User:Ryan McGrady/395proposal/Schedule

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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
 * 2) *the Justification section on the main course page, for example, is intended for this audience
 * 3) as a course design project for CRD 704
 * 4) *the Scholarly Narrative and Assessment Plan sections are intended for this audience
 * 5) as means for other educators and Wikipedians to provide feedback on what I have planned
 * 6) as a personal workspace
 * 7) *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

Tuesday

 * go over syllabus and course website
 * a brief history/story of Wikipedia

Thursday

 * what Wikipedia IS
 * what Wikipedia is NOT


 * read: The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir Part 1 - Slashdot post written by co-founder and now outspoken critic of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger
 * optional reading: The Five Pillars of Wikipedia
 * assignment: create an account, add to your user page

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: What is your relationship to Wikipedia? How do you use it? What is your opinion of its virtues and problems?


 * Web 2.0, the semantic web, participatory culture [share this!] [Tweet this!] [FaceBook this!] [comment!]
 * differences between 1.0 and 2.0
 * blurring of consumer and producer
 * nonlinearity, networks, and hypertext


 * read: Tim O'Reilly - What Is Web 2.0
 * optional reading: Help
 * optional reading: Semantic Web

Thursday

 * exercise: what is a wiki?
 * what makes them special/useful/important?
 * look at examples of wiki use outside WikiMedia, including course wikis


 * read: Henry Jenkins - What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies (blog post connected to MacArthur Foundation research project)

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: In what ways are the way you write for the web and the way you write for text similar or different? Aside from technology, what makes them different?


 * The anatomy of a Wikipedia page
 * exercise: using the history page
 * exercise: transparency (no place to hide)
 * exercise: the function and process of talk pages


 * read: Tutorial

Thursday

 * editing workshop
 * WikiMarkup/wikitext basics
 * style basics
 * starting to think about audience


 * read: The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir Part 2 - second Slashdot post written by co-founder and now outspoken critic of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger
 * optional readings/resources: Help, Help:Contents, the Editing Wikitext Wikibook, Manual of Style

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: Is Wikipedia democracy or anarchy? Chaos or order? Explain your answer and how you define the terms you chose.


 * The Five Pillars - an overview. We'll talk more about each of these throughout the course.
 * why people contribute
 * for credit?
 * gift economy?
 * to create a commons?


 * read: Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman - Why Do People Write for Wikipedia? Incentives to Contribute to Open-Content Publishing
 * read: Victor Gijsbers - Ideals of Knowledge: Media from Plato to Wikipedia

Thursday

 * edit wars, disagreements, and dispute resolution procedures
 * democracy or anarchy?
 * go over collaborative project
 * form groups for collaborative projects


 * read: Assume_good_faith
 * optional reading: Susan Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman - Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in Collaborative Online Encyclopedias (GROUP'05)
 * talks about the process whereby those who spend more time editing wind up focusing most of their energies on policy, organization, usability, etc.

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: What was one of the most helpful Wikipedia articles you've read recently? What aspects of its content, style, or presentation made it so good?


 * static vs. dynamic content
 * anybody can edit
 * comparison with other encyclopedias
 * citing Wikipedia


 * read: Neil Waters - Why You Can't Cite Wikipedia in My Class (Communications of the ACM)
 * read: Wikipedia biography controversy

Thursday

 * vandalism (and trolls)
 * uniquely Wikipedian problem?
 * how bad is it?
 * biographies of living persons
 * exercise: bots that clean up after you
 * Stephen Colbert: The Word - Truthiness, The Word - Wikiality


 * read: Priedhorsky, Chen, Lam, Panciera, Terveen, and Riedl - Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia (Proceedings of GROUP 2007)
 * read: Stacy Schiff - Know It All (The New Yorker)

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: TBD (will be based on class discussions)


 * expertise and participatory culture
 * a democratization of knowledge/information?
 * discuss possible articles for collaborative project (come to class with more than one idea)


 * read: Dan Gillmor - We The Media: Introduction (also available as collaboratively-produced audiobook)

Thursday

 * anonymity
 * ethos


 * assignment: finalize article selection for collaborative project
 * read: Nora Miller - Wikipedia and the disappearing "author" (ETC: A Review of General Semantics)
 * optional reading: Your first article

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: TBD (will be based on class discussions)


 * speed of updating
 * a lot of people want this project to succeed
 * what is an encyclopedia for?
 * studies/data on Wikipedia's accuracy


 * read: Jim Giles - Internet encyclopedias go head to head (Nature (magazine))

