ADVANCED TECHNICAL WRITING (ENG 3773)

Notes for 02-02-2009

Topic of Class

 

During this class we spoke about how to use the web collaboratively. Everyone in class attendance created an account on PBwiki.com(Penut Butter Wikki). We learned how to integrate our PBwiki with our blog on WordPress.com. This type of technology is very user friendly in the terms that is allows users from the same organization to work together on a project and make constructive changes to each work. Implication of this allows comparable editing to be done in real time by adding comments to the work without making changes to the main document. Even though this seems as an open source type of technology it still leave a trail of history how the pages have been edited by different users. This give the creator of the document a sense of authorship. A good example of this is Wikipedia.com. We also briefly spoke about the Horizon Report which addresses issues for technical writers and speaks of the extent that the development of mobile software can and should be taken.

Example

Wikipedia.com is a popular wiki that is used by many users world-wide. Wikipedia works on people editing any kind of searches that user may provide to its search engine. There is an panel of editors that go through any changes that people may have made. The changes made by users are not final. There is a history page that allows anyone to revert to any previous entry that has been made to the page. Wikipedia technology that is very powerful . Daily, hundreds of thousands of visitors globally  make a numerous amount of collective edits and create thousands of new articles to expand the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia. This is best utilized for collaborative work. This is good for finding out how changes are made to the articles and emphasizes a conversation on an article.

 

Definitions

 

Wiki - is a Hawaiian word for fast. A wiki is a page or compilation of Web pages created to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.

Links

 

definition of Wiki on Wikipedia - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

Site originaly created by Ward Cunningham called WikiWikiWeb - c2.com/cgi/wiki

Another description of what Wiki is - wiki.org/wiki.cgi

 

ALSO: In addition to editing each others prose, you can also use the COMMENTS feature (below) to communicate with each other about the page.