Skip to main content

Trying to Reboot a Wikibook

A few years ago, a colleague and I at the University of Minnesota helped our students launch a Wikibook project on professional and technical writing. The link to the project is:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professional_and_Technical_Writing

I am posting this to two blogs, one on rhetoric and one on digital pedagogy, with the hope that someone out there has a class that could reboot this project and bring it back to life. I had only four students in my technical writing course this spring, at a small private university, and they edited a few pages. However, the project needs to be much larger than four students every other year if it is going to thrive.

My view is that students in a variety of courses could update and expand the project. The book needs material on ethics, communication theory, visual design, style guides, and more. I'm sure there are dozens of topics that could be tackled by students.

Please, consider asking your students to contribute to this project. The idea of a Wikibook is that it belongs to nobody and everybody. I only want to see the project survive, instead of being neglected.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

MarsEdit and Blogging

MarsEdit (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Mailing posts to blogs, a practice I adopted in 2005, allows a blogger like me to store copies of draft posts within email. If Blogger , WordPress, or the blogging platform of the moment crashes or for some other reason eats my posts, at least I have the original drafts of most entries. I find having such a nicely organized archive convenient — much easier than remembering to archive posts from Blogger or WordPress to my computer. With this post, I am testing MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software based on recent reviews, including an overview on 9to5Mac . Composing posts an email offers a fast way to prepare draft blogs, but the email does not always work well if you want to include basic formatting, images, and links to online resources. Submitting to Blogger via Apple Mail often produced complex HTML with unnecessary font and paragraph formatting styles. Problems with rich text led me to convert blog entries to plaintext in Apple Mail

Learning to Program

Late last night I installed the update to Apple's OS X programming tool suite, Xcode 4. This summer, in my "free" time I intend to work my way through my old copy of Teach Yourself C and the several Objective-C books I own. While I do play with various languages and tools, from AppleScript to PHP, I've never managed to master Objective-C — which is something I want to do. As I've written several times, knowing simple coding techniques is a practical skill and one that helps learn problem solving strategies. Even my use of AppleScript and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) on a regular basis helps remind me to tackle problems in distinct steps, with clear objectives from step to step. There are many free programming tools that students should be encouraged to try. On OS X, the first two tools I suggest to non-technical students are Automator and AppleScript. These tools allow you to automate tasks on OS X, similar to the batch files of DOS or the macros of Wor

Learning to Code: Comments Count

I like comments in computer programming source code. I've never been the programmer to claim, "My code doesn't need comments." Maybe it is because I've always worked on so many projects that I need comments  to remind me what I was thinking when I entered the source code into the text editor. Most programmers end up in a similar situation. They look at a function and wonder, "Why did I do it this way?" Tangent : I also like comments in my "human" writing projects. One of the sad consequences of moving to digital media is that we might lose all the little marginalia authors and editors leave on manuscript drafts. That thought, the desire to preserve my notes, is worthy of its own blog post — so watch for a post on writing software and notes. Here are my rules for comments: Source code files should begin with identifying comments and an update log. Functions, subroutines, and blocks of code should have at least one descriptive comment.