Free Composition Wiki Text Project

Free Composition Wiki Text Project

There are three justifications for this project. Firstly, you will be working with an innovative collaborative web technology: the wiki. Wikis are likely to become increasingly important communications tools and are already gaining worldwide attention. Wikis raise interesting questions about copyright, collaboration, and authority that are worthwhile platforms for scholarly discussion. Secondly, the subject matter of the wiki, composition, will require you to reflect on your own writing process and help you improve it. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this project involves service learning. Service learning is a type of instruction that offers students the chance to help out their community as well as themselves.

The goal of this project is to construct a free comprehensive textbook for first-year composition. Of course, this is much too big of a project for any one student to achieve in the course of a semester! Therefore, you must engage in a managed collaborative project with your classmates and various other volunteers working on the wiki.

Every member of the class will bring different skills to the project. Some may be excellent copy editors, for instance, while others are better at designing layouts and formatting. Others will feel most comfortable working on a particular section. Finally, some students will wish to specialize in managing this considerable project and making sure progress is being made towards the final goal. While I will be offering my assistance in all of the above capacities, I expect you to find your niche and contribute the best way you can.

Here are more specific instructions:

• Direct your browser to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition
• If you haven't done so already, click the link in the above right corner to "Create an Account or Login."
  • If you don’t create an account or login each time you edit the wiki, I won't be able to keep track of your work! This may result in a lower grade than you deserve, so make sure you're logged in!
• If you are visiting the wiki for the first time, you should spend some time reading sections of the book that have already been completed and try to get a feel for its structure, style, and tone.
• Decide how you would like to contribute to the wiki. There are at least __ ways to do so, and all will count for credit:
  • Add Material: You can start working on incomplete sections, adding material as you see fit. Don't worry if it's not perfect! We can always revise it later.
  • Edit Material: You can read existing sections and find ways to make them more informative, clear, helpful, or concise. This includes everything from correcting typos and spelling errors to polishing sentences and reworking paragraphs.
  • Design and Layouts: You may have experience formatting documents and know some ways the look and feel of the text can be improved. Wikimedia, the software that runs the wiki site, offers many tools for formatting and designing wiki texts.
  • Discuss a Page: Each page of the wikitext has a companion page called "Discussion." Here you can add ideas, make comments or suggestions, or ask questions about each page. These discussions will prove valuable to others working on the wiki and help us stay focused.
• Periodically, you will be asked to report and reflect on the work you've been doing on the wiki.

You should expect to spend at least two hours a week working on the wiki. You can decide how you'd like to work—a little each day or all at once.

This is a textbook for first-year college students for use in first-year composition classes such as SCSU's "Rhetorical and Analytical Writing" courses. These courses are intended to help students develop the skills they will need to write college-level discourse, such as term papers, essays, and reports. This audience might be put-off by too much jargon or complexity—the key is to make things simple, readable, and interesting. Try to relate to their experience and make connections to what they know.

Your grade is based on two factors: Your individual contributions and the text as a whole. I will be able to estimate the extent of your participation by checking the history pages on the wiki (Click here for an example.) I will ask myself these questions about your individual contributions:

• How many did you make?
• How much time did you spend making them?
• What quality were your contributions?
• Did your changes remain, or were they edited out by the class in an effort to improve the text?

You should note that a "contribution" can be more than just adding text. Editing, revising, commenting on discussion pages, designing, changing layouts, adding images--all of these things count.

I will ask myself these questions when evaluating the work as a whole:

• How useful would this wiki be to someone teaching or taking a first-year writing course?
• Is the style and tone of the various sections consistent?
• Is the writing clear, free of errors, and engaging?

I will also be asking my colleagues to review the wiki from time to time and hopefully offer comments and criticism.

• Wikis in Plain English: Good place to get started if you're new to wikis.
• You can read all about wikibooks here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:About
• Read the Policies and Guidelines for wikibooks
• You will definitely need to read How to Edit a Page. I'd suggest printing it so you can keep it handy when working on the wiki.

If you are using Firefox browser (which I highly recommend!), then you may want to install the Wikipedia Extension, which makes editing the wiki much easier.

Thank you, and please remember to use the "ADD COMMENT" button below to post any questions.

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