Thursday

 * Wikipedia as a research tool
 * exercises: sources, verifiability


 * read: Daniel Paul O'Donnell - If I were "You": How Academics Can Stop Worrying and Learn to Love "the Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit" (The Heroic Age)

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: TBD (will be based on class discussions)


 * how to evaluate a Wikipedia page
 * reading the talk pages, looking for different points of view, areas of dispute
 * reading history pages, red flags to look for
 * more on sources and verifiability
 * different strategies for different learning goals
 * some basic rhetorical concepts: ethos, logos, pathos


 * read: the following sections from the Rhetorical Analysis chapter of the Rhetoric and Composition Wikibook: Overview of Rhetorical Analysis, [b:Rhetoric_and_Composition/Rhetorical_Analysis#Pathos|Pathos]], [[b:Rhetoric_and_Composition/Rhetorical_Analysis#Ethos|Ethos], and [[b:Rhetoric_and_Composition/Rhetorical_Analysis#Logos Logos]
 * optional reading: Introduction to Rhetorical Practices (chapter from the Digital Rhetoric Wikibook)

Thursday

 * where does trust come from?
 * more tools to evaluate information (on Wikipedia, on the Internet, or otherwise)
 * peer-review and its role in the science and the academy
 * assignment: each group should have an early draft of an article ready for the workshop today (significant content, some organization, sources)
 * workshop: peer-review another group's article


 * read: selection from Barbara Warnick - Rhetoric Online
 * read: Ryan McGrady - Ethos [edit]: Procedural Rhetoric and the Wikipedia Project (forthcoming)

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: TBD (will be based on class discussions)


 * reframing commons-based peer production
 * virtues of collective intelligence and global knowledge systems?
 * are some kinds of knowledge better suited for collaboration and networked deliberation than others?
 * group strategies for getting the best information


 * read: H.G. Wells - The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia (Contribution to the 1937 Encyclopédie Française)
 * read: selection from Cass Sunstein - Infotopia

Thursday

 * what is a hive mind?
 * is Wikipedia a hive mind?
 * more ideas of collective intelligence: futuristic, mystical, utopian, dystopian, social, simulated...


 * read: Jaron Lanier - Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism (The Edge)
 * watch: Pierre Levy on Collective Intelligence Literacy - interviewed by Howard Rheingold

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: TBD (will be based on class discussions)


 * mission of WikiMedia, Jimmy Wales
 * problems with the idea of a single objective knowledge
 * according to who
 * notability and what's deserving of being included
 * inclusionism-deletionism debate
 * exercise: the what was or was not deemed notable on Wikipedia game


 * read: Notability
 * optional readings: About, Wikimedia's Values page, Wikimedia's Vision page

Thursday

 * power hierarchies in site administration
 * systematic bias
 * does it change anything that the community is aware of this?
 * gaming the system and wikilawyering
 * exercise: comparing Wikipedias in different languages


 * read: Neutral Point of View
 * read: selection from Ryan McGrady - Gaming Against the Greater Good (First Monday)

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: TBD (will be based on class discussions)


 * goal to provide universal access
 * how usable will it be to people in developing countries
 * wikis have low barrier to participate, but what if you've never used a computer
 * language initiatives


 * read: Systematic Bias
 * read: Graham, Hale, & Stephens - Geographies of the World's Knowledge
 * optional reading: Zero Geography, involved in the above project, has a blog with a whole lot more of this sort of visualization you may want to peruse

Thursday

 * workshop on organizing, categorizing, usability, search, etc.


 * read: Wikipedia seeks global operator partners to enable free access (Wikimedia blog post from 2011.11.26)

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: TBD (will be based on class discussions)


 * open source
 * copyleft
 * intellectual property
 * Creative Commons


 * read: Lawrence Lessig - Free Culture Introduction and Chapter 1
 * read: Richard Barbrook - The Hi-Tech Gift Economy (First Monday)
 * optional reading: Contextualizing Open Content (chapter from the FOSS Open Content Wikibook)

Thursday

 * wikispam
 * publishing Wikipedia articles
 * transparency and aggregate archival or appropriation in a culture of constant revision
 * assignment: articles should be complete by today, according to the featured article criteria (even if it's not a featured article)
 * workshop: TBD based on what needs to be done on the projects

Tuesday

 * wiki discussion topic: TBD (will be based on class discussions)


 * presentations: groups 1, 2, and 3

Thursday

 * presentations: groups 4, 5, and 6

Week 14: Finals

 * final paper due by end of class time on Tuesday