User:Ryan McGrady/395proposal/Narrative

Scholarly Narrative Critical Approaches to Wikipedia, Information, and the Collaborative Construction of Knowledge Instructor: Ryan McGrady

Important! Read First!

This page is currently designed to serve four functions for five audiences (one hypothetical):

1. as a proposal for COM/ENG 395
   • the Justification section on the main course page, for example, is intended for this audience
2. as a course design project for CRD 704
   • the Scholarly Narrative and Assessment Plan sections are intended for this audience
3. as means for other educators and Wikipedians to provide feedback on what I have planned
4. as a personal workspace
   • before this course is opened to students, a lot will be moved to my personal (private) wiki that I already use for organizing my COM 110 teaching materials

• students are the fifth (hypothetical) audience for which several of these sections were written, but this page will be redesigned before actual use by students

Scholarly Narrative

Introduction / Rationale

Wikipedia, the 5th most popular website in the world, has had a dramatic influence on popular culture and the ways in which we think about how knowledge is produced and consumed. With the recent announcement of Wikipedia Zero, a lightweight version of the site which service carriers will deliver to phones free of charge in developing parts of the world (even without a paid plan), its significance only stands to grow.

Unfortunately, students' interactions with the site remain largely superficial, reading the text on the surface of articles, perhaps with some vague sense of responsible skepticism but failing to take into consideration the incredible and complex processes and systems occurring behind the scenes which shape and color the text. Complicating the issue, educators and policymakers have been slow to move past wholesale rejections of Wikipedia's value and misunderstandings of its problems. The ability to bring a critical eye to the evaluation of information is a crucial skill for which Wikipedia is only one application. To this end, this course draws from both media studies and rhetoric, giving students tools for analyzing texts as well as the broader cultural contexts in which those texts are produced. Wikipedia and its community will serve as our primary objects of study, but the skills we use could be applied much more broadly.

A class about Wikipedia presents unique opportunities for practice. Students will be given assignments for which they will have to adapt to a particular encyclopedic writing style, learn generic forms and conventions, and consider a range of audiences. They will need to communicate not just with physically present peers but with those in the larger Wikipedia community, on the one hand negotiating somewhat traditional inter-team feedback during class exercises, but on the other also assimilating to a new sense of transparency-driven accountability and peer-review processes unique to the semantic web. All exercises, assignments, workshops, weekly reflections, and projects will take place entirely on Wikipedia, as will a large part of communication outside class and all course documents. By situating class activities in practice I hope to give students the tools they need to understand Wikipedia in a deeper, more holistic way, better equipped to make meaningful connections with the discussions and readings that raise questions concerning, for example, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's unflappably utopian-altruistic rhetoric he projects onto the encyclopedia.

The course will be supported and its design informed by my extensive experience using, editing, exploring, contextualizing, and researching Wikipedia, which has been the subject of two of my publications as well as the starting point for my dissertation. Furthermore, I regularly utilize it in my teaching today and have held workshops for educators who have sought to teach with, teach about, or otherwise better understand it.

Use of wikis and Wikipedia will play a major role in any teaching statement I send out during my search for a job in academia next year, and I'd like for this course to be a showpiece in my portfolio. I believe it reflects not just my pedagogical orientations as a scholar, but also several characteristics of a personal “dream course," presenting an exciting challenge that aligns perfectly with my research interests.

Contribution to the Institution and the Field

This course draws from media studies and rhetoric, and could easily find a home in an English, Communication, Critical-Cultural Studies, Media Studies, or Digital Media department. The skills it focuses on could additionally be useful to a range of other departments: the ability to evaluate sources of information, criticism of processes of creation and production, understanding how different perspectives can fit together in different ways, and of course practical experience writing and using a wiki. As I explain in the syllabus, this class is not intended to be multidisciplinary, but rather interdisciplinary, blending ideas to work interdependently and synergistically rather than accretively or discretely, with the goal of theory-based practice and practice-based theory as similarly envisioned by Boyer: "Theory surely leads to practice. But practice also leads to theory".

I think I effectively tie together elements of Boyer's four functions of the professorate, applying the four both to myself and to the students: the scholarship of discovery in the way course material stems from my continued areas of research and expertise; the scholarship of integration in its interdisciplinarity, connecting together readings in rhetoric and media studies, placing issues in their larger cultural contexts; the scholarship of application on my part in the very creation, development, and execution of this course, and for the students through course projects that engage them with Wikipedia, its community, and collaborative knowledge-building exercises whereby they must, to a large degree, learn how to apply what we've learned in order to act and communicate and to be critics of their own accord; and the scholarship of teaching by both "transforming and extending" students' knowledge with the blend of theoretical discussion informed by practice and practical application of the discussions, but also between themselves through collaborative learning in which they will need to teach each other the article-writing processes and how to incorporate lessons from class.

