User:Gunitag/Homework/argue

The Comment

From: (name redacted)
To: me

Hi Gunitag, I am one of the admins on UBC Wiki. It seems you are creating a lot of pages that should probably moved to either a course namepace [sic], sandbox or your own user space. Please review the UBC Wiki Organization structure guidelines.

http://wiki.ubc.ca/Help:Organization

The Response

From: (name redacted)
To: (names redacted)

Dear (so and so),

One of my students, Gunita Gupta, is completing a project using the UBC wiki. This project is a multi genre, networked piece that includes scholarly components and components that are more creative in an attempt to demonstrate, inter alia, the intersection of private and public, scholarly and "non-scholarly," and to challenge hegemonic forms of discourse in higher education such as the standard academic essay. Gunita has just received a message (below) suggesting that her content is inappropriately placed and that she should review the UBC wiki guidelines.

Gunita, a brilliant thinker, reviewed with me those guidelines before she began to create this project. I provided her with a history of wiki use at UBC, from the early days (2003) when a very few of us were pioneering the use of these systems in teaching. Perhaps you are aware that former OLT staff member Brian Lamb, whose responsibility included social media platforms at UBC, has written about UBC's pioneering efforts and the affordances of wikis in higher education. He observes, "In many respects, the wide-open ethic of wikis contrasts vividly with the traditional approaches of standard groupware and collaborative systems. Access restrictions, rigidly defined workflows, and structures are anathema to most wiki developers. What’s unique about wikis is that users define for themselves how their processes and groups will develop, usually by making things up as they go along" (Lamb, 2004, np). Referring to the diverse uses of the wiki in the early days of social media at UBC, he continues as follows: "What is most remarkable about these diverse outcomes is how they came about. In all instances, the users decided for themselves how the wiki would fulfill their objectives . . . . The structure of wikis is shaped from within—not imposed from above. Users do not have to adapt their practice to the dictates of a system but can allow their practice to define the structure" (Lamb, 2004, np).

Thinking of the conversations I had with Brian and Jeff Miller (both in OLT at the time), what I remember most is the heady sense of excitement and opportunity in relation to the anarchistic nature or "wide-open ethic" of wikis. So promising was the rhetoric that I began a range of collaborative creative writing projects with students and colleagues using UBC wiki spaces; these projects in short order became the subject of international attention in the field of literacy education (Dobson and Vratulis, 2009; Vratulis and Dobson, 2008; Dobson, 2007; Dobson, 2006; Luce-Kapler, Dobson, Sumar, Iftody and Davis, 2006; Luce-Kapler and Dobson, 2005). The work is still cited today: in fact, only last month internationally renowned literacy scholar Richard Beach highlighted it as an example of innovative practice in his Presidential Address to the Literacy Research Association, one of the premier North American literacy conferences in the world (Beach, 2013). Unfortunately, those important historical artifacts -- the early wiki creative writing projects that comprised the data for the above publications -- are gone because the servers were decommissioned without any measures in place for preservation.

I have been grateful through the years for the outstanding work of my colleagues in CTLC/OLT. Over time, however, I have had the sense that social media implementation -- and technology implementation generally -- at UBC is becoming increasingly bureaucratic, template driven, and rule bound. Our wiki platform for the last few years has been MediaWiki. I was dismayed to read the following statement when I looked closely at the guidelines with Gunita: "The root, or mainspace, of the wiki is primarily a shared community space and articles in this section should be encyclopedic in nature, appeal to a broad audience, and be reflective of UBC." This is a stunningly myopic perspective. Are we truly supporting the notion that only encyclopaedic writing forms that appeal to a broad audience are reflective of UBC? If the project is to reproduce Wikipedia at UBC then we should do away with UBC Wiki altogether and send our students to Wikipedia (e.g., Jon Beasley-Murray, http://flexible.learning.ubc.ca/showcase/teaching-with-wikipedia/ ).

In my estimation Gunita's work IS representative of UBC and deserves to be housed wherever she chooses to put it on the UBC Wiki. Perhaps you can direct me to individuals who can speak to my concerns.

