cautious after starting to contributing to Wikipedia. I realized that sometimes people are opinionated about Wikipedia articles, and they don’t want to accept what other people say. For example, once I added songs of a singer to her Wikipedia page and someone else reverted my changes since he/she thought that the songs I listed were not notable. I didn’t have anything to do since the other person was a more powerful Wikipedia user. Sometimes people even vandalize the articles, and it is possible that some of the information is incorrect. Yes, there are people who are reverting the vandalized changes, but it takes some time to do it. Meanwhile, some users can view vandalized articles and get incorrect information. Nevertheless, it is an excellent source of information to start researching a topic to gain more in-depth knowledge through publications. I like Wikipedia, and I believe in what they are trying to achieve.

Stand-up reports

During the stand-up reports, I realized that some teams had a lot of progress, and some had a few. For example, a group had a Zoom/Skype meeting with someone from the organization, and they completed a design proposal. A lot of groups had impressive progress, especially considering the state of the world right now. The way people presented their progress was also very diverse. Some groups preferred to have a slide show presentation, and some of the groups just shared their screen to show what they been working on so far. I felt a little bit sad after watching other groups’ presentations because I think our group didn’t have a lot of progress, and this takes me to the next topic of the blog.

Group projects

This week we designed the wireframe for the issue we wanted to solve. We also realized that Slack is not really good for our group communication. Slack shows a lot of notifications to the user, and it is not easy to see which ones are important or relevant. This is a bigger problem if you are part of multiple organizations on Slack. I am sure there are ways to make it better, but I couldn’t figure it out yet. So, we created a Facebook Messenger group chat for our team. It is definitely easier to communicate with the Facebook Messenger group because there are fewer notifications, and I know that the messages I receive are relevant to me. Apart from that, we are looking for new issues to tackle because the current one is not very difficult to implement. We need to spend more time working on it. This year has been weird so far, and all of a sudden, all my classes decided to have homework and projects since they didn’t want to deal with having online midterms. As a result, I can’t allocate the amount of time I wanted to allocate for each class. I think our group project got affected by this. I’m trying hard to get myself together and have the same performance I had before the spring break. I hope I will manage to do it starting next week.