Purdy's chapter on the benefits of using Wikipedia, both as source and research model, provides for several levels of discussion:
Firstly, Purdy's decision to have the text available over the Internet is a clear sign of his own commitment to online content. Pair this with his inclusion (which I thought to be a genius bit of idea-marketing) of screenshots of the Wikipedia article Web 2.0 (including the brief description) and you get a strong sense that Purdy is embracing the collaborative or communal aspects of Wikipedia, New Media, and the Internet more generally. This, I think, is as important a reading of Purdy as any other that I will offer, as his insistence that "some of what happens in making effective contributions to Wikipedia parallels some of what happens in producing effective research-based writing," is clearly an attempt to analogize what happens on Wikipedia to the knowledge-generating aspect of conventional academic discourse (211). And, if I am not mistaken, this is Purdy's attempt to draw these two processes more closely together, in a way that will benefit both communities. (I realize I'm making some distinction between the 'academic' community and the community of Wikipedians, but I don't think that it is at all obvious that the two are not distinct. In fact, Purdy's writing of the article is a call for students, and perhaps less obviously, teachers and professional academics to participate in the Wikipedia format. However, there is the acknowledgement that students already participate, albeit, in a more naive way; and so the article seeks to address this, both from the academic perspective but also the Wikipedian.)
Secondly, Purdy's insistence that readers actively participate in, or, at the very least, read and acknowledge the Discussion tab of a Wikipedia article is key to helping demystify Wikipedia for students. If students can be encouraged to see how the sausage gets made then, hopefully, they will think twice before throwing it in their stew! Additionally, and this gets back to the first point, by reading the Discussion page students can become aware of the "debates, questions, and absences" in the article, thereby witnessing the process of knowledge generation (215).
Thirdly, and most practically, I think Purdy does a service for other instructors by delineating the parts of Wikipedia, how they function together, and what that means to the final product, i.e. article. After reading the piece I immediately wanted to give copies to my students. I agree with Purdy that, "it is more helpful to address ways to use it effectively than to ignore it (and ignoring it precludes some potentially beneficial uses of Wikipedia anyway)" (205). In this connection I think it wise to explicitly deal with Wikipedia, and online content more generally, rather than ignoring it, or trying to correct each student abuse of Wikipedia individually.
In connection with Purdy's article I wanted to highlight a few quotes from Doug Brent's Reading as Rhetorical Invention:
Knowledge, Persuasion, and the
Writing of Research-Based Writing in order to highlight some of the key aspects alive in both readings:
In connection with Brent's concept of a "rhetoric of reading," Wikipedia not only offers students and teachers a way to expressly recognize the knowledge-generating aspects of the research process, but also to witness it, and put it into practice. More importantly, the community aspect of Wikipedia offers a clear line to what Brent sees as the "larger process" a rhetoric of reading could help us to understand, "making contact with the mind of another human being." I offer Brent's definition of a rhetoric of reading:
"In common with any theory of reading, it must be able to account for the first stage of the reading act: the creation of meaning from symbols on paper. However, as a rhetoric of reading, it will account for this process in the context of the rhetorical framework. This means that the interaction between reader and text must be seen as being in the service of a larger process: making contact with the mind of another human being" (Brent Ch. 1).
In connection with the idea of web-based, multi-contributor content Brent proposes to us the idea of "virtual work":
"2. Being persuaded begins with evoking a virtual work from a text, a virtual work that can legitimately differ from reader to reader.
3. This virtual work--loosely put, the "meaning" of the text--is evoked as a transaction between the text itself and the reader's personal repertoire of associations and knowledge, the rhetorical situation, and the shared verbal meanings collectively attached to the words of the text by the reader's linguistic community. The overarching guide in this process is the reader's attempt to impose a coherent and unified meaning on the text" (Brent Ch. 3).
This concept of "virtual work" is mirrored by the content production of a Wikipedia article, where a literal virtual work is produced, "evoked", and where "meaning" is produced through an online "transaction between the text itself and the reader's personal repertoire of associations and knowledge, the rhetorical situation, and the shared verbal meanings collectively attached to the words of the text by the reader's linguistic community." In other words, Purdy's advice to engage the discussion page of a Wikipedia article is a way for students to come to understand and reflect upon their own rhetorical reading strategies.
Lastly, I just wanted to give one quote from Brent as a way to mirror or suss-out some of the salient features of Purdy's essay, especially as it regards "Using Wikipedia As A Process Guide" (211). Again, I'm making the connection that I made above, regarding an analogy between the Wikipedia-process and the knowledge-generating aspects of academic discourse. So, In conclusion, I leave you with this quote from Brent:
"We build and modify our repertoires more actively by participating in the "textual economy" of producing and consuming texts in pursuit of answers to questions--in the academic context, by writing papers based on research. Therefore, to delay immersing students in research until their repertoire is formed is to deny them access to one of the most important of the processes that form it. This is clearly a self-defeating proposition" (Brent Ch. 5).
