A Wiki World of Learning

We invite you to participate in A Wiki World of Learning!

The Wiki site will run before, during, and after the conference. We invite participants and presenters to construct texts together revolving around the themes of the conference and specific conference sessions within those themes. The idea is to run a kind of parallel virtual conference where conference sessions can escape the temporal and communication boundaries of typical conference sessions, but still build upon the energy and real-time interaction of the live session. People have the power to connect together disparate sessions conceptually and to negotiate conceptual landscapes.

Everyone is welcome to launch pages: we ask that you not launch a page based on someone else’s presentation without their permission. You are of course welcome to post on similar topics without focusing on a specific session presentation. If you are a presenter, a good place to start might be to post your abstract, or some other text to act as the starting point for an exploration of the topic by wiki. Try to provide a starting point for people to collaborate on a text. In the end, we hope to have complex and insightful and challenging shared texts. You will find a clear explanation of how wikis work and how they are different from discussion boards attached. Presenters and posters are invited to moderate their own pages, but Jessica Raffoul (jraffoul@uwindsor.ca) will act as a troubleshooter for the whole project. She will also confirm with first presenters when session sites are posted.

For more information on the Wiki site, visit, http://cleo.uwindsor.ca/stlhe-wiki and/or review the attached word document.

How is a Wiki different from a List-serv?

A Wiki is intended for collaborative writing. A list-serv is intended for asynchronous conversation. In a Wiki, people add to, rewrite, delete, and otherwise change each other’s text: it is dynamic text. In a list-serv, on the other hand, you can’t change each other’s text. You can only comment on it. A Wiki is not a multi-site argument.

How do I use the Wiki?

Visit the main page and browse conference themes. By clicking on one of the terms, you will find a page devoted to that theme, a place for general cross-sessional ideas relevant to all concurrent sessions, workshops, roundtables, and posters. As you will see, it has a main welcome page and then pages devoted to each of the conference themes.

Each theme page has a few inspiring quotes, and subheadings based primarily on the kinds of sessions presenters have submitted.

You may add an intro to your session on a relevant theme page and then create a page (or pages) for collaborative creation of text that informs/enriches/parallels/troubles/explores ideas related to your conference session.

To edit the wiki, we recommend GUI edit mode, which is more like word processing. You simply click on the GUI edit mode button and the text appears in a window for editing. When you are done, save your changes.

To create a new page, start in edit mode on the page that will link to your new page. Wiki links are created by typing words togethern first letter capitalized, no spaces. If the link were your session title it might look like:

NoProfessorLeftBehind, for example.

When you save and are back in "reading mode" this will be clickable. Click on it. You will then be directed to create this page by clicking on... Follow the directions. You can also link to existing pages of course. The front page contains plenty of "how-to" links and a sandbox for trying things out. To see some examples of Wiki pages that have already been started, you can review:

For more information on how to use the wiki, visit http://cleo.uwindsor.ca/stlhe-wiki/HelpContents