2008 Entries and Abstracts
Katherine Arens
Germanic Studies
Texas Theory Wiki
We think of digital learning environments most often in reference to our youngest students, learning to access information, collaborate, produce, and disseminate knowledge using the web, SecondLife, MUDs, chatrooms, or other digital environments. Yet such environments are often almost completely absent in the humanities curricula beyond basic levels (excepting discussion forums or blogging). Advanced teaching is too often construed as mentorship or framed in a banking metaphor, suggesting that academic expertise must be hierarchical or "owned" as the source of individual prestige. This project fills this lacuna by modeling systematic approaches to advanced levels of humanities learning in the context of disciplines and disciplinary expertise -- for graduate students who need to take on identities as experts within disciplinary contexts.
Two prototype graduate courses (Fall, 2007) model alternate learning and teaching hierarchies through activities associated with the information design in a specialized Wiki site (Texas Theory Wiki ). The site reflects current US-based disciplinary and curricular interests in the study of languages and literatures, linguistics, history, and cultural studies, with some attention to rhetoric and composition studies. The multidimensional models for classroom practice designed for this project are constructed as "cognitive apprenticeships" that join facts, theories, and practice in the knowledge production associated with specific humanities disciplines.
For "Fundamentals of Scholarship (389)," the Theory Wiki becomes a site of exploration for the resources that define individuals as experts. An advanced graduate seminar, "Zizek and Kristeva Read Lacan (381)," surveys a highly technical area of contemporary theory. Here, the Wiki pools expertise among a group of 12 students from 7 different programs, to simulate the particular network orientation of those theories and how experts approach the interdisciplinarity inherent in its applications.
Guided by my new design for assignment sequences in this environment, learners approach various task-based writing and editorial projects using various personal, professional, and public resources that tie their work into international scholarship, organizations, and institutions of higher education. These tasks require learners to bridge generations of scholarship, disciplinary and interdisciplinary boundaries, and personal and professional requirements. That is, this site centers assignments that foster practice in paradigms of knowledge generation present in humanities scholarship today, from more traditional encyclopedia-type Wiki entries, to collaborative work on organizing, reorganizing, and supplementing traditional work environments, and into new media and information design modeling (including multi-media, and interdisciplinary connections).
Results gathered in exit interviews (course evaluations are not yet available) suggest that the Wiki has increased students' explicit and implicit learning about how disciplines manage knowledge production, enhanced their personal empowerment as "experts" while disenchanting the cult of professional expertise (e.g. by discovering and filling lacunae in Wikipedia or other professional resources, or by deploying their knowledge into forms for discrete audiences), and fostered a sense of research as a collaborative project in process. The Wiki options simulate knowledge and information networking that shows up the limits of disciplines in interdisciplinarity, as it fosters a more student-centered and democratic space as best practices strategies for humanities teaching and learning.