Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Gordon Morehouse
Smart Cat Media
info@smartcatmedia.com
http://www.smartcatmedia.com/

Student-Run UMass Web Encyclopedia Used For Teaching

Amherst, MA, 5/02/2006 – A student run web encyclopedia, or “wiki,” dedicated to the UMass community is being used to teach classes at UMass for a third semester. “I created UMassWiki.com in August 2005,” said Gordon Morehouse, Computer Science major and the site's operator. “At the end of that year, I got an e-mail from a Communications grad student interested in using the wiki to teach her class in 2006.”

The grad student, Stephanie Jo Kent, later taught a section of COM 375 using the site as a tool for collaborative editing. “Anybody familiar with Wikipedia knows that articles are built by many users,” Kent said. “UMassWiki.com is structured very similarly to Wikipedia, and I immediately saw the potential for papers to be built by many students, and for the wiki to be used in peer review.”

“We had a number of issues the first semester, but during the spring and summer I put a lot of work into improving the wiki for classes,” Morehouse said. “I'm happy to say that Steph came back for a second semester, and then a third.” Currently, Kent is teaching a section of ENG 112 on the wiki.

“It's really great,” Morehouse said. “UmassWiki.com's biggest challenge right now is getting the word out that we exist. I've gotten a couple of volunteer editors out of this cooperation with Steph, and that's a big help.”

UMassWiki.com is a leading student-run wiki for a higher education community. Along with wikis at Columbia University (WikiCU), Oberlin College (OberWiki) and Duke University (Duiki), UMassWiki is one of the most actively developed student wikis in the nation.

Gordon Morehouse is a senior Computer Science student minoring in Spanish. His student-run business, Smart Cat Media, owns and operates UMassWiki.com.

Stephanie Jo Kent is a graduate student in communications with an interest in collaborative editing technologies. She maintains a blog at http://www.reflexivity.us/.