Discussion Board Week 2 How is Knowledge Created?
Laura Sanders
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How is Knowledge Created?
DIGITAL ARCHIVE PROJECT (LONG POST ON DISCUSSION BOARD)
250 to 500 words
Purpose
Where does academic evidence come from? (Spoiler: Not a silver platter from the sky.)
Universities do not create a "product" or make "profits" in the way that for-profit enterprises do in our culture. Colleges and universities exist to create knowledge and to ensure that students will continue to create new knowledge once they graduate.
In many college courses, instructors will expect you to support your claims and points using "credible academic sources." These articles and books often are found in professional journals, not magazines we can buy at the grocery store or easily access through a very brief Google search.
This week, we continue the theme of interrogating the concept of knowledge and how it is created.
How is scholarship created? Under what conditions?
Topic
For this assignment, I am asking you to spend three hours total getting set up and working on a digital archive crowd-source project. These tend to be set up for pure novices, easy to complete, and incredibly cool.
Spend 3 hours total selecting and participating in a crowd-sourced project.
1) Locate the project you will work on. Feel free to stop any project you do not enjoy and start a new one. Aim for 3 hours total on this work.
Please know I want you to enjoy this experience. If you hate the topic or the site, you should stop immediately and find another site to gain this experience. There are loads of them, waiting for volunteers to help on a project.
In many cases, these projects involve transcribing PDFs, so that the material can be searchable by scholars, accessible for people with disabilities, and useful for the public good.
You might tag photos for a scientific project (to help researchers code data).
You might help with other cool projects.
You may want to start clicking through some options here and getting a feel for how these projects work. Google away!
Code baby sounds (Links to an external site.) for language researchers.
Tag photos of wild animals (Links to an external site.) in a private reserve near South Africa.
The Citizen Archivist Projects (Links to an external site.) site of the National Archives also offers wonderful projects for volunteers, but the system is a little less intuitive than the Zooniverse site (Links to an external site.).
2) Then I want you to write about this experience. Post directly on the discussion board (do not attach a doc to a post). Address these questions.
What side did you select? What service did you provide? For what groups?
Who might use the data you created? How? Why?
What was good, bad, and/or surprising?
What did you learn about yourself, scholarship, and our cultural ideas about work?
How is knowledge created? How can various types of scholarship help people?
Does this exercise impact how you view academic (vs. popular) sources?
How was this experience different than listening to a lecture or reading a textbook?
Would you do it again? Would you tell others to do it?
Other Questions You May Want to Include
Why do you think people do this work for free? What motivates them?
What is this work unpaid? What might be different if this work were paid?
What are the deeper symbols of working for pay? What does our society value?
Does this activity help you understand more about academic research?
Do you see that creating knowledge can require human interpretation?
How might seeing "behind the curtain" impact your process when you are looking for sources for your research papers in future classes?
Your post should describe how the crowd source project works, describe your personal experience (what tasks you completed and what it felt like to complete them), and how this activity impacted your understanding of how knowledge is created.
Samples from previous classes are available in this module.
Assessment criteria can be found in the rubric.