Open Access- On De-Professionalization, Democracy and OERs.

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Across the readings we looked at this week it was clear that the body of literature was pro OERs. This is both a noble and democratic cause. The principal of publishing, circulating, utilizing and co-constructing knowledge and information is utopic and critical. In my own instructional experience, I’ve come into contact with many students who fear and dread the required readings portion of the syllabus where they promptly whip out their phones and consult Amazon for the damage. In the past year as I’ve progressed through course work I’ve come to do a similar move, assessing how much course material was going to cost, think about which ones to buy and which ones to try and order throught the trusty inter-library loan, hoping that the selection for each is approriate based on which book I may want to keep vs. return. And of course, ponder to which extent I am participating in the destruction of independent book stores by using Amazon. This is all going off course, but I do want to make the point that course material has real economic implications.

But it is also important to question this idea of free and open. How do the authors and creators of works then get compensated? How does one make a serious career out of things that are expected to be free? Hasn’t the advent of the internet de-professionalzed journalists in so far that we now expect the news for free, and as such, print journalism and the paid journalist have become near-extinct creatures? How has that changed the landscape of news? And the culture of access to information? My point is that free and open comes at a cost. As academics, when we have invested years into research and writing, can we honestly say that the fruits of that labor should be free and open? That may be easier in academia where publications operate under a tenure-economy. But what about writers, artists and journalists?

My provocation is: does open and free come at a cost? Who pays? Who benefits? Who gets exploited? And what careers/professions may be at jeopardy as we move farther into OERs?

Teaching the non-traditional way

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Sorry for the lateness. We do Easter in a big way at my house.

I have been pondering the intersection between pedagogy and technology  for quite a while. Long before I started my doctoral studies I noticed that students were using technology socially  but as per the Department of Education were forbidden to use their technology in the classrooms. I started thinking then about all of the ways that I observed them using their technology and how I could use my observations to create solid learning experiences as well as alternative modes of assessments that spoke to the subject matter although they were non-traditional. Now, my work in induction mirrors that goal as I prepare teachers for the classroom using the same methods. This week’s readings touch on the place where the creation of assignments and the use of technology meet.

Jade Davis illustrates for us how the clear structure of her projects help students with process oriented thinking as well as her clear goals and check points keeps student on track. The structure of her projects create strong communication between her and her students and help to facilitate student voice as well. I agree with her assertion that her assignment structure is nearly fool proof if her students follow her instructions. If they don’t her check point catch wayward students and put them on track.

Matt Barton speaks about the suspicion with which his colleagues view wikipedia, imagining it to be an unsupervised landscape where anyone can write anything unchecked and calling into question the validity of the information found there.  He spoke of  the inclusive nature of wikipedia calling it neutral but I am not so sure I agree with his or Lessig’s assertions that this is so.

Like Davis, Barton, and Konieczny, I think that Wikipedia can open up new ways to examine pedagogy. It adds a n element of collaboration and ownership that a lot of students don’t usually have. It can also bring a global focus to their work that is usually missing from assignments. I am constantly surprised that more programs don’t use wiki or other technology platforms in their classes.

Motivations:

  1. What do you think are some of the impediments to using Wikipedia and other technological platforms for assignments in the classroom?
  2. How can we truly make the wiki space more inclusive? There are a few voices that are underrepresented due to both content and knowledge base.

Ideas and Guidelines for Interactivity and Using Technology in Teaching

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The readings this week challenged us to think about ways to design assignments using technology in ways that are interactive, reflective, discursive, and socially oriented. In considering ways to incorporate technology into the classroom, it is above all important not to lose sight of the people who are supposed to benefit from being a part of the classroom. Not to be used as a mechanism for transmitting information, technology in the classroom rather serves as means of supporting learning through collaboration, communication, sharing of ideas, fostering a community.

The examples of final projects from the Macaualay Honors College Encyclopedia show how successful the use of websites can be in the serving as a platform for presenting information from research. A collection of websites under the title “People of New York City” shows various communities within the city, each focusing on the people, culture, and history of a specific neighborhood. In developing the projects, students practiced the skills of ethnography and created the content to show dimensions of the neighborhood. The project is so inherently “people-focused” that the final products appear to be a representation of community itself. While trying to get a sense for the Macaualay Springboard site, it seems also to serve the function of supporting the initial development of different project ideas and to communicate, collect feedback, and generally reflect on the progress of projects. It is essentially a place to bring multiple ideas together.