I would also hope this course would draw attention of faculty to the usefulness of wikis and Wikipedia in pedagogy—or at the very least make it easier to learn about. I could happily sign on to the Wikipedia Ambassadors project whereby I could publicize workshops or make tools available online for school employees to take advantage of. The Ambassador title is of course not required, but doing so grants us an official forum to publicize activities, in turn perhaps drawing additional attention to our initiative and department from educators and writers worldwide.

Finally, through these activities on Wikipedia and by the very existence of the class, it contributes to the increasingly popular scholarship on Wikipedia—both as an object of study and pedagogical tool—and to the Wikipedia project itself by sharing course contents and having students participate in knowledge-building exercises.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is a significant part of the course because it's an invaluable tool for analyzing texts and language use; making judgments concerning the source credibility, style, and authorial processes of a text; as well as for dealing with issues like authorship, group communication, deliberation, and accuracy of information. The first rhetoric-specific readings I assign are sections on Logos, Pathos, Ethos, and the Overview of Rhetorical Analysis sections from the Rhetoric and Composition Wikibook (a sister site of Wikipedia, providing a host of collaboratively written, continuously updated textbooks). Wikibooks are categorized by discipline/topic, but also by level of completeness/quality and academic level. Rhetoric and Composition is written to be accessible, giving a cursory but not unsophisticated explanation of the basics of rhetoric.

I also have them read a selection from Barbara Warnick's Rhetoric Online, in which she "takes a media ecology approach to explain how digitization has reshaped persuasion in public discourse during the past decade". While her exigence is more explicitly political than mine in this class, I find it useful that she sees wikis as "writing platforms that enable content development and knowledge production adapted to the nature and purposes of a given communication environment. They serve as sites for persuasion, self-promotion, information dissemination, and other communication functions. [...] spaces where citizens can strive for consensus and share a common, community voice." Perhaps her most important point for my purposes comes from her use of N. Katherine Hayles: "We 'must toss aside the presupposition that the work of creation is separate from the work of production and evaluate the work's quality from an integrated perspective that sees creation and production as inextricably entwined.'"

For another rhetorical perspective, I'll also give them a paper I wrote that draws from procedural rhetoric to locate the ethos of Wikipedia in its community and cohesive system of rules and norms. We'll be reading this at the same time groups in the class have just started digging into their final project and thus engaging with these these processes in a way that may feel a little overwhelming at first. My hope is to use my paper to further explain some of the practice happening behind the scenes but also why it's important to pay attention to and to consider what would happen without these rules (and how the rules have been devised).

I decided not to include a great deal of disciplinary readings from rhetoric because I don't want this to be a class on rhetorical theory. Rhetoric here is a tool, and while lengthy treatises on stasis or decorum might be useful, it's not where I want to focus our limited time.

Media Studies

The course blends three senses of “media studies”: the sometimes techno-utopian, sometimes technological determinist, but always insightful, contextual, and forward-thinking strains of media ecology and technology studies; popular science and technology writing, which, while sometimes missing deeper questions, can provide useful inroads through explanation, interviews, socially meaningful examples, and timeliness; and the more critical/cultural perspectives that try to uncover and begin conversations about the often concealed structures and relationships embedded in the media or technological processes we take for granted. As with the rhetorical readings, I refrain from getting too deeply theoretical for the sake of time and out of consideration for an undergraduate classroom.

We start with Larry Sanger's [history of Wikipedia, a fascinating read that I split up between the first and third weeks. There are a number of these histories available, but Sanger is Wikipedia's co-founder and he provides a thoughtful account of how it started, early values and processes, and then, in the second part, why he resigned and started his own project. Always more pragmatic than his idealist partner, Jimmy Wales, he weighs the utopian vision against a series of PR disasters and practical concerns.

To give students a background in the media environment over the past decade, I have them read Tim O'Reilly's article What Is Web 2.0 (he popularly coined the term) and Henry Jenkins's piece on Wikipedia and new media literacies. Both authors have a well-known "isn't that cool" perspective, but write very intelligently and insightfully. O'Reilly talks about the web as an industry, in terms of business and user experience whereas Jenkins merges more academic writing with his own new media fandom.

Moving into discussions of community and collaboration as they pertain to Wikipedia, I have students read a paper by Victor Gijsbers that succinctly highlights a trend from a singular, correct knowledge to something like collective intelligence, arguing that "The enlightenment of the individual has been superseded by the progress of a community; the hope for uniformity by the affirmation of a myriad of opposing visions; the quest for certainty by the idea of constant flux." He doesn't go too far into the details of these oppositions, nor does he write in a very difficult style, leaving a lot of room for class discussion. The same week, we have Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman's essay on why people write for Wikipedia, comparing different senses of "credit" to how we understand them in the scientific academic community.

