[Englecturers] New Composition Wiki Site

[englecturers at lists.ucr.edu]

Hello all,

A couple of recent e-mails that went out on the TA listserv made reference
to a "wiki site," and I thought I ought to jump in and explain what the heck
they were talking about to prevent a great deal of head-scratching, as these
references leaked out a couple of days before our intended announcement
date. While I'm at it, I'm CCing the lecturers, since we had hoped some of
the more experienced instructors might contribute to the effort as well.

In short, we've created a Web site for the storage and updating of
"universal" instructor materials, like single-author text lists. In the
past, we have distributed such intel on 1A, 1B, and 1C materials by handouts
and by computer disk. Both of these media have short lifespans, and thus we
have a very short-term institutional memory for departmental documents. One
result of this is that we are frequently reinventing the wheel. Another is
that these handouts and other distributions tend to be last-minute, rushed,
solo projects, instead of truly reflective of our collective know-how.

For this reason, we've set up the aforementioned "wiki" -- which is just
another way of saying that we now have a Web site that ANY of our TAs or
lecturers can edit, located at http://ucrcomposition.pbwiki.com. No HTML
expertise is necessary. (If any of you have played around with sites like
Wikipedia, this is similar.) The site is only open to people with the
password (psst: the password is "rivera," all lower-case, without the
quotation marks, though some of you already know this by now). Since the
site is off-campus and we're not distributing the password to folks who
aren't instructors (or soon going to be), there shouldn't be any, say,
student traffic here.

What sorts of materials are going to be stored here? The best way to get an
idea is to login and look, but a short description would include lists of
acceptable single-author texts, suggested writing prompts, tips that people
want to share, sample final exams, and -- my favorite -- a page of
boilerplate for syllabi, so you can plug-and-play things like plagiarism or
disability statements. (Note: At the moment, we don't have any basic writing
material on the site; contributions along these lines would be particularly
welcome.)

If you don't like something you see on the site, go ahead and change it! Or
post an alternative version. That's one of the things that makes wikis
powerful collaborative tools.

If anyone has questions, you can e-mail me at gray at scotts.net, though try to
keep the spam to a minimum (as I'm aiming to take exams this quarter). If
you have trouble logging on, there's a chance it's related to your
connection or browser settings. Try again on one of the departmental
computers; I've added links to the toolbars there, and they all work -- I've
checked.

- Gray Scott

P.S. From time to time, users will want to upload files (that is, Word
documents and the like). Unfortunately, we don't have much storage space at
the wiki, so I recommend signing onto our "sister" Yahoo!Groups page and
using the (moderate) file storage space there:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ucrcomposition/. If you do so, however, please
post a note and a link on the wiki, so we know to look for the new stuff!