Though perhaps considered more formal in their presentation, scholarly journals serve a similar purpose. Journals provide salient information to a community who share similar academic or intellectual interests. Online open access journals make the sharing of such information possible, and more recently, have even provided means by which community members can become more involved in the review and editing process. The article about the work of Dr. Adrienne Brundage illustrates this nicely, and shows how assignments can be structured to give students the opportunity to learn about the publishing first-hand and in so doing, learn about what is effective for scientific writing.

In thinking about how to actually orchestrate the interaction within the classroom to teach complex concepts of media, or the learning of any material that could be better facilitated through peer-interaction, Dr. Jade Davis shows how to use a system of “speed dating” to help students generate ideas and come up with a project proposal. Since many technologies can be used to broadcast information widely, it seems now more important than ever to be able to gauge the interests and needs of the community that the knowledge you seek to convey can best serve. This dispersive model of one-to-one collaboration seems like a quick and very engaging activity that allows the students to collect different ideas and settle on the ones that work best for them and their overall project goal. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy present other assignment and project ideas. While many of the projects are specific to certain subject areas, the way that different games and other forms of media are incorporated into the lesson could be applied across a broad range of disciplines. In looking over the assignments, I became interested in the one proposed by Laura Tabor titled “Pre-Research to Create Exigence for Public Argument Essays,” which seems particularly relevant given that we are in an election year and could stimulate an interest among students the discussions that surround political debates.

In addition to incorporating online resources into the classroom, as we may already know, we can also bring the classroom online. Konieczny discusses the resources and general feasibility of designing lessons using Wikipedia and stresses some of the technicalities of using it as a resource both for teaching writing and about online communities. The article is practically a “how to” for novice users of Wikipedia who aspire to incorporate it into their lessons. Barton also discusses the use of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching and learning, with particular emphasis on how it is a community of users and has certain norms of etiquette to prevent the “tragedy of the commons” or the selfish destruction of the information and the medium.

Motivation

  1. In reflecting on the readings, were there any other common elements that you say pervasive through the different assignments that were presented?
  2. In developing your Wikipedia assignment, did you consider some of the issues that Konieczny and Barton mention in their articles on the online open-access, open-editor encyclopedia? Were there any things that you wish you had considered before planning your assignment? Is there anything that you would change about the assignments at this point?

 

 

Theorizing the Web, April 15&16, 2016

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Hi friends!

I just remembered that I had really loved this conference last year, so I looked it up and wanted to see who would join me this year! I haven’t looked at the program yet (it just went up), but I figured I would let you all know sooner rather than later.

http://theorizingtheweb.tumblr.com/2016/program

ACHIM IS PRESENTING!

Now that I have seen that, we MUST go. 🙂

Always down to talk about what’s being talked about.

Jojo

Final Project Proposal

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Your final work for Core 2 is to produce a project proposal that includes a proof of concept. Yes, I will be reading it for a grade, but your true audience for this proposal are the gatekeepers who hold institutional purse strings, allocate resources and space, approve curriculum, or administer technology resources. Your job is to convince this hypothetical reader that your project is intellectually and/or pedagogically vital, builds on but doesn’t duplicate existing work, is done in the most effective and efficient way possible, uses the right tech, and most importantly: that you can pull it off in the time frame that you have available to you.

This project proposal does not have a fixed length requirement. You are welcome to follow the guidelines for the NEH Digital Humanities grants, or another discipline specific set of requirements. This proposal can as also double as a first draft of your ITP Independent Study proposal. Generally, it needs to include an abstract or summary with a clear problem statement, a project narrative that gives the practical, historical, theoretical, and technical contexts for the project proposed, a clear work plan or project timeline, and proof that you can complete the project. Proposals typically include a budget; you may choose to include this, but it is not required. You may find it useful to include your personas and your use case scenarios. Some disciplines may have other, discipline specific requirements; please include those.

