Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 10, 2010, 09:50 AM

I'm intrigued that celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy was accused of "using Wikipedia" for his shoddy research and defended himself by saying "My source of information is books, not Wikipedia."   The book he read is a famous hoax, an account of the thoughts of famous Paraguayan named Jean-Baptiste Botul whose thought, of course, is "Botulism." Levy fell for the hoax, perpetrated byjournalist Frdric Pags:  Weve had a big laugh, obviously, Mr. Pags said of Mr. Lvy. This one was an error that was really simple that the media immediately understood.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Sep 18, 2009, 07:47 AM

HASTAC has adopted a motto (thanks again, Steve Burnett!) of "Learning the Future Together." As a historian of technology, I believe that you learn the future together by being deeply informed about the past before you shoot off your mouth about the glories that went before, the disaster we're in now, and the catastrophe looming ahead. Maybe, maybe not. What this interview reminds us is that we're by no means the first people to encounter technological change nor the first to be convinced the younger generation is going to the dogs. Those insights alone should remind us to see what is and what we can do with it rather than wring our hands about that which is no longer relevant, available, or inspiring to the world we live in now.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Sep 02, 2009, 09:45 AM

The form of a Wikipedia contribution is quite exacting . . . but what counts as "exacting" is culturally determined. This is the beginning not the end of a discussion of gender and knowledge. I'd love to hear what others think about this study of Wikipedia contribution and use as well as about the larger issues.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jul 14, 2009, 10:02 AM

My conversational tour with Information Age visionaries continues today at Wikimedia Foundation, with co-founder Jimmy Wales. At its beginning, even Wales didn't think Wikipedia would amount to much. No one, not even the most radical science fiction writer, would have conceived, even five years ago, that volunteers worldwide, without remuneration, would create the biggest, most remarkable encyclopedia in human history.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jul 05, 2009, 08:06 PM
"What if you could combine Wikipedia?s collaborative production strategy with the peer-review standards of a respected academic journal?"  This is the question that Professor Susan Brown, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and at Guelph University, asks in a new grant of over a million dollars funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation's Leading Edge Fund.  The grant supports the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, the logical follow-on to the groundbreaking Orlando Project.   Scholarship 2.0.   This is the next big idea and Professor Brown and her team are the people most likely to make it happen.  Congratulations, Susan!

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jun 24, 2009, 11:20 AM

Over on Facebook, I'm engaged in a very interesting conversation sparked by Siva Vaidhyanathan's posting of this excellent expose in VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW of all the passages in Chris Anderson's new book FREE that were taken all too freely from other people, mainly Wikipedia, mistakes and all, without fact checking, and without attribution. Bad, bad, bad . . . Inexcusable. Not acceptable. Intellectually lazy. Reprehensible.

 

And yet . . .

 

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on May 21, 2009, 11:07 PM
Wikimedia Foundation announces important licensing change for Wikipedia and its sister projects

Adoption of Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License will support greater interoperability and re-usability of Wikimedia content. The current GNU Free Documentation License will continue to be supported.

May 21, 2009

Submitted by Alexa Garvoille on Apr 06, 2009, 11:04 AM
After editing Wikipedia pages with grad colleagues at Duke and simultaneously student teaching in Durham Public Schools, I've combined the two in this paper for the AACE-EDMEDIA conference. Abstract: In response to current anxieties over students? ability to critically evaluate internet-based sources, we propose a secondary curriculum that uses Wikipedia as a platform to pose questions about information verifiability, ethical use of technology, and the democratic role of internet-users.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 17, 2009, 08:04 AM

How did English become such a grumpy profession? And what is the epistemological framework that accounts for "critique" having a higher value on the intellectual hierarchy than "formulation"? There are so many things in the world worth critiquing. No one questions that. But there is also much to contribute, and especially now, where so many forms of public knowledge are truly open, accessible, and available to anyone who can sign-in to the public terminal at the local library. Making knowledge public is easy now. Why isn't sharing the knowledge of our profession--including its standards of credibility and citation--something we teach in every course and require of everyone entering the profession?

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 04, 2009, 11:01 AM
People often ask me why I don't "take on" those "dumbest generation" and "coming of the dark ages" types who make silly generalizations supported by sloppy logic and bad history about how technology (what is "technology" exactly?) is throwing us to the dogs. I don't have time! This era is far too exciting as a time of learning to be whining about what no longer exists. More constructively, I herewith post the syllabus for the other course I'm teaching this term, as I leave my leave and return to the classroom after a decade as an administrator. I posted the syllabus for "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" earlier (http://www.hastac.org/node/1832). This is for a highly "traditional" English class, a graduate course on "The Early American Novel and Other Fictions." As you will see, it could also be subtitled "This Is Your Brain on the Internet."