About

This wiki is an ongoing student-developed project that explores scientific, technical and social aspects of the 35W Bridge collapse.  It was initially created in Spring 2008 by undergraduate and graduate students in the "Emerging Technologies in Scientific and Technical Communication" course offered by the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.   The site will continue to be expanded and improved by a variety of future courses. At this point, the wiki is not open to public contributions.  (This policy may change in the future, but for now we are limiting the site to student-generated content for educational purposes.)  Still,  your comments and questions are welcome.  You can reach the current instructor, Krista Kennedy, at kenne329[at]umn[dot]edu.

The site development and execution have been produced entirely with free web applications that are also, where possible, open source.  Since the class was taught completely online,  a number of social networking tools to build community and manage team dynamics were used as well.  Applications used include Moodle, Twitter, FaceBook, del.icio.us, Thinkature, Flickr, YouTube, and, obviously, pbWiki.  Working with applications like these supports the department's mission of exploring emerging written, visual, digital, scientific and technical communication practices.

Since the work is entirely drawn from publicly shared resources and materials, we have licensed our work under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial 3.0 US license.  All of the images on our Flickr account are in the public domain, as are the PDF documents available on our 35W Bridge Public Documents Repository.

 Credit:  Enrico Fuente, http://www.flickr.com/photos/okobojierik/1305101002/