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RAW Lectures #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' - Video
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah-video
<b>Dr. Nishant Shah spoke on the 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' at the first event of the RAW Lectures series in Bangalore on March 6, 2015. Here is the video recording of the talk and the discussion that followed. </b>
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<iframe src="https://archive.org/embed/CISRAWLectureSeriesIDr.NishantShah" frameborder="0" height="480" width="640"></iframe>
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<h2>RAW Lectures</h2>
<p>The Researchers at Work programme initiated the RAW Lectures series to take stock, reflect, and chart courses into the studies of Internet in/from India. The lectures address the experiences and practices of Internet in India as plural and intertwined with longer-duration processes. The lectures also critically respond to the questions around the methods of studying Internet in/from India, and the opportunities and challenges of studying Indian society on/through the Internet.</p>
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<h2>Lecture #01 - Stories and Histories of Internet in India</h2>
<p><a href="http://cdc.leuphana.com/people/#nishant-shah" target="_blank"><strong>Dr. Nishant Shah</strong></a> is the Professor of Culture and Aesthetics of New Media at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, Research Associate at COMMON MEDIA LAB, Affiliate at DIGITAL CULTURES RESEARCH LAB, and International Tandempartner at HYBRID PUBLISHING LAB. He is the co-founder and former-Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India.</p>
<p><strong>More:</strong> <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah</a>.</p>
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<h2>Download</h2>
<p><strong>Video files:</strong> <a href="https://archive.org/download/CISRAWLectureSeriesIDr.NishantShah/CIS%20RAW%20Lecture%20Series%20-%20I%20(Dr.%20Nishant%20Shah).mp4" target="_blank">MP4</a>, <a href="https://archive.org/download/CISRAWLectureSeriesIDr.NishantShah/CIS%20RAW%20Lecture%20Series%20-%20I%20(Dr.%20Nishant%20Shah).ogv" target="_blank">OGG</a>, and <a href="https://archive.org/download/CISRAWLectureSeriesIDr.NishantShah/CISRAWLectureSeriesIDr.NishantShah_archive.torrent" target="_blank">Torrent</a>.</p>
<p>The video is shared under Creative Commons <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" target="_blank">Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International</a> license.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah-video'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah-video</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkInternet HistoriesLearningRAW Lectures2016-02-09T08:45:00ZBlog EntryCSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cscs-digital-innovation-fund
<b>The CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) has been set up by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) to encourage, host, and provide seed funding for the development of digital tools and infrastructure for arts, humanities, and social science research in India. The Fund’s priorities have been shaped by Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Lawrence Liang, Nishant Shah, Sitharamam Kakarala, S.V. Srinivas, and Tejaswini Niranjana; and it is administered by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS.</b>
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<p>A fundamental challenge has emerged in arts, humanities, and social science research with the coming of digital media. The challenge is of at least two kinds: 1) the ways in which we access our primary materials have changed, opening up the possibility of formulating new problems as well as conducting our research, and 2) additionally, the digital networks and objects that facilitate research are themselves becoming part of the phenomena we document and analyse. While the contexts under investigation are rich and diverse, the digital tools and methods by which to explore them are not readily available, especially in India.</p>
<p>CDIF uses the terms <strong>tools</strong> and <strong>infrastructure</strong> to respectively refer to autonomous software programmes and hardware devices, and platforms for collective use. A software to enable capturing of comments posted on a news website will be an example of the former, while an archive to be populated and annotated by a number of users will be an example of the latter.</p>
<p>The core mandate of CDIF is as follows:</p>
<ul>
<li>Identifying digital tools and infrastructure needed by researchers and practitioners in arts, humanities, and social science fields. This is clearly not a one-time exercise, but a continuous one.</li>
<li>Promote, support, and fund the development of new digital tools and infrastructure, as well as revision and expansion of existing ones.</li>
<li>Creating focused conversations and materials around teaching of, and teaching through, digital tools and infrastructure across the arts, humanities, and social science disciplines.</li></ul>
<p>During 2015-2017, CDIF has a specific interest in supporting efforts that engage with questions of the digital futures of Indian languages, needs and forms of archive-building, and tools and infrastructure of academic collaboration, among learners and among researchers.</p>
<p>CDIF will periodically announce open calls for project proposals related to development of digital tools and infrastructure for research. To receive these announcements, please subscribe to the <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/cdif" target="_blank">cdif@cis-india.org</a> mailing list. In exceptional cases, we may also consider directly supporting a project.</p>
<p>For any clarification, including sharing of project ideas, please write to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cscs-digital-innovation-fund'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cscs-digital-innovation-fund</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroCDIFResearchers at WorkLearning2018-05-14T07:25:49ZBlog EntryCIS Featured in 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report
