Wiki Pedagogy/Acknowledgements
Firstly, I wish to thank my collaborators Jacques Daignault (UQAR, Lévis campus), Daniel Oliva (École de technologie supérieure) and Éric Francoeur (École de technologie supérieure) for their invaluable input, as well as Anne-Mireille Bernier for her impeccable editorial work. A special acknowledgement goes to Jacques Daignault for introducing me to (and keeping me up-to-date on) wikis and the Free Software Movement generally. Without the underlying philosophy and hope of collaboration, openness, and freedom intrinsic to the FSM movement, I would not be involved in technology education.
Secondly, I wish to thank a number of people who participated in my wiki research projects:
- Students in the elementary and secondary education programs at Laval during the 2004 scholastic year; their capacity to tolerate the necessary ambiguities involved in integrating new tools into pedagogical practices was commendable;
- Two university research assistants, Judith Horman and Maggy Pouliot, who helped conduct the research on the university-based wikis; and
- Students — as well as teachers Françoise Dulong and Jacques Fortin — from the Lévis-Lauzon and Limoilou CEGEPs in the Quebec City region. They collaborated in our SSHRC project ("Technoscientific literacies via open source enabled virtual research collectives"), which was conducted almost solely using wiki technology.
Thirdly, special thanks goes to technicians Laurent Duschene and Samuel Cossette at Équinux and David Mercier at Lévinux for their invaluable help and patience in creating, adapting and managing all these wikis. Thanks also to Florence Bezier (in charge of faculty computing in the Department of Education at Laval) who has graciously allowed us to autonomously run and manage the open source servers that, together with those situated at Lévinux, house many of our wikis.
And finally, I would like to thank Stephen Downes (and indirectly the National Research Council of Canada, which intelligently employs him) for his highly informative daily newsletters that introduced me to many of the wiki authors cited in this text.