Open Collections

Wikis and the creative writing process

University of British Columbia

A wiki is one example of social software that can assist and augment the creative writing process in a number of ways. In this thesis, I present a work of original fiction developed in a wiki, a select literature review on wikis, an autoethnography of my creative writing process while working in a wiki, and an ethnographic study of my students who wrote their own wiki stories. The research thus far suggests that wikis can facilitate the following vis-à-vis creative writing: increased risk-taking; more extensive revision and editing; greater flexibility and freedom for writers; instant access to writing via the internet; the storage of intermediate drafts; and the ability to incorporate multimedia and hyperlinks to convey complexity in ways not possible in print. Wiki environments may also support dialectical inquiry and collaboration between students and teachers. This opportunity for easy (and easy to monitor) collaboration, along with their organizational and creative affordances, is why wikis should be more readily adopted into school curricula. As many texts today are digital, collaborative and under constant revision, wikis can support the creative writing process in a milieu that is becoming increasingly comfortable for people and provide them with a much wider audience than most print formats.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-07-29

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/11442

Language and Literacy Education

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/