Best regards, (name redacted)

References

Beach, R. (2013). Understanding and Creating Digital Texts Through Social Practices. Presidential Address. Literacy Researchers Association Conference, Dallas, Texas, 4-7 December 2013. Slides available: http://www.slideshare.net/rwbeach

Dobson, T.M. and Vratulis, V. (2009). Interrupting Processes of Inquiry: Teaching and Learning with Social Media in Higher Education. Digital Studies / Le Champ Numerique, 1(2). Available: http://www.digitalstudies.org

Vratulis, V. & Dobson, T.M. (2008). Social negotiations in a Wiki environment: A case study with pre-service teachers. Educational Media International, 45(4), 285-294.

Dobson, T.M. (2007) In medias res: Reading, writing, and the digital artifact. Journal of E-Learning, 3(7), 266-272.

Dobson, T.M. (2006). For the love of a good narrative: Digitality and textuality. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 5(2), 56-68. Available: http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/journal/index.php?id=1

Lamb, B. (2004). Wide open spaces: Wikis, ready or not. EDUCAUSE review, 39, 36-49.

Luce-Kapler, R., Dobson, T., Sumara, D., Iftody, T. & Davis, B. (2006). E-Literature and the digital engagement of consciousness. In James Hoffman, Diane Schallert, Colleen Fairbanks, Jo Worthy, and Beth Maloch (Eds.), 55th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, 171-181.

Luce-Kapler, R., & Dobson, T.M. (2005). In search of a story: Reading and writing e-literature. Reading Online, 8(6), np. Available:http://www.readingonline.org/

The Next Response

From: (name redacted)
To: me

Thank you for copying me on your email to Simon regarding Gunita’s project work on the UBC wiki. Simon has asked me to follow-up with you directly and I will do so here, though I would also like to suggest that we set up a meeting with you and Gunita, and include one of my colleagues from CTLT, Will Engle, who has a lot of good background on the current state of the wiki and who spent some time as a wiki gardener working on the UBC wiki.

I appreciate the points that you’ve raised below concerning the manner in which the affordances of the wiki should be available to provide support for academic and creative writing by students and faculty. As you know, many of my own projects and teaching activities have specifically worked to leverage the wiki and other social media spaces for just such purposes.

In the last 5 years, we have seen an explosion of activity on the UBC wiki, and that has prompted an evolution of the Wiki’s architecture to help keep things organized (or to organize those areas of the wiki where appropriate as distinct from other areas where there is no such effort made). The key issue that relates to the current request to move some of Gunita’s work is the organization of the wiki into several Namespaces. This move happened in 2009 as a response to the large number of diverse projects and uses that UBC faculty, students and staff were authoring on the wiki, ranging from groups such as the Library who use the wiki for resource development and documentation, to instructors and students who use the wiki to support course-focused activities and assignments, to users who use the wiki for any number of academic, research or personal purposes. Scott MacMillan sent a link to a page that provides more information on the name spaces in his original message: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Help:Organization. The goal of this organizational strategy is not to be restrictive but to help ensure specific projects can flourish by trying to balance the inherent tension between openness and purpose in a community-wide, highly used space. The goal of the Namespace organizational schema is not to recreate wikipedia but to support different users, different purposes and to provide context for individual wiki pages.

One of the risks of publishing the kind of creative material that Gunita has authored, uncontextualized, in the main wiki space, is that anyone can revise it or redirect how the page is used. A project page that doesn't provide context may soon be rewritten or re-purposed by others who are using the Wiki. Two other name spaces have been defined to loosely structure pages that are connected to courses (which, by the by, is where the ETEC540 pages we’ve used typically live), and the Sandbox, which is intended as an experimentation space. As well, each user has, in effect, their own area where any number of pages can be set-up and controlled as determined by the author, as subpages connected to their username. For these latter spaces, there is no attempt to define or constrain what is authored nor direct how the wiki is used, nor are such pages tended by any wiki gardeners (a role that we have experimented with on the Main namespace).