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ReplyDeleteLike Jeff, I am glad to have read Brent and Purdy in conversation this week. The sausage observation does well to link(pun intended) Wikipedia with a truism about legislative processes. It’s hardly Oktoberfest over on the contentious discussion pages, after all, and students who glimpse the conflict and compromise behind the curtain are less likely to confuse “wikiality” with “truth,” just as congressional pages quickly appreciate the distance between “law” and “moral rightness.” Along these lines, I am interested in appraising Wikipedia guided by Brent’s claim that reading involves being persuaded to change one’s beliefs.
ReplyDeleteWikipedia will not be ignored. To prepare students to engage this dominant resource productively, my class turned its attention to the discussion pages during our first week together. We batted around Wikipedia’s terms “weasel words” and “peacock terms” (from the “Wp Manual of Style”) in order to sharpen our sense of how even innocuous-seeming language may carry a point of view. Returning to Wikipedia’s main entry pages, I thought we would consider how article length and trivia sections are marked for revision. Surely Wikipedia can teach us something about how the structure of written documents connotes importance. Well, that was something I wanted to share, at least.
However, I hope some of my students find Wikipedia too “boring” to serve as a model for their projects. That is, I hope they can come somewhat closer to Brent’s embrace of ethos. While they compose Personal Academic Arguments, they should come to reckon the value of narrative, the benefit to be gained by following a point of view awhile. I may find fault with Brent’s reductive assessment of reading and writing as a struggle over belief (Do I hope to persuade you to find my limerick funny? By writing you for directions to your house, do I persuade you to accept our participation in a shared, navigable physical world, or aim to convince you I am worth answering? Sure, we can put it in those terms, just as I could describe my visit to your house as an economic transaction. But, see if you’d have me over for sausages again). On the other hand, telling a student that NPOV handwipes can sanitize belief out of their papers sends the wrong message, and probably encourages the kind of prose Matalene discourages in her piece.
But, there’s a little more to chew on: does any of us inhabit a single “linguistic community”? How can this interpretive facet be separated from rhetorical situation? Is your classroom such a community, or do you view peer groups as discourse communities? And, would Brent quite agree with someone who says that it is by assuming or setting a goal of objectivity (even if counter-factual, or impossible) at some level that we allow writing to be meaningful? Is this idea folded into his perfunctory discussion of logos? Or is he just tossing out Snausages to throw old-school rhetoricians off the scent?
If you read any discussion page for any Wikipedia article, it will blow your mind the things that people quibble about. I think these discussions are particularly interesting in light of the Brent reading. As Brent says, "the 'meaning' of the text--is evoked as a transaction between the text itself and the reader's personal repertoire of associations and knowledge, the rhetorical situation, and the shared verbal meanings collectively attached to the words of the text by the reader's linguistic community." When Wikipedians quibble about calling Princess Diana "British" or "English," they are engaging with these associations and the shared verbal meanings that these words have. Even though Wikipedia is ostensibly a "neutral" zone it still can relate to Brent's "rhetoric of reading."
ReplyDeleteI agree with T.S. that Wikipedia will not be ignored, (nicely put) however I found about Middlebury College's banning the site as source material equally valid. The argument not being that Wikipedia is so erroneous as to be invalidated, but that it is not a sophisticated enough source for the level of work we expect Comp students to be engaging with (209.)
ReplyDeleteI have never seen the discussion pages of the site, but it would be an interesting place to turn students towards, to help them understand the limits of a collaborative source, with the hope that they will understand this emphasis on remaining neutral is appropriate only in the early stages of a topic, and they will soon find it too “boring” of a source for later research (as Tom suggests.)
Tom, I appreciate the credit, but I am not in fact the JW who wrote this piece. I think it was John.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I just wanted to say I didn't know there was a "discussions" page on Wiki. I think it could make for an interesting assignment to have students look a few over and then respond to what they read and learned about the "Wiki-process".
I have no sausage puns.
I agree with Purdy that wikipedia can be a tool for students to explore both their reading and writing processes and I think Brent offers some interesting thinking on how to work through texts to achieve thinking. The question for me is why aren't we as suspicious of every text as we are of wikipedia? Of course the easy answer is that wikipedia is modifiable at any point by anyone, but there are checks and balances and a community of editors. To me, one author sources are just as suspect, whether they come from academic sources or not. There have been peer reviewed papers that supported Christianizing native cultures, that included plagiarism and manufactured sources that people believed in because the author was tenured. Wikipedia is just as fraught as any text and shouldn't be given special scrutiny but the same scrutiny.
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