Main Page
From WriteMediaWiki
Welcome to the wiki project page (not James Narine's page)
We'll use this environment to explore the promise and perils of the "wiki" collaborative writing space. We won't use the wiki for everything, or even for most things in the course. Mostly, we'll treat the wiki as a place to share our research and writing for the major collaborative web development project for the course. Along the way we'll play around with the environment.
We could use another online tool - Google Docs comes to mind as an appropriate alternative - but the ubiquity of Wikipedia as a global information resource makes a wiki seem most appropriate in a course entitled Writing for Electronic Media.
You may not notice it, but our course wiki is powered by the same software that powers Wikipedia, an open source package called MediaWiki that is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Why are we using MediaWiki to run our own little course wiki? The short answer is "because we can." More seriously, I want us to experience the collaborative writing spaces of wikis. We could do this by creating, editing, and modifying Wikipedia entries. But the Wikipedia community is quite strong, very knowledgeable, and our work might quickly be subject to modification by individuals not at all connected to the class. Why take the risk when we can harness the Wikipedia engine right here in our own classroom?
Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.