<b>This report, authored by Vivian Lewis, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne, sheds light on the expertise required to support a robust and sustainable digital scholarship (DS) program. It focuses first on defining and describing the key domain knowledge, skills, competencies, and mindsets at some of the world’s most prominent digital scholarship programs. It then identifies the main strategies used to build this expertise, both formally and informally. The work is set in a global context, examining leading digital scholarship organizations in China, India, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The report team visited and spoke to us last year, as part of the study. Here are the Executive Summary and link to the final report.</b>
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<p><strong>Access the 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' report <a href="http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub168" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></p>
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<h2>Executive Summary</h2>
<p>As new production, researchers scholarship analysis, pursue using digital or digital publishing scholarship or computational and dissemination (the creation, techniques), of they are often challenged to develop new skill sets. What skills, competencies, knowledge, and mindsets should digital scholars possess? How are such attributes—which we group under the term expertise—best cultivated? Does the shape of expertise vary around the world? Such questions are being asked by institutions establishing or reshaping digital scholarship organizations (DSOs), instructors developing educational and training programs in digital scholarship, experienced and aspiring digital scholars defining what expertise they need to acquire, and researchers exploring the global nature of digital scholarship.</p>
<p>Through our pilot study, we sought to answer these questions with the broader aims of identifying the workforce-related factors important to the success of digital scholarship, helping training and educational programs define key goals, and contributing to the conversation about the global dimensions of digital scholarship. We focused on “best in class” DSOs, highlighting the human dimensions behind their success in areas such as research output, winning grants, international reputation, and innovative teaching or training programs. We conducted interviews with a range of people involved with leading DSOs, including directors, research staff, faculty, librarians, graduate students, and university administrators. We conducted site visits with all but one of the 16 institutions
participating in our study, which enabled us to get a richer sense of the facilities, organizational context, and local culture. While most of our interviews focused on digital humanities, we also included several digital social science organizations to identify areas of commonality and contrast. We explored a variety of organizational
structures, including research centers and institutes, an academic department, labs, a network, a nonprofit organization, and a company; these organizations were sponsored by academic schools, libraries, and information technology departments. To understand the global dimensions of digital scholarship, we examined organizations from Mexico, China, Taiwan, India, Germany, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>Since digital scholarship projects often require specific technical skills (such as expertise in text analysis or geographic information systems [GIS]), it was difficult to generalize about what particular skill sets organizations should offer; in many ways that depends on the goals and focus of the organization. In addition, different skill sets were expected depending on one’s position and degree of experience. However, our interviews revealed in particular the importance of collaborative competencies, reflecting the ways in which digital scholarship typically takes place in teams dependent on diverse expertise. Since digital scholarship often involves
developing new methods, tools, and theoretical approaches, successful digital scholars usually exhibit creativity, curiosity, and an enthusiasm for learning, which we term learning mindsets. Some level of general domain knowledge is useful so that team members can understand the research questions they are pursuing, while researchers draw upon methodological competencies (such as data science and GIS) and technical skills (such as database design and programming) to carry out their research. Finally, managerial skills—particularly project management—are needed to ensure that projects are completed.</p>
<p>While self-education and learning by doing are the predominant ways that digital scholars have traditionally acquired expertise, they also appreciate being part of a community of practice, so that they can turn to colleagues for help solving a problem and learning something new. Many organizations host workshops and visiting speakers and enable faculty and staff to attend conferences, although it can be challenging for staff to secure travel funding. A couple of organizations provide dedicated research time to staff, so that they can experiment, stay abreast of the state of the art, and contribute their own research. Along with formal support for professional development, we noted the importance of a “learning culture” in fostering continuous learning. Organizations most successful at
building expertise among faculty, students, and staff tended to share characteristics such as <em>an open and collaborative interdisciplinary culture</em> in which each team member contributes expertise and is respected for it; <em>global engagement</em>, which includes participating in multi-institutional research projects; an <em>entrepreneurial culture</em> in which experimentation is valued; and a <em>focus on teaching and learning</em> as well as research. We noted variation in the kind of <em>facilities</em> these organizations occupied; collaborative space seemed to be more important than top-notch hardware.</p>
<p>Since we were able to visit only a small number of organizations in each country or region included in the study, we don’t feel comfortable making broad generalizations about the state of digital scholarship around the world. However, we did note some common factors that influenced the shape of digital scholarship expertise. These
factors included <em>a tradition of digital scholarship</em>, as more established organizations could both build on existing structures and could be limited by them; <em>funding</em>; the degree of <em>involvement of the institution’s library</em>; and variations in <em>academic career structures</em>, such as paths to promotion and the recognition of alternative academic careers.</p>