The proof that you can complete the project sometimes comes in the form of your biography, or a description of how the proposed project builds on your previous and related work, but in this instance, you need to complete a proof of concept for the project. This will be different for each of you, but it needs to demonstrate that you have learned enough about the task at hand that you will be able to complete it. Most of this learning is technical, but it might not be exclusively technical. Some examples of past proofs of concept:

  • When proposing a group wiki assignment, one person created a simulation of one assignment at the halfway state, with the text edited in character by the user accounts for each of the 4 personas described.
  • When proposing a mobile app, one person found an open source quiz app they could build on, changed the text of one of questions, and recompiled the app.
  • When proposing a student assignment to create multimedia historical maps of NYC neighborhoods, one student created a sample map with the Google Maps API that contained a map point for each type of media expected to be used (video, audio, photograph, text).

You will be turning in a text, and giving a presentation. The presentation will take place on one of the last two weeks of class May 16 or 23. These will be 15 minute presentations with 15 minutes of discussion/feedback afterwards. We will invite all ITP faculty to join us, though we don’t expect all will be able to make it for all of the days. One advantage of presenting early: you can incorporate your feedback into your text. The text as a .doc/.odt will be due May 23rd. We’ll sign up for timeslots in class.

(Please help improve this post)

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Wikipedia’s three core content policies (NPOV, V, NOR) demonstrate what type of knowledge platform this is; an aggregator of existing knowledge. (Reagle) By consequence, this leads to the question of how to deal with existing bias feeding into the knowledge base, as portrayed by the readings ((Hill), (American Women Novelists)) and well pointed out by Sakina. Is not neutrality an obstacle to intervention when the playing field is unlevel, for example?

But to be fair, these norms which govern the collective process of Wikipedia are what distinguishes it from different types of collaboration like, say, Anonymous. (Collaborative Futures) What this specific kind of collaboration is is also captured in DGG’s comment that “just as we are not a place for original scholarship, or original fiction, we are not a place of original participatory art” on the discussion page regarding David Horvitz’s attempt to have his page deleted. I imagine these are codes which developed in the collective effort to maintain the stance of a democratic platform, and I should say it has done a good job at keeping that position on the internet, which is, you know, the internet. Scrolling through the CfD discussion on American Woman Novelists, however irritated I may be by some of what is written there, I am also amazed at the fact that there actually is a discussion which led to somewhere.

While achieving productive discussion on the internet is not something which happens exclusively in Wikipedia, I feel safe in saying it is neither something which happens in most big platforms for gathering people. What contributes to making Wikipedia a different platform than others; the big and small efforts from many people, the platform’s technical implementation, the visions which are promoted in and outside the community, broader social contexts? While the answer will be something similar to all of the above, one thing I am curious about is how the practice in Wikipedia differs from language to language.

Also, the assumption of “good faith” resonates with the democratic vision of collaboration between modern individuals, or Western liberal subjects—a term we examined through Haraway, and which kanarinka also points at. Among the many possible ways to think about this, I would like to ask what it means to assume good faith, with regards to automated processes of knowledge making. This also could mean a lot of things, but what I am picturing is the following. Even now there are many bots which are active in Wikipedia, though I imagine most are limited to trivial tasks, and for good reasons. However, as computer science fields like natural language processing keep growing and terms like automated journalism are moving from speculation to real things, I find it not too hard to imagine a piece of software which could do wikipedia edits in a more author-like way. Wikipedia policies like Verifiability and No Original Research help in making the editing process more standardized, which would also help in automating it. But what happens once bot-edits become as reliable as human-made edits in terms of accuracy? Do the bots pass the WikiTuring test and become part of the community? Can a script prove its not having Conflict of Interest? Or, in a less dramatic and more likely picture, editors might want to employ those scripts (just as the bots which are now active) to contribute more to the knowledge aggregation process which is Wikipedia. I wonder if and how the community’s social norms will change under such circumstances.

[citation needed]

On The One Hand Anyone Can Edit, On The Other Hand Anyone Can Edit

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My interest in Wikipedia is truly growing, to my own surprise. The series of articles about Wikipedia assigned this week further contextualize/illuminate this growing interest in the medium-platform-community that is Wikipedia. Most people that I know believe that Wikipedia is not a good source of information or knowledge because it is TOO democratic, TOO open, and teachers + professors always caution against its use in academic work. I’ve never held this belief strictly, but I also did not realize that behind the front-end of a page is a back-end where information and knowledge are critically negotiated, contested and mediated by a diverse (?) community of people who spend unpaid time building the informationscape in piecemeal.

