Please distribute the following CFP to anyone who might be interested.
Call for Papers
Wikis are without a doubt one of the most interesting and radical of the new writing media available to the wired society, yet they also one of the most misunderstood. Many of us know of them only by encounters with "that wacky website anybody in the world can edit," the (in)famous Wikipedia, that is showing up more and more in our students' works cited lists. For others, wikis represent the incarnation of the openness, decentralization, and collaboration dreamt of by the Internet's founders. For those of us in the computers and writing community, wikis represent a fertile field for rhetorical analysis and one of the richest opportunities for teaching writing in the classroom.
The time has come for an edited collection of essays on wikis entitled The Wild, Wild Wiki: Unsettling the Frontiers of Cyberspace. Editors Matt Barton and Robert Cummings would like to invite you to submit your thoughts for a volume on the theory, politics, future, and application of wikis for teachers of college composition (and beyond). These essays will be organized into the following three categories:
* Theory and Politics: 12-25 page essays that discuss wiki issues from theoretical perspectives. Such essays might examine how knowledge gets constructed and legitimated in wikis, or how wiki users negotiate authorship. Do wikis liberate or erase identities? What roles, if any, should copyright laws play in the regulation of wiki discourse? Why is that the most famous wiki happens to be encyclopedic; could other types of discourse flourish in wikis? How do wikis remediate other media, old or new? What can you do with a wiki that you can't do with any other media? Should we think of wikis as related to the open source phenomenon through Commons-Based? Peer Production and, if so, does this predict how and where wikis will expand? Do wikis fundamentally alter the practice of revision? The concept of collaboration?
* Applications: 8-12 page essays that examine how teachers can use wikis in the classroom. This includes assignments involving Wikipedia, but also creating new wikis specifically for classroom use. The essays here will look at practical applications as well as limitations and technological matters (How hard is it to install a wiki? What kind of support is needed? What are the differences among the many wiki servers now available? Can a classroom wiki achieve critical mass or low cost content integration? What are the ethical implications of asking students to write in a wiki where writers, other than their teachers, make editorial decisions about their text? Do contributions by student writers, as part of a class assignment, differ substantially from those offered freely by self-selecting wiki contributors?)
* Lore: 6-12 page narratives that describe teachers' experience using (or reacting) to wikis in their classrooms. How have you been using wikis in your writing or teaching? What went right and what went wrong? What would you do differently next time? How have you assessed writing in wikis?
We also plan to "eat our dogfood" during this project--in other words, we will be using wikis extensively to plan, draft, review, and revise the essays in our collection. All authors will share in the reviewing and editing process. We also hope to secure a publisher who will allow us to publish under a Creative Commons license rather than traditional, full-blown copyright. Our goal is to produce a volume of accessible and engaging works that will help secure wikis a prominent place in composition.
Tentative Timeline:
Abstracts: October 10, 2005
Abstract acceptances: October 17, 2005
Submissions Deadline: May 1, 2006
Send your enquiries, queries, or abstracts to either of the co-editors:
Matt Barton
mdbarton@stcloudstate.edu
(320) 308-3061 (phone)
(320) 308-5524 (fax)
Dept of English
720 Fourth Avenute South
St. Cloud, MN 56301-3061
or
Robert Cummings
rec@uga.edu
(706) 542-2103 (vox)
(706) 542-2128 (fax)
Dept of English
University of Georgia
254 Park Hall
Athens, Georgia 30602-6205
Changing Wiki
I think the comments today by Wales are pretty telling. The Wiki cannot remain wild forever, if it is to be a trusted source of information. It's a paradox of popularity: the larger the target, the more hackers and vandals will want to strike.
I posted the paragraph from Reuters, and the link to the story.
Wikis are interesting. I just don't know how they will be locked and by whom. Will editors be elected? Will one person hold the keys to the castle? And what is the social lesson to be learned?
Wikis not always completely open
That's a very interesting article. Wikipedia has always been the flagship/lightning rod of the wiki phenomenon. I'd like to know more about exactly what Wales is contemplating; the quotes in the article are pretty brief.
If he's talking about "freezing" or "hardening" some text on a wiki, after it has resided there for a while and is is thought of as a product of considered compromise, I don't think of this as a problem as long as there is a way to loosen that text back up if the community so desires. In a completely open wiki like Wikipedia, you hope that the text which remains is the product of a thoughtful consensus. If you gradually freeze text which you consider to be the product of that consensus, then perhaps you're moving focus of the conversation from what is accepted by the community to what is more controversial, much in the way that science moves from hunch to hypothesis, to theory, to fact.
But let's not forget that the Wikipedia way is not the only way. Wikis allow all sorts of creative text editing permission structures. For instance, I've long wanted an American Literature wiki which behaved as a hybrid between the Wikipedia model and the peer-reviewed journal. I want to establish a community of editors who would constantly review submissions and make decisions about which text should be frozen as a reflection of the consensus view on, say, Mark Twain's views on religion. In this model anyone could submit, but only editors (initially selected by academic credentials but then augmented by activity on the wiki ala the slashdot modding model) could freeze text. I've started one here (shameless plug):
http://klotho.english.uga.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
And would love suggestions.
But, as we wait to find out what Wikipedia does, let's not forget that while it is certainly the most successful wiki, it's only one of many possibilities.
Wiki Compromises
I have maintained the Existential Primer since 1996 and the Tameri Guide for Writers since I was on CompuServe. We have relied on a mailing list to improve the content and even accept edits. I maintain the EP, with complete editorial control, because I attempt to verify the information before posting it. Sometimes, we still have errors creep into the text.
On the negative side, because I write the content and cite all sources (to prevent the "half-life" of citations), it means the work has been slow. I will have some periods during which life prevents any additions. Or, because I am teaching, I will focus on the Tameri Guides for Writers -- again, ignoring my duties on the Exist List or the EP.
Because both projects contribute to my standing as a teacher, I'm in delicate position. When I allowed posts directly to the EP, the threats and hateful posts were shocking. Philosophy is always a minefield, but especially on the Internet. I find myself taking lessons from the EP and applying them to my use of Blackboard.
I consider my academic efforts to be "open for all" because they should have value to students, teachers, and parents. I want input and suggestions. I also want to credit the individuals offering assistance.
Wiki possibilities
On the comment that wikipedia is one of many wiki-possibilities, I think, too, that much of the talk about wikis seems to conflate the engine with the activity. That is, a "wiki" is going to be "some basic software" that allows "some kind of collaborative editing, connecting, developing of content..."
I guess it's like the question that circled around a few years ago about what a "blog" is. Is "blog" a verb or noun...the software or content, etc... I know it's kind of obvious, but the same question needs to be applied with a bit of rigor on wikis as well.
The wiki engine--as much as the wikier's philosophy--shapes so much of what can go on within a wiki.
I've set up and tinkered with code for about 5 or 6 different wiki types now, and each of them approaches its task in quite different ways from the others. When you layer wiki flavors over the diverse communal purposes--you have a wide range of possible instantiations.
And I still don't know whether it is good or bad to see "wiki" modules for Drupal and "blogging" modules for jotspot or wikka...Seems that as people bump up against the limitations of one--ie, "grrrr, my wiki entries would work great if I could stack them sequentially by date..."--(ie2, as we swim around in the fluidity of genre...(maybe))--we want the technology (which has been promised to be making knowledge, or information, or...at least data...'fluid' for years) to be equally fluid.
Too much fluid, though, makes for watered down, washed out options like BlackBoard. (I think I'm drowning, now, in my own metaphor)...
jcw