<p>Digital scholarship organizations face a number of challenges, particularly in securing adequate funding for their work. We want to draw particular attention to the challenge of recruitment and retention. Typically, DSOs cannot compete with the private sector in offering high salaries or extensive opportunities for advancement; rather, they provide more flexible environments and an academic or intellectual atmosphere in which staff are encouraged to experiment and learn. Unfortunately, some staff at many organizations are hired on temporary contracts because of limited funding, so they often leave for more stable positions. We also noted a tension
between research and service at some organizations, wherein these organizations viewed producing new knowledge as central to their mission but may also be expected to provide services to local researchers or to maintain existing projects. At a few organizations, we observed status differences between faculty and staff, particularly in the ability to be principal investigators on grants or to receive travel funding. Researchers whose first language is not English must often choose between reaching a smaller audience with work published in their native language and devoting significant time to translating their work into English.</p>
<p>We provide an extensive list of recommendations aimed at digital scholars, leaders of DSOs, universities and host organizations, funders, and the broader digital scholarship community. To highlight some of the most salient: We recommend that digital scholars take responsibility for their own learning, nurture their own curiosity, and actively pursue learning opportunities, including by participating in communities of practice and team projects.
We advise the leaders of DSOs to encourage both structured and unstructured opportunities for learning by including dedicated staff research time in job descriptions, enabling staff to train and mentor, and hosting workshops, outside speakers, and other events. Host institutions such as universities should create more stable staff positions with paths to promotion and facilitate more stable funding for DSOs, while funders should support global digital scholarship exchanges. As for the digital scholarship community, we recommend heightening awareness of digital scholarship around the world through conference programs, funding initiatives, publications, and communities of practice, and promoting greater linguistic diversity. We hope that this report helps raise awareness of the range of expertise required for digital scholarship, the importance of a learning culture and active communities of practice in nurturing it, the challenges digital scholarship staff often face in finding stable careers, and the diversity of models for digital scholarship around the world.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital ScholarshipResearchers at WorkLearningDigital Humanities2015-10-16T07:43:18ZBlog EntryInternet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Extended to Nov 22)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call
<b>With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). This first conference will focus on the theme of 'Studying Internet in India.' The word 'study' here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation. We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 22, 2015. Final sessions will be selected during December and announced by December 31, 2015. Below are the details about the conference series, as well instructions for proposing a session for the conference.</b>
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<p><strong>Call for Sessions document: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions/at_download/file">Download (PDF)</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Call for Sessions poster: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions-poster/at_download/file">Download (PNG)</a></strong></p>
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<h2>Internet Researchers’ Conference</h2>
<p>The last decades have seen a growing entanglement of our daily lives with the internet, not only as modes of communication but also as shared socio-politico-cultural spaces, and as objects of study. The emergence of new artifacts, conditions, and sites of power/knowledge with the prevalence of digital modes of communication, consumptions, production, distribution, and appropriation have expectedly attracted academic and non-academic explorers across disciplines, professions, and interests. Researchers across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, and boundaries.</p>
<p>The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is very excited to invite you to take part in the first of a series of annual conferences for researchers (academic or otherwise) studying internet in India. These conferences will be called the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), with the abbreviation reminding us of an early protocol for text-based communication over internet. The first edition will be organised around the theme of ‘studying internet in India.’ The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.</p>
<p>This conference series is founded on the following interests:</p>
<ul><li>Creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions.</li>
<li>Foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India.</li>
<li>Accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India.</li>
<li>Exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.</li></ul>
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<h2>Studying Internet in India</h2>
<p>The inaugural conference will be held in Delhi (<strong>to be confirmed</strong>) on February 25-27, 2015. It will comprise of discussion and workshop sessions taking place during the first two days, and a writing sprint and a final round table taking place during the third day.</p>
<p>The conference will specifically focus on the following questions:</p>
<ul><li>How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?</li>
<li>How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?</li>
<li>What tools and methods are made available by arts, humanities, social science, and technical disciplines to study internet in India; how and where do they fail to meet the purpose; what revisions and fresh tool building are becoming necessary; and how should the usage of such tools and methods be taught?</li>
