“Definitions” Assignment
I decided that the best way for me to contribute was adding to a definition with the least written about it. “Passivity” had only one sentence in its definition so adding more information would be most beneficial to the class.
I started by re-reading everything I could find about Passivity in the articles assigned to us. The authors Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig of Digital History, 2005, “Introduction,” and “Exploring the History Web,” presented Passivity as a danger to digital history, but their tone and arguments didn’t convince me of the danger. In fact, I didn’t know whether they truly believed it was dangerous.
I made a note of that in my definition because most of the class used the authors’ words as a primary source for their contributions. That makes Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s positions on each of the qualities, that make digital media better/worse, very important.
I didn’t find BudyPress difficult to use, perhaps because I edited the document later than everybody else.
Thanks for this post, Anton. Your justification for starting with “passivity” is a sound one. This is a simple but important factor that historians working in all fields should take into account when choosing a starting point.
Regarding Cohen and Rosenzweig’s concerns about the dangers of passivity: can you think of a current example of students of history (either formal students or interested members of the public) interacting with historical information only as consumers and not producers? Despite tools that are making it much easier for people to contribute historical production, and engage with the process of better understanding the past, what percentage of people take part (take Wikipedia for example)? These are questions we will continue to explore during the course.