ELATEwiki is the Electronic Learning And Teaching Exchange created and edited by those interested in advancing the use of technology in teaching. This site is intended to host a wealth of freely available information categorized and organized into E-Learning and Teaching topics. It will be useful to teachers, scholars, students, and administrators seeking to understand the dynamic and changing higher education landscape during this critical time of transformation.
The following screenshot provides a view of ELATEwiki’s homepage.
How ELATEwiki evolved
The concept for ELATEwiki emerged during a series of conversations among members of K-State’s Distance Education Leadership group who were seeking to find better ways to support e-learning faculty members. Although several on-campus teaching exchanges already existed, it was apparent additional resources were needed, particularly for those in geographically dispersed locations.
For nearly a year, the leadership group explored wiki technologies and conducted research into existing applications that might be used to support those engaged in e-learning both on and away from the K-State campus. The advantages of wiki technology — with its technological affordances of wide access and dissemination, digital content archival, collaboration, adaptability, dynamic updating capability, and the reversibility of postings — became clear.
By the beginning of 2009, a small team began work in earnest to plan, create, and launch a publicly accessible e-learning wiki available to anyone with an interest in higher education. A web presence for the site was established Jan. 23, and it is now open for public use.
What’s in ELATEwiki?
Currently, ELATEwiki has more than 50 topics created by its users, and the numbers keep increasing every day. Example entries from www.ELATEwiki.org include:
- Prepping for Live Virtual Events
- Self Publishing Online to Visualize Manuscripts
- The Ecologies of Virtual Work
- Virtual Office Hours
- Screen Captures for Various Digital Uses
- Screencasting
- Second Life
- Telepresence
The screenshot below shows more categories.
Join the ELATEwiki community of users
You are invited to join the growing community of users at ELATEwiki to either learn from the existing topics or contribute as an author and share your expertise. If you wish to become a contributor, visit www.ELATEwiki.org where you will notice a heading called “Create Pages Related to”. You can click a link there to contribute a page related to general areas such as Course Issues, Instructors, Students, or Tools. A template will appear for your addition. After your initial entry (as founding author for a topic), others will continue to build upon and develop your material.
We hope to create an open atmosphere of sharing and collegial scholarship that results in better teaching and learning for everyone. All materials in this wiki will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. Visit ELATEwiki today and join in our efforts! Questions or comments can be addressed to Roger McHaney (mchaney@k-state.edu).
ELATEwiki exists because of the support of Sue Maes of the Division of Continuing Education (DCE) at K-State, whose office provided the funding. The development team (the DCE Distance Learning Leadership team) that created ELATEwiki included Roger McHaney, Bettie Minshall, Ellen Stauffer, Lynda Spire, Ron D. Jackson, and Shalin Hai-Jew. Josh Works provided critical back-end development. Andrea Mendoza created the evocative ELATE logo for this site. Thanks to Peter Paukstelis, Scott Finkeldei, Vicki Clegg, Josh McCune, and Dave Bollman for their critical support.
