Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
DH and Media Studies Crossovers Vol. 3(3)
Lauren S. Berliner
University of Washington, Bothell
Over the past decade, Wikipedia has inspired ongoing debates in higher education over the extent to which its crowd-sourced encyclopedic entries should be considered comprehensive, accurate and reliable in pedagogy and scholarship. Many educators forbid its use in the classroom, frustrated by the site’s open-sourced, dialogical nature, wherein knowledge is produced through polyvocal expertise, debate, and frequent modification rather than traditional channels of academic peer-review (Maehre 2009). But a growing number of educators, including myself, have chosen to use Wikipedia and wiki media applications intentionally, precisely for the reasons others have been cautious (Carver, et al. 2012; Wadewitz, et al 2011; Obar and Roth 2011; Seale 2010).
As scholars of media such as Adrianne Wadewitz and José Van Dijck have taught us, critically engaging with wiki architecture and textual detail can help to surface important questions about how knowledge is produced, contested, represented and circulated. Working with wikis can be a means for training students to identify how evidence is marshaled and organized in representing truth claims, while students get the chance to “hack the academy” (Wadewitz et al 2011). Pedagogues in the Digital Humanities have tended to use wiki assignments to focus on writing, editing, and analyzing entries. This approach helps students to build critical literacy skills while encouraging them to give voice to underrepresented ideas while thinking critically about what it means to be an author. Wiki assignments offer something different for the Media Studies classroom: an opportunity to work with an applied method for studying media ecologies and the relationship between form and content. If we understand Digital Humanities to be emphasizing learning through critical practice and Media Studies as centrally committed to understanding the constructedness of representation, teaching with wikis enables us to think through the intersections between these areas while fortifying the field’s increasing efforts to entwine theory and practice.
Wikis in the classroom can do more than simply disabuse students of the exuberant, often- utopian claims surrounding digital technology and the democratic potential of Web 2.0, or celebrate the virtues of non-market collaborative peer production. Wikis compel us to think concretely about concepts that are fundamental to Media Studies. When writing or editing within a wiki, one must consider questions of media specificity, authorship, audience, media systems, media ownership and management, distribution, representation and participation. For instance, as Wadewitz, et al. note, one cannot simply submit an entry as they would write a paper for an instructor to read. The author must imagine an audience of other readers and editors, and expose their ideas to an iterative process. She must also be aware of the conventions of Wikipedia writing, including using a decidedly “neutral” tone that adheres to the guidelines on the site. She must be savvy about what is considered “legitimate” and valuable knowledge according to Wikipedia and possess the necessary literacy and technical skills to participate. And of course, nothing can be accomplished without access to a computer and a high-speed Internet connection. These requirements place constraints on participation and shape what is considered to be “legitimate” and valuable knowledge. Once students come to understand that “knowledge” on the site is subjectively shaped by those who have the interest, time, literacy, and access to participate, they are able to see parallels to other media forms and make connections to their understanding about the relationship between media management and content. Media Studies students are poised to consider their wiki media work within what Van Dijck calls the “ecosystem of connective media” and a way to “raise[s] important questions about its viability and independence in an online environment that is dominated by commercial mechanisms and principles…” (Van Dijck 2013, 133).
In my experience teaching core Media and Communication studies courses within an interdisciplinary program, I have found that working with Wikipedia and wiki media platforms offers particularly effective ways for engaging students with Media Studies concepts. I have utilized both Wikipedia and the educational writing platform, Wikispaces, in two separate classes: a core introductory class in Media Communication studies, and a lower-level course on Participatory Media. As the following two assignments illustrate, utilizing wikis in course assignments can enable students to synthesize and articulate what they are learning about media ecology and representation through practice.
Wikipedia and What it Means to Participate
Students often enter my classes holding fast to the idea that Wikipedia is inherently democratic and open to the incorporation of the universe of ideas and forms of participation. Most of them have never actually given much thought to the processes of content production, and those who have, generally imagine that a desire to contribute takes precedence over the problem of editorial consensus. Yet, when they are asked to take a closer look at the site’s “neutral point of view” guidelines, or attempt to write an entry that will evade editor contest, they quickly realize that rather than being an open, collaborative knowledge experiment, Wikipedia is moored to commercial processes and is tightly managed by its devoted volunteers.
