HEIMAN & BARTON

Focus on using Wikis in an ethical and meaningful way.
Goal: using Critical Discourse Analaysis (CDA) to better understand how to use Wikis in the classroom and workplace. They identified and explored ideological struggle in the creation of Wikis.

Open with discussion of Wikis, knowledge experts, and how experts or elites can potentially silence new users or participants. Make point that we need to be careful to not replicate ideology when we integrate new technologies and tools. Also focuses on important/role that Critical Pedagogy can bring to TC.

They used CDA to analyze artifacts. Artifacts were drawn from Wikipedia and Wikibooks. Presenters wanted to look at power relations and what tools are present to manifest that power within Wikipedia.

They assert that Wikipedia is not messy enough to be really democratic--it's pretty clean and well-organized.

Presenter reviews different power aspects:
what is vandalism of pages--present different examples;
use of vocabulary of academic tone to intimidate;
creation of different wiki editor profile pages to assert authority and ethos;
online profiles.

What were your takeaways from the session?

Do you think any of the presentations should be turned into an article?

What did I miss?