The Wiki at Windrows:About
Work on my main project—www.aplacetostudy.org—has greatly intensified and to keep fropm getting overloaded, I'm suspending work on this prototype. You are welcome to look around and to even leave a comment someplace, lbut the site won't change for a number of months. Robbie McClintock (robbie@aplacetostudy.org)
About theWiki at Windrows
The Wiki at Windrows supports self-development and liberal learning by residents of PrincetonWindrows, an over-55, independent-living community. Residents sponsor and maintain the Wiki as a free, user-developed intranet, to extend and deepen their activities and interests.
We live in an age in which the scope, depth, and importance of user-generated content and the devolution of control to end-users expands greatly throughout our culture. With the Wiki at Windrows, we seek to enable ourselves to employ end-user activity — our own and that of our world — as we live independently within our retirement community.
How can a wiki help us as residents of Windrows exercise our agency?
- First, with it we can conveniently organize and employ informative contextual resources to enhance our programs and activities.
- Second, with it, each can stimulate and learn from one another by posting interesting materials, thoughtful comments, and productive responses and queries about what takes place here at Windrows, in our surrounding localities, and in the world at large.
- Third, we can personally and in groups use it as a creative medium to participate fully in the literary, artistic, and cultural aspirations of our time.
The Wiki at Windrows can enable us to activate "user-generated content," and little limits what we can do with it other than our skill and taste, our initiative and imagination.
Our wiki runs on an instance of a very large, powerful software program, Mediawiki, the program developed and maintained as open-source freeware to run Wikipedia and associated projects. Mediawiki provides an extensive set of tools for generating content, running from quite simple to the very powerful and complex. It also has extensive help resources pertaining to both process and technique. Consequently, a relatively small, modestly cohesive user-group can through shared self-help become unexpectedly adept rather quickly.
Currently, the Wiki at Windrows is emerging as a working prototype. Any resident of Windrows can have an account on it, free for the asking. They will energize and direct its development.