ELATEwiki

Abstract

A small team at Kansas State University worked to plan, create and launch an e-learning wiki to support faculty in their work. The advantages of the wiki technology—with its technological affordances of wide access and dissemination, digital content archival, multimedia expressiveness, remote collaboration, subscribability, and the reversibility of postings –appealed to this team. Even initially, there seemed to be opportunities for building novice and professional capacities in e-learning through the co-creation and sharing of information, problem-solving, and virtual community building. This chapter describes the research literature and pedagogical theories on wikis. It addresses the team’s efforts in exploring and then building the wiki site. Additionally, this explains the team’s rationales in terms of the intellectual property policies, the work to create accessibility, the wiki’s fortuitous naming, the seeding of the wiki with contents, its low-key branding strategy, and the publicity plan for a “hard launch” of the ELATEwiki to the Wikisphere. This also describes the datamining techniques used to track use of the site and how those affect the site’s continuing evolution. Finally, this chapter will provide perspectives on the work of a wiki-master in a peer-to-peer, collaborative, and open wiki.