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Reply to wikipedia

Reply to wikipedia

Reply to WikiPedia tightens its editorial policies… ever so slightly at cac.ophony.org

Jim

Reply to James Drogan

Reply to Kate

Your school might also be willing to host a wiki — I’d check with them. You might be able to get them to install wiki software on their servers for your class. If that’s the case, then Mediawiki is the way to go — that’s the wiki engine that runs Wikipedia and it’s free. Your private hosting service, Squarespace, might also let you install a wiki as part of your hosting package. Once you get the software hosted and running, you’d start an article and let your students at it. Simple as that.

Other suggestions folks?

Reply to Mikhail

Reply to James Drogan

Sean is right about community. In the case of Wikipedia, it’s a very loose community: they don’t know each other, and random folks can come along at any time and do anything. But amazingly, other people often come back and set things right, and improve them, even.

A great audio-visual example of this is provided by Jon Udell’s screencast of the Wikipedia entry for “Heavy Metal Umlaut.” I did not link it there, because when you click the link, it starts playing, and you’ll stop reading this! If you have a fast internet connection (on campus or broadband / DSL), click here when you’re ready to view Jon Udell’s screencast. The screencast is an eight-minute web-based movie (it shows right on the webpage, requiring no movie-playing applications) which details the rise and fall and rise of one Wikipedia entry (about those random umlauts used in heavy metal band names and song titles). You see how an entry develops, is vandalized, and eventually, becomes a piece of writing an awful lot of people had something to do with. It’s fun to watch and also serves as a good introduction to Wikis for those who are just thinking about what this kind of writing and editing process means.

For smaller, tighter-knit communities writing Wikis, we can expect things to run a lot more smoothly. I think Wikis provide an exciting space for teachers to experiment with certain kinds of collaborative writing.

Reply to Kate

It is only a week old at this point, but we imagine having a sort of Wikipedia of our own for WAC (and CAC) at CUNY; it would be a community-edited archive/encyclopedia of the work we do. It has similar features to Wikipedia (history and tracking of changes, etc.). Currently we have a dozen or so example handouts and assignments on there. We will be getting more, but Mikhail’s discussion of Wikipedia has made me excited about the potential for collaborative writing.

For example, when I added a document about this blog I created a link on the wiki for CAC. There is no actual page for CAC at the moment though. Someone could drop in a one or two sentence entry for it, but, like Mikhail’s entry on “Fly Me to the Moon,” it could be built up over time with corrections additions and links. It would take a while but that could happen. The main challenge would be building a community around the site.

In general collaborative online writing needs a community of some kind. This applies also (or maybe especially) to teaching. Examples I’ve seen of successful on-line writing or bulletin boards in teaching have always been successful because the class became a community that was drawn together by the topic.

Reply to Sean E

Nonetheless, this notion of “authorial authority” is possibly the biggest hurdle when coming to a wiki for the first time. In fact, this omen often creates a self-regulating logic wherein people limit themselves to posting about topics that they are somewhat fluent in. So while the theoretical logic of the wiki as an open-ended social database of knwoledge remains in tact, the fact is that the wiki does, indeed, have a built in regulator made of the various communities surrounding certain post topics.

Herein lies the rub, this community remians relatively anonymous suggesting a (re)production of knowledge that remains outside of an institutional logic of giving credit, referencing, and documenting. This fact often makes academics wary - for they often depend for their subsistence on “original” research that can be translated into an authored book with a seal of approval from the intellectual property lawyers representing their publishing firm (can anyone say tenure?). Now, with the shift to a predominantly communal definition of knwoeldge that characterizes a wiki - the criteria for credit, evaluation, critique, and assessment must also shift.

Given all this, how do we effectively integrate the wiki into the individualistic academic environment that we teach within? And, if we can, what concessions to the truly collaborative logic of the wiki are we forced to make? Finally, how do we, as educators, scholars, students, and dilletantes - begin to rethink the nature of assessment with the rise of such potentially powerful technological teaching tools?

Reply to Jimmy