The time has come for an edited collection of essays on wikis
entitled The Wild, Wild Wiki: Unsettling the Frontiers of
Cyberspace.
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
No simultaneous submissions. We also cannot accept previously
published essays. 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