- Update your profile on Blogs@Baruch
- login, then rollover the “Welcome, your name” link on the top right
- click “Edit”
- Fill in as much as you can, including a profile picture
- Using the Wikipedia Doc in our course group on Blogs@Baruch, make an index of our class edits to Wikipedia. Each student must make at least one edit to an entry on a topic somehow related to the 2012 Presidential election. You can contribute to an article about Obama’s speech Thursday evening, other speeches given this week at the DNC, update an article that references last week’s RNC, or anything else you’d like within this realm. You then must list and link to your edits in our group document. Please let us know if you have any questions.
- Read Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History, “Owning the Past?”
- Note on reading and assignments: DO THEM.
- Citation and plagiarism
- Notes on formatting blog posts
THE BLOCK QUOTE: Banksy in polaroid est pour-over letterpress. Put a bird on it blog vegan reprehenderit. Fanny pack marfa leggings locavore next level +1. Craft beer typewriter twee messenger bag duis. Mixtape odd future ex farm-to-table pork belly, sriracha nostrud lomo flexitarian 3 wolf moon american apparel. Direct trade labore lo-fi fingerstache, umami sartorial vinyl fap chambray tempor pop-up master cleanse aute placeat cred. Qui high life mlkshk odd future cupidatat, artisan kogi seitan typewriter magna jean shorts.
- Titles!
- LEXICON:
- Review of edits to the document, historicize these ideas
- Assess process of joining group, creating lexicon doc
- Readings review — pull out main themes:
- William Cronon, “Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World,” Perspectives on History, February 2012.
- Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Journal of American History, Vol. 93, No. 1 (June, 2006): 117-46.
- What can we learn about authority, authenticity, voice, research, community, collaboration from the ways that wikipedia works? The ways in which it has been built? The power and pitfalls of crowdsourcing?
- Looking back to lexicon: what can we say about Wikipedia using our lexicon (from Cohen and Rosenzweig and as developed in Google doc)?
- Examine the way sources are cited/credited in Wikipedia
- Tools review
- Logistical questions?
- Twitter: look at #baruchdh
- Delicious: look at #baruchdh
- Reader: discuss?
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.
This is the first time that I have actually collaborated on an assignment with my classmates. I have heard of people using drop boxes and Cloud storage to edit files but I have never worked with it firsthand.
For my contribution to the assignment, I defined the word passivity in relations to Digital History. Before I started, I looked up the definition of passivity on Merriam-Webster but I realized that the definition would not suffice for the purpose of Digital History. I re-read the prior assignments and even though it mentioned passivity very briefly, I was able to infer the author’s definition of passivity. I did further research and found another definition of the word from North Carolina State University’s Wiki page and I incorporated their definition with my own.
For what it’s worth, this assignment frustrated me a great deal. I tried to edit the doc file but it was being edited by the same person for over 40 minutes. As a suggestion to anyone who reads this blog entry, if we end up doing another collaboration assignment, please, please have your contribution written out before you decide to edit the document. Once you have everything written out, just copy and paste everything in. Save it and let another person contribute.
In the BuddyPress.doc “Digital History Lexicon” document, we were asked by the professors to define terms associate with digital history. This was a new experience for me because this is the first time I was ever assign with a task to edit a document with my peers.
When I first visited the BuddyPress doc page, I saw a lot of the words has been fill out except for hypertextuality/ nonlinearity, so I decide define it, by rereading Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History, 2005, “Introduction,”. Next, I gave an example of hypertextuality by creating a link from that page to facebook.com. Following that I decide to add to inaccessibility because I felt like there’s could be said on that word.
I believe that using this tool for collaborative work has both negative and positive. The positive is that the different view people bring to the table. The diversity of people can bring a new perspective on an idea and issues or in this case, a definition of a word and the concept the author uses it in. The negative of this tool is that only one person is able to edit it at a time. It’s a negative because if everyone log on at the same time to edit the document, it would create long wait. Like traffic, no one likes to wait.
Overall, I find that editing the document with my fellow peers is an interesting and new experience.
When delving into the group edit assignment; I began to think about the credentials one needed to post an edit in the classes assignment. We have to log into a Baruch blogs account and be added to the sites user list. Now imagine if everyone on the Internet had access to our document. We would ideally like to think that these users interested in our assignment would provide us with helpful definitions and direction to our goal, but it’s naive to think that many people would not simply try to sabotage our assignment for a quick laugh at our expense.
A website like wikipedia requires less credentials than our Baruch blog to begin making changes on the site. All that is needed is an accessible email account; that’s it. The reason why a site like this can become and remain a source of quality and consistent information, is the utopian idea of a group working together for a common goal. Wikipedia has a large userbase that is committed to providing the Internet with a reliable open source enclyopedia. So in order to be successful in working on something that can be touched and accessed by so many people without checking credentials; is to have both a moderating staff and a dedicated group of users who are all working toward a similar goal.
In this case our class is looking to provide concise and correct definitions for our assignment. That is our common goal that we are working towards. Without a framework being provided for our assignment, I’m not sure how concise or correct we would be able to make a list of important key terms based on our reading.
Edited out some information and included pieces to Readability and Passivity.
The BuddyPress Doc lacks the ability to allow access and edits denying real-time interactivity and sharing of information.
However many basic functions are available to provide users with a tool with potential to create and grow upon itself.
In the document, I edited the terms Diversity and Manipulability. Using the text, I reread the reading to find where Cohen and Rosenzweig mentioned the terms. After reading, I wrote my own definition in the space, using the reading as a guideline.
For Manipulability, however, I decided to take it a step further by embedding the photo Cohen and Rosenzweig used in the reading as an example. By doing so, I feel like it brought the document to another level and the example could better illustrate my definition.
It was difficult to use the HMTL tool, however, as I had to find the image’s url by opening it up in another window on my browser and figuring out how to edit the caption, center the image where I wanted it in the document (it had originally be thrown to the top) and make sure it came up when I was done editing.
After reading the article written by Cohen and Rosenzweig, I decided to expand on the definition of the durability of the digital media. In particular, I wanted to bring everyone’s attention to the real problem that is developing in our modern society. At the same time as we are celebrating our technological achievements and the shift towards digital media across all specters of life, we as civilized society moving ever deeper into dangerous territory. And this danger lies in the fact that potentially some or all digital content including digital history could be lost instantaneously if measures are not taken to preserve it!
I am really glad that for this class we have such a useful tool as this blog where many users can contribute their ideas to the same project. I think, it is great that we can collaborate with each other. It will help us to get inspirations and allow us to expand our horizons on this subject. And, at the same time, our blog can create debates and express new ideas and opinions. There are famous words that come to mind: ’’The society is shaped by the ideas that are generated by the individual members of this society’’.
Recent Comments