In the case of our brave little RAP, it isn’t quite the case that students were told to leave source material unchanged – in fact, the process of collectively ‘marking up’ source text, in a public forum, was very much at the heart of the class. If you look at John Clare’s maudlin poem ‘I Am’ in RAP, for example, what’s most interesting about it? I’d say it’s that the isolation claimed by the speaker (“I am the self-consumer of my woes…”) is complicated, to say the least, by students linking in & out of the text (graphically evident by words troubled into hyperlinks, and little boxes connoting anchored linkbacks from elsewhere in RAP).

Is this marked-up version of Clare’s poem instructional in & of itself? Well, sure – click into some of the student’s linked thoughts, you’ll learn a thing or two (if only about the caliber of undergraduate writing at Bowdoin). But what’s most important is the process that all this marking up suggests. Source text is not inviolable, not fixed. It is dependent on collaborative production, open to disruptive interpretation. Student decisions transform text. It’s all about process.

Can all this be shoved towards terms that line up with the Manovich essay (which I agree is a stimulating read)? In loftier moments, RAP might hope to have connected a ‘database’ of source text with the narrative of what happened to this text in this class, ending up as a “catalogue of discoveries being made.” Kaufman’s description of an avante-garde film near the end of the essay isn’t so different from the experience this wiki archives:

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An ordinary person finds himself in some sort of environment, gets lost amidst the zillions of phenomena, and observes these phenomena from a bad vantage point…. But the man with a movie camera is infused with the particular thought that he is actually seeing the world for other people…. He joins these phenomena with others, from elsewhere, which many not even have been filmed by him. Like a kind of scholar he is able to gather empirical observations in one place and then in another. And that is actually the way in which the world has come to be understood.

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Be this as it may, to approach a class wiki from the outside is to deduce process – to understand the way in which the world has come to be understood by the makers of that particular project. That ain’t easy – especially if we can’t see valuable meta-info about instructions, versions, revisions. But to look closely at even just the public side of class wikis is often to appreciate, I think, just how much of a pedagogical process this tool can capture.

As for that ‘collaboration index’ – a most welcome refinement. If this taxonomy is to develop into something beyond a broad and introductory gesture, many more such refinements will be necessary.

I have also been reading Manovich a bit more closely for another class, and his discussion of Database vs Narrative (linked to in the post) is very insightful and shouldn’t be missed.

For educational purposes, I think that the process can be equally important. Wikis are a natural fit for developing writing process; editing, revising, collaborating, etc. The meta information about revisions and discussions, which is built into the Wiki, can be a powerful tool for teaching and learning.