Building a "Green" Wiki

The Wiki project gives you an opportunity to revise your technical description and your colleagues’ work. We’ll post our technical descriptions to the class wiki and revise our own and others’ writing based on

1. the instructor’s feedback (it came with the grade attached to the technical description)
2. peer review session(s)
3. the new medium

Your technical description was developed for a print-based medium. The wiki is an online environment that opens up different rhetorical opportunities and challenges.  It also requires rethinking the audience, purpose, and context for your technical description. While your description was originally written for a technical audience and intended to be part of a larger technical document (report, proposal, white paper, etc.), the wiki has an entirely different audience and purpose. For this project, you’ll produce an online document aimed at a lay reader who is curious about, but has no technical understanding, of the process you’re explaining. You will revise your document so that it is suitable for publication in an online encyclopedia such as How Stuff Works.

Project Resources

Your main resource for this project will be your Technical Description Project. This page includes additional resources you may find helpful. 

• Our Green Wiki
• Develop Personas: Usability.gov explains what a persona is and how to develop one.
• Audience Analysis worksheet: Use our worksheet to analyze the audience.
• Examples of online process descriptions: 
  • How Stuff Works: The big-daddy of online process descriptions for general readers
  • How Its Made: Television series that features extended process descriptions
  • How Do They Do It: Television series that mixes process decriptions and mechnism descriptions.
  • DeConstructed: Television series that focuses on object and mechanism descriptions.

Deliverables for the wiki project

For this project you will create the following deliverables:

• A "Persona" for one of the wiki's target user groups (done in class on first day of project)
• Developmental Editing/Reviews of other students’ wiki entries
• An audience analysis worksheet for your revised technical description to be published in the wiki
• A revision of your technical description suitable for a wiki environment based on others’ feedback and the new medium
• A Project Assessment Memo that describes the revisions you’ve made and why 

Caution!

Here are some areas where this assignment might go astray:

1. There are two main focuses for the wiki project. One of them is revision. Failure to revise your work will result in failure of the module. Editing is a last minute sweep to catch dropped words and misspellings. Revision is a significant re-envisioning of all or portions of a document. Simply editing won’t cut it; I expect you to do some heavy lifting.

    

2. The other main purpose is collaboration, both with your peer review partner(s) and with the people whose work you are reviewing. You have to play nice with me and your peers. That means giving positive criticism and pointing out spots for improvement. Your ability to provide useful, substantial feedback will impact your grade in two ways. First, I'll will provide an actual grade for the feedback you and your peer review partner provide on the alpha and beta drafts of this project; second, once this project is complete I will assign a "product grade" for the wiki as a whole and this grade will be factored into your individual grade for your individual portion of the product.

Evaluation criteria for the wiki project

This project will be evaluated in three main areas:

 Product

 Your wiki entry must:

• Include a revised technical description with all appropriate components, descriptive detail at a level for the target audience, well integrated technical definitions, and visuals

• Be connected to the other teams’ entries

• Employ appropriate document architecture and a consistent organizational strategy

Process

Your document must:

• Be the result of several drafts based on your instructor’s and colleagues’ feedback

• Show evidence of an effective revision process, including participating in peer review and revising, editing and proofreading

Production

Your document must show evidence of an effective production process, including: 

• Competent use of the wiki

• Submission on time and in accordance with the submission requirements posted in Blackboard

• Completion of the peer review process

• Completion of a Project Assessment Memo and team minutes submitted at the same time as the project

Project Assessment Memo Prompts

The Project Assessment Memo gives you an opportunity to tell the instructor precisely how and why you applied specific principles and strategies you picked up from our readings and discussions. The only way you can cut yourself short is by not thinking about or adequately explaining your process. Use the following prompts to help you write a 1-2 page memo (in correct memo format) describing the rhetorical choices you made when you were revising.

• What feedback did you get from your peers? Instructor?

• How did you integrate that feedback into your wiki entry?

• How did your understanding of your audience—laypeople in college—influence your revisions?

• What additional research did you do to facilitate your revision?

• What challenges did you encounter in revising?

• How did the new medium influence your revision?

• How well did your peer review partnership collaborate? Who did what?