<li>Given the global techno-economic contours of the internet, and the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the same in India, how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?</li></ul>
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<h2>Sessions</h2>
<p>The conference will not be organised around papers but sessions. Each session will be one and half hour long. Potential participants may propose sessions that largely engage with one of the questions listed above.</p>
<p>Each proposed session must have at least two, and preferably three, co-leaders, who will drive the session, and prepare a session document after the conference. The proposed session can either involve a discussion, or a workshop.</p>
<p>In a discussion session, the co-leaders may present their works (not necessarily of the academic kind), or invite others to present their works, on a specific theme, which will be followed by a discussion, as structured by the co-leaders.</p>
<p>In a workshop session, the co-leaders will engage the participants to undertake individual or collaborative work in response to a series of questions, challenges, or provocations offered by the co-leaders at the beginning of the session. The proposed work may involve writing, searching, copying, building, etc., but <strong>not</strong> speaking.</p>
<p>Both the kinds of sessions are open to presentations and collaborations in the textual format or in other formats, including but not limited to code-based works and multimedia installations.</p>
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<h2>Writing Sprint</h2>
<p>At the writing sprint, on the third day morning, all the participants will collaboratively put together the first draft of a handbook on tools and methods of studying Internet in India. It will be created as an online, open access, multilingual, and editable (wiki-like) book, and will be meant for extensive usage and augmentation by students, researchers, and others.</p>
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<h2>Final Round Table</h2>
<p>This will take place after the lunch on the third day to wrap-up the conversations (and propose new initiatives, hopefully) emerging during the previous days of the conference, to make plans for follow-up works (including the first IRC Reader), and to speculate about the shape of the next year’s conference.</p>
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<h2>IRC Reader</h2>
<p>The IRC Reader will be produced as documentation of the conversations and activities at the conference. The Reader, obviously, will have the same theme as the conference, and will largely comprise of the session documentation (not necessarily textual) prepared by the co-leaders of the session concerned. Once all the session documentation is shared by the co-leaders and is temporarily published online, all the participants will be invited to share their comments, which will all be part of the final Reader of the conference.</p>
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<h2>Proposing a Session</h2>
<p>To propose a session, each team of two/three co-leaders will have to submit the following documents:</p>
<ul><li>The name of the session: It should be created as a <strong>hashtag</strong>, as in #BlackLivesMatter, or #RefugeesWelcome.</li>
<li>A plan of the proposed session that should clarify its context, the key questions/challenges/provocations for the session, and how they connect to any one of the four questions listed above. Write no more than one page.</li>
<li>If it is a discussion session: Mention what will be presented at the session, and who will present it. Share the abstracts of the papers to be presented (if any). Each abstract should not be longer than 300 words.</li>
<li>If it is a workshop session: Mention what you expect the participants to do during the session, and how the co-leaders will support them through the work. Write no more than one page.</li>
<li>Three readings, or objects, or software that you expect the participants to know about before taking part in the session.</li>
<li>CVs of all the co-leaders of the session.</li></ul>
<p>We understand that finding co-leaders for a session you have in mind might be difficult in certain cases. One possible way for you to find co-leaders is by sharing your session idea on the <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers" target="_blank">researchers@cis-india.org</a> mailing list. Alternatively, you may keep an eye on the list to see what potential topics are being discussed. If you are facing any difficulty subscribing to the mailing list, please write to <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p>All session proposals must be submitted by <strong>Sunday, November 22</strong> (extended), 2015, via email sent to <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
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<h2>Selection of Sessions</h2>
<p>All proposed sessions, along with related documents, will be published online by <strong>November 30</strong>. All co-leaders of proposed sessions will be invited to vote for 8 sessions before <strong>December 15</strong>. The sessions with maximum votes will be selected for the conference, and the list of such sessions will be published on <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
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<h2>Venue, Accommodation, and Travel</h2>
<p>The conference is most likely to take place in Delhi on <strong>February 25-27, 2016</strong>. The place, dates, and venue will be confirmed by <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
<p>The conference organiser(s) will cover all costs related to accommodation and hospitality during the conference.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we are not sure if we will be able to pay for travel expenses of the participants. We will confirm this by <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroInternet Researcher's ConferenceFeaturedLearningIRC16Researchers at Work2015-11-15T07:48:17ZBlog EntryThe Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia
