I've written a brief article about using wikis effectively in the classroom and posted it to my website. I am concerned that so many people seem to misunderstand the wiki way and are trying to use wikis in ways contrary to it. My thoughts are that only certain kinds of genres are good for wikis, and that "force fitting" other projects into wikis is counter-productive. Rather than blame wikis for being incompatible with such projects, I blame pedadogies that create such projects in the first place. What are we supposed to be teaching in rhetoric and composition? Feel free to read my article and make some comments on it there or here. Here are some of the highlights:
Now, enter the wiki. What the hell, you may ask, is a wiki? Why would I bother to learn about a technology with such a silly name? After all, I just spent $200 acquiring Microsoft Office, why on earth would I want to bother with anything else? Leave me alone, you silly man.
Let me guess what you are thinking: What is to prevent such a website from anarchy? What if someone deletes my material? How do wikis protect an author's work?
For one thing, wikis are not really as vulnerable as you may think. They are at least as well-protected as your home. Now, I beg you to consider: Is your home really invulnerable? Couldn't a small group of hoodlums take it into their minds to vandalize your home if they took a mind to it? How is that you are able to drive a car at all, since anyone with a fifty-cent pocketknife could slash your tires wherever you park it?
Please let me know if you notice this article and actually read it. :P
i noticed this article and read it :o)
i'm trying to get over how bad i feel about the omission you commented on my my first post here... but i wanted to say that i do enjoy this site lots...
i've been learning about the wiki way and then experimenting with using the tools in group settings. mostly i've been learning about it by collaborating on community wiki, and discussing on the wiki IRC channel.
i talked with my supervisor who seems quite eager about using wiki in our own course... i told him the best way to come to understand it would be to interact on a wiki himself. but he has reservations about collaborating on a wiki. he talked for about 1/2 an hour about the issues of ownership of ideas in academia, and how he would not want to lose his ideas... that they may be published before his gets published etc...
it does seem like the wiki-way is rather the anti-thesis of the academic world.
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the illusion of progress: http://nearlythere.com
Do compositionists REALLY value collaboration?
It's dated, but I still occasionally refer to this JAC article about collaboration--Collaboration as Political Action by
Elizabeth Ervin and Dana L. Fox. I think there's some good points being made here. We talk a lot about collaboration, but when it comes right down to it, the only collaborating we're doing is with information feudalists--i.e., we're a victim of the worst sort of late capitalist ideology there is, namely, the commodification of ideas and expressions.
What could be more perverse than the ownership of ideas and expressions? But, oh, how hard it is to convince anyone of this absurdity. We Americans no longer have COMMON SENSE but COMMON CENTS. I'm sick of it!
I've written an article about this dire situation here. I originally intended to submit this to a journal, but then realized I was uninformed by a huge bulk of scholarship done in this area already, by people no less than Hawisher and Eve Lunsford. Ironically, it just proves my point that there are no original ideas. I had naively thought that no one had felt compelled to write an article exploring the post-modern implications of the war on plagiarism. I wrote this article in complete ignorance of the vast body of scholarship in composition that addresses that very point. I can't submit this piece until I've found a way to make it "original." That's difficult!
Where are the collaborative dissertations? Where are the collaboratively written monographs? Books? Sure there are some, but what's even more sure is that hiring/tenure/promotion committees (who we aren't supposed to care about as grad students, riggghhht???) don't give as many points for collaboratively written materials as for single authored stuff. Meanwhile, we punish students for plagiarizing and get neurotic about proper citations.
Defining value
Matt,
One of the things that I like about your wiki article is the way that you look at different projects and discuss the suitability of wikis for each. But you should extend the same type of analysis to collaboration here, I think. There are indeed a lot of ways that our institutions discourage collaboration, but you run the risk here of glossing over the ways that collaboration does take place.
Being "informed by the scholarship," for example, is one form. I consider the review process itself, even when my readers are anonymous, to be collaborative. Perhaps I don't list them as authors, but then I'm not listed as an author when I review manuscripts for journals or presses. Last year I authored a book chapter with a graduate student in my program, and while that may not receive as many "points," that chapter was part of why I was nominated this year (and the only assistant prof to receive a nomination) for a university graduate teaching award, which will earn me points. And not to be flip, but as someone who's on several dissertation committees, I have yet to see the one that wasn't collaborative, and integrally so.
I guess my point is that collaboration often takes place, even when a single name appears in the byline. The vast majority of what I do is collaborative, but there are different levels and models for collaboration, a spectrum like the one you suggest for wikis. The byline is the tip of the iceberg, as far as I'm concerned. I think it's valuable, as I see you doing in that piece, to do what we can to make more of the iceberg visible, but not at the cost of denying that it's there in the first place. The question for me has never been whether our field values collaboration, but how it does so.
Collin
Bylines and Such
I agree with you completely, Collin. I was just looking at three peer reviews and wondering why we keep them anonymous. I guess so that people can feel free to reject/harshly criticize a piece without being held accountable. Still, I know what you mean when you say that this is a type of collaboration. Ideally, I'd like to thank these people and list them as "co-authors," along with everyone else who, in one way or the other, "collaborated" with me on the article until finally I have to take my own name off and just write "Humanity" on the byline. :-)