*The Wild, Wild Wiki: Unsettling the Frontiers of Cyberspace, *edited by Matt Barton and Robert Cummings
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) 308-5524 (fax)
Dept of English
720 Fourth Avenute South
St. Cloud, MN 56301-3061
or
Robert Cummings
rec@uga.edu
(706) 542-2128 (fax)
Dept of English
University of Georgia
254 Park Hall
Athens, Georgia 30602-6205