What quickly came to the forefront for me is the problem of the shape and color of that landscape, as well as the diversity of the community that constructs it. Specifically, while barriers to entry to Wikipedia as a contributor/editor is theoretically low, the space is still predominantly white and male. As such, the informationscape tends to reflect that, and emerges as a reflection of the power dynamics within a larger social context. This is one entry into the conversation about why edit on Wikipedia.

The precursor to this conversation is to contextualize Wikipedia within a political economy of ideas and principals about who we are as a society. The issue of democracy, openness and value/validity is essential to theorizing this space in relation to our conceptualization of civil society. It isn’t an accident that resistance to Wikipedia often comes in the forms mentioned above (ie. that it is overly democratic, overly open and not a great source for information). With relation to democracy and openness I will make the argument that mainstream social values, relations and practices are actually not built on democratic principles or principals of openness as one might venture to think within the parameters of discourse around American civil society. Our legal system and constitutional infrastructure is built on principals of individuality and private property as shaped by political modernity. Encoded into our subject-position in relation to the law and to ideologies of citizenship is the idea of a sovereign self and the sanctity of private property. What that looks like in reality is far from this blanket statement I’ve made. We are not all positioned, from the get-go, as equals. Some sovereignties are protected more than that of others, and are conceptualized by different terms (think of same-sex relationships, alternative family structures, immigration regulations, criminality etc). However, the concept of a ‘free’ individual and private property are basic elements/components of how we organize ourselves in the social-political-economic sphere for better or for worse. For example, the values and social system as they relate to community organization and land use for Native Americans were not conceptualized and constituted in the same way that they were for the settlers. However, we now know whose conceptualization of communal/social organization and land/property prevailed. While this seems like an antiquated example (and I am sure there are more contemporary examples to engage), it most starkly highlights the point that the concept of private property and individuality became coded into our legal, political and social institutions over time. This code privileges one group over another, one ideology over another, and essentially one way of being over the other. Principals held by Native Americans were displaced by Settler principals and became the foundation of our legal and our social and economic institutions.

Therefore, it is quite understandable to perceive something like Wikipedia as too democratic and too open. It operationalizes concepts that are ubiquitous in rhetoric but missing from the actual practices of the nation, both on legal-institutional levels as well as the cultural forms that develop around them. I argue then that Wikipedia resists and challenges our basic ideologies about how society and citizenship works, and tests how democratic principles and openness (open and free to utilize and or participate) would look like. As some of the examples from the readings demonstrate (Hurricane Sandy, Gamegate etc), these ideals are not entirely ideal, even or clean cut. Democracy in action turns out to be a contested space that is messy and ridden with power and hierarchy, but also a space that is open to and inviting of a (re)negotiation of those things.

It is only fitting then that negotiation happens around information. The Wikipedia project can then be conceptualized as an epistemic struggle; a political and ontological activity in shaping what we know, and how we know it. The issue of validity and value are especially pertinent in this case. Academia has largely functioned as an institution that acts as the arbiter/gate-keeper and producer of knowledge (within a particular sphere that is distinct from the media or think tanks, both that may have a more direct relationship to public policy but for the sake of the argument we shall leave this aside for now). Academic institutions self-validate through constructing an economy of value and validity about truth claims that are engaged in questions and concerns around methodology, source and disciplinary codes of conduct. Epistomology becomes the domain of a few specialized spaces where the construction and circulation of knowledge is managed, policed and guarded. These spaces are also largely homogenous. Academic institutions encode within their practices a self-referential mechanism where only the knowledge produced within their own domain is valuable and valid. While Wikepedia does  not move too far from this model (that is its concern with methodology, source and codes of conduct) it is though more open (accessible to greater amounts of people as participants and as users). Again, this statement is an over-generalization that too conveniently places these spaces in a binary. But there is some truth to it. The fact is that authentic participation and co-construction of knowledge challenges an institution like academia in similar ways that I’ve asserted that it challenges principals of private property and individuality.

Against this brief and brutish backdrop, I return to the conversation on why edit on Wikipedia?

 

 

 

 

Safiya Noble’s Article on Google Search and Black Girls/Women

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Hi everyone, thanks for a great discussion in class today (and thanks for posting Jade’s Medium essay, Sara). Here’s that article that I mentioned by Safiya Umoja Noble:

http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/google-search-hyper-visibility-as-a-means-of-rendering-black-women-and-girls-invisible/

And a proper citation, because I’m a librarian:

Noble, S. U. (2013). Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible. InVisible Culture: Issue 19.