"We Can't Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies" Op Ed from Chronicle of Higher Education

We Can't Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 29, Page B20

By CATHY N. DAVIDSON

When I read the other day that the history department at Middlebury College had "banned Wikipedia," I immediately wrote to the college's president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, to express my concern that such a decision would lead to a national trend, one that would not be good for higher education. "Banning" has connotations of evil or heresy. Is Wikipedia really that bad?

I learned from Mr. Liebowitz that the news media had exaggerated the real story. The history department's policy that students not cite Wikipedia in papers or examinations is consistent with an existing policy on not citing sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is hardly a "ban." It is a definition of what constitutes credible scholarly or archival sources.

Even granting that the news media exaggerated, it is useful to think about why this was a story at all — and what we can learn from it. The coverage echoed the most Luddite reactions to Wikipedia and other ventures in creating knowledge in a collaborative, digital environment. In fact, soon after the Middlebury story was reported, one of my colleagues harrumphed, "Thank goodness someone is maintaining standards!" I asked what he meant, and he said that Wikipedia was prone to error. So are encyclopedias, I countered. So are refereed scholarly books. (Gasp!) He was surprised when I noted that several comparative studies have shown that errors in Wikipedia are not more frequent than in comparable print sources. More to the point, in Wikipedia, errors can be corrected. The specific one cited by the Middlebury history department — an erroneous statement that Jesuits had supported a rebellion in 17th-century Japan — was amended in a matter of hours.

That brings us to a second point. Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It is a knowledge community, uniting anonymous readers all over the world who edit and correct grammar, style, interpretations, and facts. It is a community devoted to a common good — the life of the intellect. Isn't that what we educators want to model for our students?

Rather than banning Wikipedia, why not make studying what it does and does not do part of the research-and-methods portion of our courses? Instead of resorting to the "Delete" button for new forms of collaborative knowledge made possible by the Internet, why not make the practice of research in the digital age the object of study? That is already happening, of course, but we could do more. For example, some professors already ask students to pursue archival research for a paper and then to post their writing on a class wiki. It's just another step to ask them to post their labors on Wikipedia, where they can learn to participate in a community of lifelong learners. That's not as much a reach for students as it is for some of their professors.

Most of the students who entered Middlebury last fall were born around 1988. They have grown up with new technology skills, new ways of finding information, and new modes of informal learning that are also intimately connected to their social lives. I recently spent time with a 5-year-old who was consumed by Pokémon. His parents were alarmed by his obsession, although his father reluctantly admitted that, at the same age, he had known every dinosaur and could recite their names with the same passion that his son now has for the almost-500 (and growing) Pokémon characters. I also was able to assure the parents that by mastering the game at the level he had, their son was actually mastering a 9-year-old's reading vocabulary. He was also customizing his games with editing tools that I can only begin to manipulate, and doing so with creativity and remarkable manual dexterity. The students at Middlebury have grown up honing those skills. Don't we want them to both mine the potential of such tools in their formal education and think critically about them? That would be far more productive than a knee-jerk "Delete."

I must admit I have an investment in this issue. A passionate one. I am on the advisory board of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative, a five-year, $50-million project started last year to study how digital technologies are changing all forms of learning, play, and social interaction. One focus of the initiative is research on ways that schools and colleges can be as lively and inspiring intellectually as are the Internet imaginations of our children. Grantees are working on such projects as learning games where young children create their own Frankensteins, then consider the ethics and science of their creations; other researchers are helping students develop a new civic awareness as they use three-dimensional virtual environments to create new worlds with new social rules. In the spirit of collaboration, the MacArthur program sponsors a blog, Spotlight, where visitors can interact with grantees (http://spotlight.macfound.org). In all the projects, the knowledge is shared, collaborative, cumulative. Like Wikipedia.

I am also co-founder of a voluntary network of academics called Hastac (http://www.hastac.org) — an unwieldy acronym that stands for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, but everyone just calls it "haystack." With my co-founder, David Theo Goldberg, I have recently posted the first draft of a paper, written for the MacArthur program, on "The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age." That paper is on a collaborative Web site (http://www.futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/about) that allows anyone to edit it, make comments, and contribute examples of innovative work. The site is sponsored by the Institute for the Future of the Book, a group dedicated to investigating how intellectual discourse changes as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens. We are holding a series of public forums and, in the end, will synthesize responses and include, in a "Hall of Vision," examples of the most inventive learning we have found in the country, learning that is collaborative and forward-looking. We will also include a "Hall of Shame," for retrograde and unthinking reactions to new technologies. (I was delighted to learn that, despite media reports, Middlebury College won't have to go there.)

As a cultural historian and historian of technology, I find that I often go to Wikipedia for a quick and easy reference before heading into more-scholarly depths. I'm often surprised at how sound and good a first source it is. Its problems have been well rehearsed in the media — to take a case that came recently to light, the way someone can create a persona as a scholar and contribute information under false pretenses. Some entries are bogged down in controversies, and some controversial figures (including scholars whose work I admire) are discussed in essays that are a mess of point and counterpoint. But I just looked up two well-known literary critics, Judith Butler and Fredric Jameson, on Wikipedia. Two months ago, when I first looked, the entries I found amounted to "idea assassinations" (if not outright character assassinations). But someone has been busy. The entries on both figures are much improved. I clicked on the editing history, to see who had added what and why. I looked up a half-hour later and realized I'd gotten lost in a trail of ideas about postmodernism and the Frankfurt School — when I had a deadline to meet. Isn't that the fantasy of what the educated life is like?

I also find that my book purchasing has probably increased threefold because of Wikipedia. I am often engaged by an entry, then I go to the discussion pages, and then I find myself caught up in debate among contributors. Pretty soon I am locating articles via Project Muse and 1-Click shopping for books on Amazon. Why not teach that way of using the resource to our students? Why rush to ban the single most impressive collaborative intellectual tool produced at least since the Oxford English Dictionary, which started when a nonacademic organization, the Philological Society, decided to enlist hundreds of volunteer readers to copy down unusual usages of so-called unregistered words.

I urge readers to take the hubbub around Middlebury's decision as an opportunity to engage students — and the country — in a substantive discussion of how we learn today, of how we make arguments from evidence, of how we extrapolate from discrete facts to theories and interpretations, and on what basis. Knowledge isn't just information, and it isn't just opinion. There are better and worse ways to reach conclusions, and complex reasons for how we arrive at them. The "discussion" section of Wikipedia is a great place to begin to consider some of the processes involved.

When he responded to my letter of concern, Middlebury's president also noted that "the history department's stance is not shared by all Middlebury faculty, and in fact last night we held an open forum on the topic, in which a junior faculty member in the history department and a junior faculty member in our program in film and media culture presented opposing views and invited questions and comments from a large and interested audience." He added that "the continuing evolution of new ways of sharing ideas and information will require that the academy continue to evolve as well in its understanding of how these technologies fit into our conception of scholarly discourse. We are pleased that Middlebury can take part in this important debate."

The Middlebury debate, by the way, already has a place on Wikipedia. Maybe that's the right place for high schools and colleges to begin as they hold their own forums on the learning opportunities of our moment, and the best ways to use new tools, critically, conscientiously, and creatively.

Cathy N. Davidson is interim director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and a professor of interdisciplinary studies and English at Duke University.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 29, Page B20