<b>The digital turn in education comes across a wide range of initiatives and processes. The Wikipedia which is the largest user generated content website stands as a figurehead of such a digital turn, writes Nishant Shah.</b>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>The digital turn in education has been described across a wide range of initiatives and processes. These include the introduction of digital tools and gadgets as a part of the learning environment, building digital archives and repositories of learning and curriculum building, facilitating remote access to education through information and communications technologies infrastructure, improving quality of access to education and learning resources, building diverse and customised syllabi to accommodate for alternative and contesting perspectives, building peer knowledge communities of information and knowledge production, and including non-canonical material and experiences into formal institutions of education. Different locations, contexts, geo-political circumstances, socio-economic factors, and cultural differences influence the spread, rise and integration of digital technologies in mainstream education. Much academic, policy and implementation attention has been given to these processes and several models of new learning environments and infrastructure have been postulated over the last two decades. The democratising promise of internet technologies has been largely if not exclusively about education, learning, literacy and production of knowledge from different parts of the world.</p>
Wikipedia, one of the first and possibly the largest user generated content websites, that aims to put together the ‘sum total of all human knowledge’ in an open encyclopaedia, stands as the figurehead of such a digital turn. It questions and subverts the traditional analogue forms of knowledge production and relationships. The much discussed experiment conducted by Nature (Giles, 2005 and Orlowski, 2006) that established Wikipedia as an almost equal (if not more) reliable source of information to the fountainhead of print-based knowledge <em>Encyclopaedia Britannica</em>, has become the touchstone by which digital collaborative knowledge structures seek their validity within mainstream classroom pedagogy and learning.
Wikipedia itself has emerged as an object of deep scrutiny and contestation, with warring factions going strong about its strengths and weaknesses. The supporters look at how this collaborative peer-to-peer structure has changed knowledge relationships that defined consumers, producers and mediators of knowledge. They see in the rise of Wikipedia, and other such wiki-based structures and user generated content sites that remix, reuse and share knowledge within the digital realm, the potentials and possibilities of changing the futures of knowledge ecologies and economies. The detractors of Wikipedia make a strong case for specialised and expert curatorial practices of knowledge, without which the information explosion of the digital world would collapse all distinctions between speculative writing and rigorous accountable research.
<h2>Concerns</h2>
<p>In the seemingly unbridgeable differences of these two contesting positions, there is however, a set of common presumptions which remained unquestioned and unchallenged. The example of Wikipedia accordingly serves to throw in sharp relief these more general questions regarding digitally produced knowledge and digitally enabled learning practices.</p>
<h3><strong>Design of Trust</strong></h3>
<h3></h3>
<p>The first among them is the concern around Authority and Authorship (Liang, 2010). Increasingly, as Wikipedia becomes a de facto global reference site available in different languages, there is a growing dependence on the authority of information available on Wikipedia. Given that the number of users of Wikipedia is exponentially higher than the number of editors on Wikipedia, there are many users who never confront the structures of participation, processes of editing, and questioning the source of information (Harouni, 2009, Broughton, 2002) found on the site. This is not a problem exclusive to Wikipedia. Given the explosion of user generated sites which often gloss over the problems of authority and authorship, misdirected or misguided information, there is a need for digital criticality which can help people sift through different kinds of information and develop the capacity for effective critical judgment regarding both truth or falsity and rhetorical persuasiveness or manipulation. Especially within the context of scholarly and academic research and learning, classroom teaching and pedagogy, there is a need to define new parameters by which information introduced in the classroom or learning environment needs to stand deeper scrutiny regarding reliability (over authority).</p>
<h3>Flattened Politics</h3>
<p>The second concern has to do with the depoliticized perception of participation, collaboration and knowledge production on Wikipedia (Graham, 2010). Not only are geographical counters, experiential knowledges and non-standard forms of citation (Prabhala, 2010) ignored on Wikipedia, but they are also rendered redundant under the guise of objectivity. The essentially viral nature of information online and conditions of easy replicability that allow for copy and paste cultures often means that the information gets de-contextualised and de-politicized from its original intentions and circuits of production/distribution.</p>
<p>In many ways, Wikipedia’s adherence to an encyclopaedic model, promotes the idea that there is universal, objective knowledge which can be produced and understood without engaging with the politics of context, language, translation, evidence, etc. This adoption of an older model of aggregating knowledge becomes problematic in the light of new perspectives and theories of reading and writing, which establish knowledge as a contested terrain rather than the benign site that can be mediated through protocols, bots and procedures (Miller, 2007 and Rosenzweig, 2006). In classrooms, students and teachers are both faced with problems when they encounter the simultaneously authoritative and collaborative, definite and tentative nature of information on Wikipedia. The flattened structure of information further complicates our engagement with the larger contexts it refers to and often hinders the learner’s ability to go beyond the self contained universe of Wikipedia, unable to engage with that which has been omitted or left-out and only concentrating on that what has been written and represented.</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<h3>Technology as Tool</h3>
<p>The third concern marks a larger anxiety with the Web 2.0 technologies
and their integration with formal structures of education and learning.