The fifth and seventh weeks, titled "Wikipedia Is Not a Reliable Source" and "Wikipedia Is a Reliable Source," respectively, bookend our talk of authorship. First we'll cover the most well-known arguments for distrustful sentiment toward the site through a short article by Neil Waters clearly summarized by the title Why You Can't Cite Wikipedia in My Class; a social science study concerning how vandalism is handled on the site by Priedhorsky, Chen, Lam, Panciera, Terveen, and Riedl; and a New Yorker piece by Stacy Schiff. There are several weeks for which only one perspective is given through the readings, leaving room for a class discussion that will problematize the understandings students bring in. Schiff's article is one such case:

One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a private university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005. Initially, he contributed to articles in his field—on the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen hours a day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life a secret from his colleagues and friends. (To his knowledge, he has never met another Wikipedian, and he will not be attending Wikimania, the second international gathering of the encyclopedia’s contributors, which will take place in early August in Boston.)

But soon after publication, Essjay, the prominent figure and source of information in her piece, was found to be a 24-year-old unemployed college dropout. On this topic of authorship, they'll read the first part of Dan Gillmor's We the Media, an important book that validates both sides, written by a journalist-academic and champion of citizen media who has tracked the collapsing distinctions between the production and consumption of knowledge for years. Finally, toward the redemption of Wikipedia, I have listed a very popular and controversial study that shows Wikipedia's accuracy versus Encyclopaedia Britannica and an article encouraging academics to let their students use Wikipedia in class.

For the last four weeks of the course before finals and presentations, we turn to discussions and critiques of specific features of Wikipedia. First is collective intelligence and related terms which run the gamut from utopian to dystopian. We'll go over H.G. Wells's vision for a universal encyclopedia that would enable world peace and the continued prosperity of humanity; Jaron Lanier's scathing critique of the Wikipedia community as "hive mind;" Pierre Levy's networked, metaphysical, epistemological enlightenment ideas; as well as, briefly, the grand ideas of Plato, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Francis Heylighen, and others. This was a particularly difficult week to choose readings for, as it's an area I love to talk about, for which there are vastly differing theories and experiments. Fortunately for my decision, a great deal of these readings are too difficult for an undergraduate class (in relation to this one week's significance in the larger context of the course anyway), some hold too tenuous of a connection to Wikipedia, and others presently consist the "new" section of one of my exam reading lists. I also include here a selection from a book that I found inspiring, Cass Sunstein's Infotopia, in which he pragmatically analyzes case studies, using group communication and economics to answer the question of how to get the best information possible from the minds of many people. I have high hopes for discussions these days, and for that reason did not schedule and exercises/activities/assignments that week.

Next is the week I entitled "The Dark Side of the Sum of All Human Knowledge," drawing from frequent Jimmy Wales sentiment that we should "imagine a world in which every single person has free access to the sum of all human knowledge." I want to talk about: what it means to have a single "sum" knowledge, what that would look like, how decisions are made concerning what to include; how disputes are settled within the community and conflicting points of view resolved; the nature of the community of editors and their demographic composition; what "neutral point of view," a central tenant, could really mean; the power structures and hierarchies that are visibly present; and the role of deception and wikilawyering in shaping content. I struggled with readings for this, beyond Wikipedia policies and internal essays. I will continue to look for something appropriate for this class from a cultural studies tradition, but for the time being have included another of my papers (though I'm uncomfortable with one of mine on the syllabus, nevermind two). In "Gaming Against the Greater Good," I look at the system of rules and conventions, how they emerged, how they are treated, and how some attempt to play the rules against their intended purposes.

For the week on "Access and Inequality" I point to another part of the Wales quote, "imagine a world in which every single person has free access to the sum of all human knowledge." There is a great 2011 publication from Convoco and the Oxford Internet Institute, "Geographies of the World's Knowledge," which provides a wealth of information, replete with creative visualizations, on how various forms of knowledge and information are distributed around the world. It addresses old and new media, including Wikipedia, and many of the findings are stunning. Having students read through it at home and then bringing the visuals up on the big screen in class will make for a powerful conversation starter. We'll also talk about Wikipedia Zero, a new initiative for which Wikimedia will work with cell phone carriers in developing areas of the world, striking a deal to allow this lightweight version of the encyclopedia to people for free without a paid service plan.

The last topic of the class, emphasizing the "free" in Wales's quote, is about free/open content, licensing, and intellectual property. Lawrence Lessig, in Free Culture, effectively argues for a "free culture [that] is a balance between anarchy and control." His cause is more policy-driven than I need to talk about in this course, but this is an example of a topic through which I hope to expand understanding beyond the scope of Wikipedia to the larger problems it assuages locally by adopting free content licensing. Additionally, though updated more recently, Richard Barbrook's piece for this week was written three years before Wikipedia came around, at the height of Web 1.0. He explains the concept of a gift economy and how, for many, the Internet resumes the struggles for freedom from the 1960s. I debated whether to include this here or in the week on community and collaboration, but since Barbrook's original inspiration was the free software movement, it seemed more appropriate here.