July 17, 2006
Academics Start Their Own Wikipedia For Media Studies
Many academics have expressed skepticism, right here on Wired Campus blog, about the validity of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. But some researchers are taking an approach more along the lines of: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
The Institute for the Future of the Book, a center supported by the University of Southern California, announced today that it will soon unveil an online scholarly press, of sorts, called MediaCommons, that will focus on the discipline of media studies. The announcement comes just days after Rice University unveiled the first all-digital university press.
MediaCommons will try a variety of new ideas to shake up scholarly publishing. One of them is essentially a mini-Wikipedia about aspects of the discipline. Or, as the announcement states, "electronic reference works, in which a community collectively produces, in a mode analogous to current wiki projects, authoritative resources for research in the field."
The blog Kairosnews welcomed the announcement. "From a theoretical standpoint, this is an exciting collection of ideas for a new scholarly community," the posting said, adding that the biggest challenge will be building a community of volunteers to do the work involved.
Is this the future of scholarly communication? Can wikis be valid forms of scholarship? Add your thoughts.—Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Monday July 17, 2006 | Permalink |Comments
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My name is Adrian Lopez Denis and I am a PhD candidate in Latin American history at UCLA. In the last two years I have been looking for ways to incorporate the open source model to collective forms of historical production. From the beginning, encouraging professional historians to contribute to the development of the wikipedia project emerged as the most obvious approach. Most professional historians are both researchers and educators. Besides conducting their own specialized studies, they are often expected to provide hundreds of undergraduate students with a relatively wider understanding of the past. Completing a history course usually requires writing research papers, journal entries, annotated bibliographies, or book reviews. Students are expected to produce a certain amount of pages that educators are supposed to read and grade. There is a great deal of redundancy and waste involved in this practice. Usually several students answer the same questions or write separately on the same topic, and the valuable time of the professionals that read these essays is wasted on a rather repetitive task.
In the process of essay writing, students use an array of resources, from the overpriced textbooks and readers they are expected to purchase to more readily available online tools like wikipedia. Some of us would perhaps push for deeper levels of inquiry involving books on reserve, open library searches, or even the occasional dive into local repositories of primary sources. In most cases, however, the entire process will be a mockery of actual research. As long as essay writing remains purely an academic exercise, or an evaluation tool, students would be learning a deep lesson in intellectual futility along with whatever other information the course itself is trying to convey. Assuming that each student is writing 10 pages for a given class, and each class has an average of 50 students, every course is in fact generating 500 pages of written material that would eventually find its way to the campus trashcans. In the meantime, the price of college textbooks is raising four times faster that the general inflation rate.
The solution to this conundrum is rather simple. Small teams of students should be the main producers of course material and every class should operate as a workshop for the collective assemblage of copyright-free instructional tools. Because each team would be working on a different problem, single copies of library materials placed on reserve could become the main source of raw information. Each assignment would generate a handful of multimedia modular units that could be used as building blocks to assemble larger teaching resources. Under this principle, each cohort of students would inherit some course material from their predecessors and contribute to it by adding new units or perfecting what is already there. Courses could evolve, expand, or even branch out. Although centered on the modular production of textbooks and anthologies, this concept could be extended to the creation of syllabi, handouts, slideshows, quizzes, webcasts, and much more. Educators would be involved in helping students to improve their writing rather than simply using the essays to gauge their individual performance. Students would be encouraged to collaborate rather than to compete, and could learn valuable lessons regarding the real nature and ultimate purpose of academic writing and scholarly research.
Online collaboration and electronic publishing of course materials would multiply the potential impact of this approach. Users outside the class, the country, or the continent could benefit from the work of the students. Course projects could be run on relatively closed websites associated to traditional scholarly institutions. The output from these sites could be periodically uploaded into larger repositories based on a more open model of intellectual collaboration along the lines of the wikipedia project. An even bolder move would be to base entire courses on the creation of actual wikipedia entries. Under this principle, the interaction between classmates and larger online communities could be immediate and continuous. Students could run a wikiportal, write a wikibook, or even be fully integrated in an electronic course within the wikiversity. Discussing the advantages, disadvantages, and larger implications of the wikimedia model of collective intellectual production could be a valuable educational experience in and on itself.
Changing our approach to in-class writing assignments could be rather significant. We could produce a huge repertoire of dynamically evolving instructional materials, created by students and for students, professionally edited and collectively reviewed, free and copylefted. It could be very difficult to convince many of our colleagues about the practicality of dumping the results of their promotion-giving, sabbatical-swallowing, and ultimately unwelcome original research into such an anarchic pool of information as wikipedia is today. It would be easier to alter our current approach to essay writing in the history class, recycling an otherwise dull operation into a socially productive and intellectually stimulating practice.
— Adrian Lopez Denis Jul 17, 01:46 PM #
At UNC-Chapel Hill we have developed a one million dollar intermediate health professions Spanish course which is marketed nationally. I would like to set up a wikipedia for faculty who use this course and am eager to learn from others who might have ideas about how this could be done.
— Linda Carl Jul 19, 08:59 AM #
Sigh, to have such resources! As an academic folklorist, what intrigues me about things like wikipedia and wikis is how much they are, in fact and in theory, a return to folk culture. That is, what I study as a folklorist is an abstract entity called tradition. Traditional forms of speaking and acting are of course forms that are maintained, revised, and innovated by a group of speakers and actors. That sounds a lot like open source, doesn’t it? Folk culture is, in some sense, the original form of open source. A joke is available to its community to be used, re-used, revised, and rejected based on its fit to given individual events and its perceived value for future situations. If someone could make a living at a traditional form, say making boats, then that was fine, but that in no way limited who could make boats. (My current work is on boats that go on land and water here in Louisiana, so that is why my example is drawn from there.)
The allure of these new forms of knowledge production is that they so closely parallel the forms of knowledge production that we study. The problem for us as academics, however, is that these forms are still regarded with a fair amount of suspicion and/or trepidation by most institutions and their practitioners—our university currently has something like a “campus alert” in regards to Wikipedia itself. (It’s a long story not worth telling.) So like the first poster above, I find myself reserving my explorations of these new forms of knowledge production—knowledge production which also entails new forms of socialization—within the realm of my teaching.
— John Laudun Jul 22, 11:07 AM #