It has to do with new configurations of power, recalibrated hierarchies
of learning and teaching, and distributed communities of learning which
might not often be cohesive and concurrent. With the unqualified
emphasis on digital gadgets – OLPC, Smart Boards, iPads – and ubiquitous
connectivity, there is often a danger to reducing these structures to
sheer functionality. There have been experiments where pedagogues have
merely introduced user generated sites as reference material and ways of
accessing information without actually looking at how they posit
questions to existing education systems. The larger trend of distrusting
non-academic spaces continues.</p>
</td>
<td><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/DC.jpg/image_preview" title="Digital Technology" height="270" width="363" alt="Digital Technology" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>A lecture on the problems of Wikipedia
is immediately followed by a ban on or “policing” of the use of
Wikipedia as a reliable resource, trying to create a false and divisive
distinction between offline and online learning tools (Davidson, 2007).
With the increased focus on ‘Digital Natives’ within education policy
and everyday classroom pedagogy, there is a call for changing the
existing classroom and replacing it with a digital classroom – a classroom that challenges the teacher-student relationships, the
authority of the prescribed curricula, and the form of learning and
teaching within college and university structures. The Digital Classroom
is often mistaken to be a virtualisation of the contemporary classroom,
where virtual presences and cloud-based resources of learning structure
the syllabi and the methods of learning. However, the larger anxieties
are about rendering the physical classroom digital by establishing new
relationships and structures at the levels of curricula design,
teaching, learning and evaluation. The need is to look beyond the social
media as a tool, and start unpacking the transparency of the digital
interface and the perceived non-hierarchical nature of information
filtering (Geiger, 2010) on Wikipedia and other such user generated
content portals.</p>
<h3>Quality of Access</h3>
<p>The fourth concern draws from digital internet rhetoric of Do It Yourself. There is a heavy promotion of howthe only thing that stops a student (or anybody who is a learner) from being an intelligent and engaged student is lack of resources. This rhetoric finds bolstering in other political movements like FLOSS and A2K (Willinsky, 2006). There is a presumption that the teacher is merely a proxy for the paucity of resources and that once the students have unlimited access to the ‘sum total of all human knowledge’, they will be able to Learn everything on their own. The DIY University models, the proposition of phasing out teachers and investing in digital infrastructure instead, the idea that the digital native student has instinctive abilities to navigate through knowledge systems (like a fish does to water), all obfuscate not only the traditional learning processes but also reduce all learning to Access.</p>
<p>There is no debate about the quality of access. Even when factual errors are spotted, it is celebrated as an opportunity to improve so that information on Wikipedia is by definition flawed and always potentially in the process of being improved. There is little theorisation of both the role of a teacher in a classroom and the relationship with information access and learning. The presumption that the only gating factor to better education is lack of resources glosses over questions of social and economic disadvantage, political contexts, age, language, race, gender, sexuality, social support, etc., that come into play when designing inclusive education systems. Instead, there is a promotion of fact-based skill-oriented learning that fits the larger neo-liberal agenda of producing workforces who necessarily should not have to be critical in their everyday labours (Achterman, 2005). Universities and colleges are finding increasing pressure to produce students who work within such flat knowledge horizons towards market expansion and promotion of information capitalism rather than a critical learner who is able to deploy lessons learned from education in order to question and change the reality of the conditions within which s/he lives.</p>
<h2>Rationale<br /></h2>
<p>Given these dramatic measures and accelerated changes happening in academia and within the university systems across the worlds, it is necessary to dwell on what a digital college classroom and learning environment looks like in the time of Wikipedia. A synthesis of perspectives from different stakeholders in varied disciplines, engaging with knowledge production, consumption, distribution and access is necessary to understand what the futures and contours of the university system and classroom pedagogy are. The ambition is to look at Wikipedia as a symptom of our times rather than a site of analyses.</p>
<h2>Call for Proposals</h2>