I teach using Wikipedia in a lower-division class called Participatory Media. This class examines critical issues in contemporary digital media discourse and participatory culture, with an emphasis on interrogating claims that have been made about digital media’s emancipatory nature and its role in creating social change. One week of the 10-week course is dedicated to studying Wikipedia as both a media artifact ripe for textual analysis, and a dynamic, biased, sociotechnical system for knowledge production. With the help of guest speaker Monika Sengul-Jones, a member of the FemTechNet collective who has organized several Wiki edit-a-thons, students were encouraged to examine Wikipedia’s mission to “empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally” by closely following how topics and edits are negotiated amongst the editors and then attempting to contribute to the site themselves https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement.
See: Berliner Neutral Point of View Assignment.
First students were asked to read and respond to Jose Van Dijck’s chapter “Wikipedia and the Neutrality Principle,” which argues that “rather than being an open and serendipitous stream, content contribution to Wikipedia has gradually become a process strictly managed by humans and machines” (133). Next students turned to Wikipedia to read threads on the “Neutral Point of View” noticeboard page and write about their analysis of a debate of their choice, noting editors’ complaints and how the debate was resolved.They were given the following instructions:
The aim for this assignment is for you to spend time reading through how Wikipedians describe and discuss the “Neutral Point of View” rule, and to become aware of how rhetorical skills and Wikipedia’s own legalities are marshaled to support particular sides. This exercise should familiarize you a little with how Wikipedia works beyond being status content, so that you’re primed to think critically about the project of Wikipedia and how participation works.
In the following class period we engaged in a discussion about their written observations. Many students reported that Wikipedia editors appeared to have an insider language and fluency with the rules that according to one student, felt “intimidating to try to engage with as an outsider.” (They were also surprised to see how subjective both the entries under investigation and their complaints were. Most shocking for students was that editors were able to offer “evidence” to support their beliefs on any side of a debate. Students noted that in one particular thread, editors argued over the title of an entry called Gunshow Loophole, which was about the ability for Americans to purchase guns at gun shows without a license. An editor who was clearly a supporter of unregulated gun ownership argued that the entry instead be called the Gunshow Loophole Controversy. Students noted the impact and warrant behind such subtle word changes, which got them thinking more deeply about the identities of the editors and their particular biases towards the “truth” about gun sales in the United States. The students’ questions fed a discussion of the realities of who contributes to Wikipedia, which they learned is overwhelmingly young, white, educated, economically privileged, Western, and male.
Through the pre-class exercises and discussion, students were surprised to discover what Van Dijck calls the “autocracy and bureaucracy” of Wikipedia in the place of the pure democracy they had initially anticipated based on their user experience. By the end of our discussion, students were making links between the challenges to democratic representation on Wikipedia and the connections that they have been trained identify in broadcast media in their other classes.
Following our discussion, and having reviewed the guidelines for editors, students then attempted to edit entries of topics for their designated group research areas. Through this exercise, they quickly experienced the many constraints to participation they had observed on the noticeboard page as they second-guessed every word choice and the credibility of the citations they wished to include. Attempting to pre-empt the critiques (and politics) of other editors, many of my students found themselves censoring or sanitizing their contributions to entries on topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement and Gamergate. They also spent a lot of time trying to peer-edit their writing, so as not to contribute easily contestable language. More than anything, students struggled with the functionality and layout of the site, which they had only experienced on the user-end. By the end of the class period, students had made little progress on editing an entry, which while initially disappointing (I had wanted them to receive feedback from other editors), wound up being a happy accident. The difficulty in producing an entry underscored the constraints of the politics of Wikipedia on participation itself, and that even though Wikipedia claims to have “no firm rules,” its guidelines inadvertently produce “systemic bias” (Van Dijck 2013).
Using Wikispaces to Teach Core Media Studies Concepts
As might be expected of a final course assignment for a core Media Studies class, this one requires students to employ media and communication theory to explain the social world and demonstrate the ability to link media histories and contemporary media-making practices using concepts from the field. However, working with a wiki format allows for a much more immersive experience with the media, one in which students must go beyond theory and critique to contend with practical and epistemological questions that emerge in decision making.
