running version: pmwiki-2.1.27

August 2005

This wiki is running PmWiki on a Mac G4/450 Biro.

I discovered PmWiki in early summer of 2004. I had been using UseMod?, but PmWiki allowed for more possibilities in organization, some add ons, and a few more features. Primarily, PmWiki ltes me use groups handles css easily, and includes a printable view css... If you're interested you can have a look at its selling points. PmWiki is under ongoing development. UseMod? development has languished a little. PmWiki costs some grace and ease of use.

I continue to use UseMod? for course and student wikis.

Oct 31 2004 | Nov 28 2004

I originally conceived of this wiki as a writing space: not a home page, not a home site, not my Office. I figured I would write here, as I write a weblog, and keep my Office and other more static pages apart from this. But there came a time when it just didn't seem to make sense to isolate static from dynamic. So I moved. Office, courses taught, papers and presentations - the lot. I moved them to the same space that is being dynamically written all the time.

I set aside the NoteBook category for public-ready work, short and long. I've placed most of my work for the past 10 years on static web sites; the new stuff is staying on the wiki. So NoteBook will develop over time.

But as I moved I found that I needed some private writing space: places where I could keep notes, comments, snippets of material, some under development, much of it sensitive. I created a notes area for this, dividing the wiki into private and public spheres.

But the bulk of my work takes place on course wikis: Weblogs and Wikis, Twwt-Wiki, and the new E-Rhetoric Wiki, It's on the course wiki sites that the interesting stuff is going on. We're creating something new there: the course as document, the course wiki as evolving text. I've been a little chary of putting some material on each of these (I maintain either a private area on the wiki or a set of notes off-line), but I'm warming to the idea of fuller, more complete integration of my work with student work on each wiki. The idea is to create, as we go, a set of open access spaces, lived-in online classrooms, littered with detritus as well as more structured work.

I don't want to make this sound planned out or goal-driven; it isn't.

March 25 2005

Updated to pmwiki-2.1.27. On Kairosnews, cel4145 has taken note that some scholars have moved away from the passive home page and are using a dynamic site:

That's the sense of this wiki: an identity site that is also a workspace. Appropriate. But as a wiki, it doesn't announce itself very loudly, and in the end, it is - right now, anyway - a sheltered workspace: mine alone. (I've been using course wikis for open work.) But now that this wiki is becoming stable, and more people are becoming aware of wikis, I may create an open group space to work collaboratively, and more loosely.

BoxLogic The NoteBook is getting a companion wiki-notebook kind of space, highly intertwingled. The front page of the NoteBook will be an entry point to BoxLogic, which entry will be changing and changeable. Some short work (like WikiPoint) might become topical nodes in a larger project of the NoteBook. Other projects now in the NoteBook group might find their own groups, or move to the old Notebook wiki.

There's a constant balancing act between wiki and finished text. That's good.

June 26 2006. Consolidation, mainly

As wikis, blogs, and social tools develop, our working methods become matters of discussion and reflection. Developments are also influencing what we're making available to others. I keep my tag cloud nearby for my own convenience, but also knowing that others might find it useful. At the same time, I also know that what I have tagged is telling - as telling as leaving the latest copy of Wired on the coffee table for visitors to see. Scholars are opening their studios to visitors.

I've set aside BoxLogic. Nothing much came of it. Instead, I'm developing more and more in the NoteBook section. I'm using it for (ready-for-public) drafts: short pieces, grant proposals - stuff that lean towards articles rather than time-stamped weblog posts. I tend to use the weblog for timely comments and announcements, moving to the wiki for writing that I'd like to see persist.

I'm doing the roughest wiki work behind the scenes in a pw protected area. In that space are rough notes, to do lists, the flotsam and jetsam that even I have hard time making sense of. I was collecting notes in too many places: notes I'd email to myself, notes on my flash drive, notes on the desktop of every computer I was using, physical stickies in my pocket....

Then I started using Writely for notes, with the idea of keeping them all together in one space. Writely's good - especially for moving to print - but I wanted something a) closer to home: housed on my own server, and b) readily convertible to wiiki markup rather than print. I opted for creating a pw protected space on this wiki for notes and roughs.

Mindful that consolidation can make work easier, I've been thinking about where to house course-related materials. Some faculty use their home wikis for course syllabi, materials, and announcements. Easy enough to do using groups in PwWiki?. But I prefer placing course stuff on the wiki for that course. Wikis multiply, yes, but each wiki space remains dominantly the domain of the students. That is, I post to the course wiki, just as the students do, rather than students posting to my wiki.

After some experiments with feeds and bookmarking, I've settled on del.icio.us for bookmarking socially interesting content, while maintaining local browser bookmarks for day to day sites I use. del.icio.us has done away with having to maintain pages of links to sources and resources on various wikis. All the sources end up in one space, tagged for each course. The next fusion needs to come between my Endnote bibs (held locally) and the online sources.

For newsreading, I'm vacillating between using a local news reader and using BlogLines. Using local news readers (one on each computer and another on the Palm) means some maintenance to keep it all in synch; BlogLines? is accessible from every machine. I'm also playing with Google as a news aggregator, but find it awkward. The jury's out on Google.

As the web becomes more social and visitors become more comfortable with the unfinished state of work and the diversity of work (notes, drafts, observations...), it's becoming more comfortable to let the process show, to let others into the mess of the studio. I still have a couple of private spaces online, but the public spaces are growing,

• Local private wiki workspace for notes
• Local public wiki space for drafts
• Writely for notes and drafts that are moving to paper
• del.icio.us for socially interesting content
• local bookmarking for daily and working sites
• BlogLines? for news