<p>This is a call for proposals towards a special Reader, from people who are interested in producing historical and contemporary accounts of relationships between education, technology, learning, and pedagogy in order to map existing crises and questions of our present times. We take the classroom as the unit where different processes and flows of the education system meet. In this context, we invite researchers, academic practitioners, students, artists, new media theorists, education policy actors and historians of knowledge to look at the <em>Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia</em> as an opportunity to question global trends in education and ways by which Wikipedia (and other such structures) can be fruitfully integrated in formal education towards better learning. Proposals can be for producing theoretical accounts, critical analyses, case-studies from one’s practice, review of information and knowledge, narratives of art and activist interventions, regional and local snap-shots, and other innovative forms by which the diverse and complex questions can be elaborated.</p>
<h2>Key Questions</h2>
<p>Proposals can be inspired by but not limited to some of the questions listed below that we identify as beginning points for engaging with the area:</p>
<ol><li>What does a digital classroom look like? If we had to think beyond just integration of digital tools into the classroom, what are the new models and structures of classrooms (physical, pedagogical, or otherwise) that we are looking at?</li><li>What are the new relationships that we are mapping in the time of Wikipedia – student-teacher, teacher-curriculum, student-classroom, student-student, technology-education, pedagogy-learning? How do we account for the shifts and map the transitions?</li><li>How do we understand the changing nature and function of the university and education with the rise of the internet? What are the policy and practice visions of the University of the Future?</li><li>What does the integration of Wikipedia and similar structures in everyday classroom practice lead to? What does it change and for whom?</li><li>What is the role of the teacher in the age of ubiquitous information access? How do we restructure our ideas of pedagogy, learning and evaluation?</li><li>What are the historical tensions between technology and education that are being replayed with the rise of the digital?</li><li>What does the rise of Wikipedia mean for our traditional understandings of data repositories? What are the politics and implications of Wikimedia’s other projects on Alternative Citation, Wikipictures, GLAM, etc. on the larger knowledge ecology and industry?</li></ol>
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<p><strong>References</strong>:</p>
<ol><li>Achterman, D. (2005). “Surviving Wikipedia: Improving student search habits through information literacy and teacher collaboration”, <em>Knowledge Quest</em>, 33(5), 38−40.</li><li>Davidson, C. (2007). “We can’t ignore the influence of digital technologies”,<em> Education Digest</em>, 73(1), 15−18.</li><li>Geiger, S. (2011). “The Lives of Bots”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Giles, J. (2005). “Internet encyclopedias go head to head”, <em>Nature</em>, 438(7070), 900−901.</li><li>Graham, M. (2011). “Wiki Space: Palimpsests and the Politics of Exclusion”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Harouni, H. (2009). “High School Research and Critical Literacy: Social Studies with and Despite Wikipedia”, <em>Harvard Educational Review</em>, 79 (3), 473-494.</li><li>Liang, L. (2011). “A brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Miller, N. (2007). “Wikipedia revisited” <em>ETC: A Review of General Semantics</em>, 64(2), 147−150.</li><li>Orlowski, A. (2006, March 26). Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study, <em>The Register</em>. Retrieved December 17, 2011, from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/</a></li><li>Prabhala, A. (2011). <em>People Are Knowledge</em>. Documentary retrieved from December 17, 2011 from <a class="external-link" href="http://vimeo.com/26469276">http://vimeo.com/26469276</a>.</li><li>Rosenzweig, R. (2006). “Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past” <em>Journal of American History</em>, 93(1), 117–146.</li><li>Willinsky, J. (2006). <em>The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship</em>. MIT Press :Massachusetts.
<hr /><strong>Collaborators</strong>: Dr. David Theo Goldberg, <em>University of California
Humanities Research Institute</em> and Claudia Sullivan, <em>Digital Media and
Learning Initiative, HASTAC</em>.<br /><strong>Photo source</strong>: <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=digital+classrooms&l=1">Flickr</a> (Creative Commons-licensed content for noncommercial use requiring attribution and share alike distribution).<br /></li></ol>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia</a>
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No publishernishantWikipediaResearchers at WorkLearningDigital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia2015-10-05T14:53:30ZBlog Entry