Tag Archives: Wikipedia

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?

 

 

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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.

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