Depending on what Gunita’s goals are, and I would be interested in hearing more from her about these, it is possible that the Sandbox Namespace would be a good place for her pages. Or, she could contextualize her pages in relation to her own Username. There is information on how to do that here: http://wiki.ubc.ca/Help:User_page Both Sandbox and Username spaces are open for any kind of experimentation, but also, people are less likely to go into those pages and make revisions or repurpose the page unless they are connected to the project or are collaborating with the author of the pages. If Gunita is interested in having her written pieces endure, we'd be happy to help explore the best options so that she can define what authorship should look like in the space, and determine how the pages she has authored work as individual nodes or as a larger collection of interlinked pages.

In any case, I would be happy to meet with you and Gunita to respond to your concerns and to ensure that Gunita has the kind of space that she needs to support her work. If you could let me know some potential times you have to meet in the coming week or two, I will work to set up a meeting.

Best regards,

(name redacted)

And So On

Dear (so and so),

Thanks for your message. Gunita is in an intensive part of her program right now and has declined the invitation to meet. She has now restructured her materials in her user namespace.

I am aware of the history of wiki implementation at UBC; indeed, I lived through that history as an early adopter of the technology on this campus. As I noted in my first message, Gunita and I reviewed the guidelines to which Scott, and now you, have pointed us before she undertook the project. I maintained that anything she produced in the context of her studies at this institution would be reflective of UBC because she is a UBC scholar. We were also well aware that her content may have been modified or repurposed where it originally sat -- this was part of the experiment she hoped to undertake. I maintain that she rightly understood the wiki to be a wide-open, anarchistic writing environment -- one defined by users, not administrators -- along the lines of what our former colleague has described in the article I cited in my last message (Lamb, 2004).

All this said, I suppose my primary concern is twofold:

1) The process of "gardening" in this case tempered a student's enthusiasm for her project. I directed Gunita to the wiki in part because she was concerned about restrictive institutional structures and standards, and wanted to undertake a more authentic examination of the interplay between scholarly/non-scholarly forms, public/private, etc. The unfortunate, ironic, result was that her playful work elicited in short order a restrictive institutional communication. 2) The rhetoric defining the Main Space presently is close-minded and too vague to be of use. What message are we sending through statements that imply that only particular genres and content with broad appeal is reflective of UBC? (E.g., "The root, or mainspace, of the wiki is primarily a shared community space and articles in this section should be encyclopedic in nature, appeal to a broad audience, and be reflective of UBC.")

Again, as I noted in my last message, I have appreciated the work of my colleagues in OLT/CTLT in developing social media platforms for use in teaching and learning through the last decade or more. I hope, however, in the interest of truly flexible learning, that there will be some revisitation of how CTLT communicates the purpose of the different name spaces on UBC Wiki.

Best regards,

(you know who)

ps. Briefly, because I'm sure we're all busy and ultimately I doubt this rhetorical exercise will effect change, I should have noted a third concern: evidently the whole project of challenging institutional boundaries between public and private, scholarly and non-scholarly is thwarted by a hierarchical organizational schema such as the one described, particularly with "gardeners" ensuring items are contained and in place.

In any case, all this is interesting food for thought for our research seminar. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

And So Forth

Hi (you know who),

Thank you for this and your previous message. You raise some important points here, and I know that I come away from this with some food for thought particularly about how best to consider the role of a gardener within a site like the wiki where there is such a mixture of users and project contexts. That is something I will take up with some of my colleagues, along with how we are describing and supporting people’s use of the namespaces within the server.

I do want to assure you that the evolution of the social media platforms that CTLT manages has been largely driven by feedback and direction from many people across the UBC community including faculty and students who have different ideas/interests concerning how they want to use these tools and spaces. Your feedback and critique are valuable, and I’m particularly keen to respond to it in such as way to ensure that the wiki does not thwart creative or critical work of anyone at the university.

As I early suggested, I would be happy to facilitate a meeting with some of the people that are directly involved in the set-up/development of the wiki. The kinds of challenges you’ve identified here in terms of institutional boundaries are ones that need to be engaged so as to help ensure that any social media spaces, or indeed other spaces at UBC, too, are supportive of the community’s needs.

We can organize this according to what best meets your schedule/availability.

Best, (so and so)