Dr. Conner I don't know what happened to my wiki but it looks completely different and all there is to work with is point and click mode. I have no idea how to use this or what happened if you could help me out I would greatly appreciate it. Or if anyone reads this and can help me out let me know.

thank you

Nathan

Yes, Nathan, I hear your plea. Many of us have been hearing about and tuning into this inevitability, and we will certainly read/hear more about it this week. I want to open up the aperture on this discussion as far and wide as possible: we should voice our dismay, yes, because the affective charge that comes when our surface medium shifts so dramatically ("the carpet too, is moving under you...") is of course one of the primary web 2.0 Muses. If you feel dismay, we can help transform that anger into writing, into critique, into encomia and gifanimations and poetry, even!

However, at the same time, I encourage you to crown yourselves with laughter like Zarathustra (cf. Thus Spake Zarathustra Part IV section 18) as you welcome this occasion as an opportunity, and a gift. Although I agree that pbwiki 2.0 is totally lame, and the way they went about ignoring their stakeholders in education is puzzling (at best), I am offering a definition of this apparent crisis that may energize you even more.

First: notice that this is an object (perhaps even abject, at first blush) lesson in why open source is the way: pbwiki upgrade is here and as we all already knew, it totally sucks. But we also already knew that they weren't sharing their code. So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that they weren't taking feedback from the robust 1.0 community of users seriously. There are SO MANY wiki farms (wikis that offer individual wikis, like ours), so let's accept the change as the noosphere's way of telling us not to territorialize on any one wiki--I'm hearing a message that says we ought not to tether our work and play to any one means of production. Now that pbwiki wants to regress into a CMS mentality, let's use it as such, and, in the meantime, browse the universe of new media for the writing adjuncts/software/media that suit our more participatory needs. Along the way, we might find new audiences! Gamers, how can we resist the Wikia gaming wiki scene any longer? Methinks it will also be good fun to learn how to serve our own wiki.  Goran and David are already on the case.

Second, we get the "double D":  detachment and dexterity. Yes, we now have an opportunity to cultivate new levels of detachment with regards to our writing. Unhinged from particular "truths," from pre-formed ideas that need to be "expressed," and also from particular softwares and media (such as pbwiki 1.0), our ability to language (verb form, here), and language in common, amplifies, and as a result, we become better listeners, and become more more discerning analysts of the assumptions and premises that undergird our discourse and our collaborations. In other words, dexterity in the infodynamics of web 2.0 comes only through infinite rehearsal. Game on....and on!

Seeing the semester through to the end is of course the plan: let's stay open.  I look forward to hacking away at the new pbwiki with you all (it is workable, after all), and, at the same time I look forward to learning more about wikis in general. I've already started testing wikis (wiki.dot, mediawiki, pmwiki), and, what's more--this is most important--I think we can learn a lot about our writing by comparing the differences between different versions and visions of the wikidelic.

To this end, check out wikimatrix

Also, this list of wiki farms also let's you compare general and technical features--including whether or not the source code is open or not! :)

Game on! Wyrd to the Wiki!