Creating a wiki from scratch is another way to engage students with questions concerning knowledge production and collaboration without having to work within the encyclopedic mission and guidelines of Wikipedia. For a final assignment in a core course in Media Studies and Communication, students were asked to reflect on core themes from the course through the construction of a Wikispaces site. The site enabled them to incorporate a range of digital media, keep track of their edits, share their site with classmates, and later export their files to share with a wider public. Unlike the Wikipedia assignment, in which students discovered the inherent rules and biases of the site, students using Wikispaces must invent rules for contribution and editing amongst themselves, reflecting on their own academic and technical literacies, and putting their particular biases in check. What’s more, using the site encourages students to utilize Internet content and digital media tools.
The students were divided into groups of 4-5 to create a wiki page for a class archive that aims to teach a general audience about a topic from our course curriculum, highlighting and explaining relevant concepts and providing examples. Students chose their own themes and were required to collaboratively produce a framing essay, three examples as case studies, and annotated sources. The content could be written individually, but they needed to edit collaboratively. Students were required to edit a minimum number of each other’s pages, and were asked to initial each site page, so that the class could get a sense of how many people have shaped the content. In the last week of the course, student groups presented their site to the class, describing their content and reflecting on the challenges they encountered in producing it.
In the most recent iteration of the course, students covered the Journalism and the Internet; Advertising and Consumer Culture; Copyright and Fair Use; Social Media and Youth; and Media Framing.
Even though students were assigned to these discrete themes, they all necessarily confronted and engaged overlapping Media Studies concerns. For example, all groups needed to think about the representational work that an included image is doing, as well as whether or not they have the rights to include it; they all had to contend with the constraints that the media form placed on their creation of original content; and, they needed to integrate their academic research and writing skills with their sense of what sources and example the general public might find most engaging and convincing as their wiki circulation widened beyond our class.
Concluding Thoughts
Wiki-centered assignments bring us to the intersections of imagined divides between Digital Humanities and Media Studies approaches, offering a way to teach Media Studies concepts with applied methodologies (McPherson 2009). As Tara McPherson argues in her call for the field of Media Studies to more fully immerse itself in interactive and multimedia expression, Media Studies scholars are uniquely situated to study, critique, and “reimagine the relationship of scholarly form to content.” (McPherson 2009, 120). The assignments described in this essay offer a snapshot of some of the possibilities for working with wikis in the Media Studies classroom and hopefully illuminate the myriad of possibilities.
Works Cited
Carver, Brian W., Rochelle Davis, Robin T. Kelley, Jonathan A. Obar, and Lianna L. Davis. 2012. Assigning students to edit wikipedia: Four case studies. E-Learning and Digital Media 9 (3): 273-83.
Cohen, Noam. 2011. Define gender gap? look up Wikipedia’s contributor list. New York Times, January 30 (362): 1050-6.
Maehre, Jeff. 2009. What it means to ban wikipedia: An exploration of the pedagogical principles at stake. College Teaching 57 (4): 229-36.
McPherson, Tara. 2009. Introduction: Media Studies and the digital humanities. Cinema Journal 48 (2): 119-23.
Obar, Jonathan A., and Amy Roth. 2011. The wikipedia public policy initiative: Exploring the potential benefits of using wikipedia in the university classroom as a tool for innovative E-pedagogy.
Seale, Maura. 2010. Information literacy standards and the politics of knowledge production: Using user-generated content to incorporate critical pedagogy. Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods: 221-35.
Van Dijck, José. 2013. The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press.
Wadewitz, Adrianne, Anne Ellen Geller, and Jon Beasley-Murray. 2011. Wiki-hacking: Opening up the academy with wikipedia.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Monika Sengul-Jones, whose excellent work creating Wikipedia edit-a-thons to address the diversity gap among the site’s producers inspired me to created the unit on Wikipedia for my class. Her visit to my class shaped our lesson, and she was largely responsible for designing the assignment we used. I also am grateful to Kristin Gustafson for her input on the Wikispaces assignment, which she integrated and made valuable modifications to when she later taught the class.
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