ChaucerWiki:About

From ChaucerWiki

A little history about ChaucerWiki

Wikis, as information sources, are not new. Their freewheeling nature of allowing everyone unfettered access to updating, altering and deleting articles is a terrifying aspect to many. So it was with interest when reports came out in 2006 suggesting that the validity of Wikipedia was more or less on par with an online encylopedia...and Wikipedia was much more current.

Chaucer (http://chaucer.umuc.edu) is an experimental web server of the Faculty Media Lab at University of Maryland University College (UMUC). The server is operated by the UMUC Center for Media and New Technology. Typically, the Center for Media and New Technology plays the role (among many roles) as a sort of "rapid response team" to online faculty members at UMUC who want to try out new technologies in their class. Often, but not always, these new technologies involve multimedia of some sort.

The Chaucer server is a great place for testing out some of these ideas that faculty members might have.

Enter ChaucerWiki. At the end of the Spring semester, 2006, Dr. Gila Kurtz of UMUC's Master of Distance Education program needed a wiki for use with her class on asynchronous technology. As the Center for Media and New Technology began to respond to her request, it became rapidly evident that this wiki would be an ideal location to collect a knowledge base (wiki-style) on best practices in online learning.

UMUC seems to be an appropriate university for that -- it has the largest online program of any public university in the United States...and one of the largest online programs in the world.

So the goal of ChaucerWiki is to create a knowledge base of best practices in online learning. We hope you find it edifying and hope you can make a contribution.