Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Washington College/FYS Info Privilege (Fall 2024)

This course takes an exploration into the history of censorship, philosophical basis for knowledge, epistemology, and influences of power and technology in modern information seeking acts. Through engaging with works by John Stuart Mills, Audre Lorde, Miranda Fricker, bell hooks and more, by the end of this course, you will have an understanding of inequalities in what information and ideas are available to us and how we access those ideas, that can affect an individuals finances, health, social standing and well-being.

Learning Outcomes:

After successfully completing this course students will be able to:

Recognize issues of access or lack of access to information sources. Examine the ways access to information affects their life. Define the ways privilege impacts their access to information. Articulate the purpose and distinguishing characteristics of copyright, fair use, open access, and the public domain. Define what it means to be information literate. Articulate their own information privilege. Discuss the legal and socioeconomic interests influence information production and dissemination. Complete an authoethnography,examining their relationship to seeking ideas and information. Experience the peer review process by challenging themselves to expand on a “stub” Wikipedia article.

The main form of writing will come from a semester long process of creating an autoethnography and group Wikipedia project. Students will form groups and choose a stub article in Wikipedia to expand on. This process will have them examine the idea of information open access, authority, review process and information privilege. During the semester, while working on the collaborative project, students will document their own experiences and reactions to their readings and work and inturn create autoethnographies that will be published on a blog, with their permission.

By examining information hierarchies perpetuated by existing social and economic oppressions, and publishing two formats of information, contributing to general knowledge and contributing experiential knowledge, they will leave the course with a better understanding of their own positionality in relation to knowledge access.