6 research outputs found
Thinking Deeply, Creating Richly: Learner Transformation Through Narrative
Narrative methods support transformative teaching and learning by accessing human cognitive strengths, including memory, reflection, and self-awareness. This paper explores the enduring and mindful use of narrative in education – as a method for transformative teaching and learning. A narrative is the intentional conversion of a group of events, participants, and details into a constructed reality that illustrates causes, characters, and results. Narrative development is a native human process by which we teach, learn, and remember. Narrative educational methods incorporate two key characteristics: integrative sense making, and shared connection building. Diverse disciplines – including biology, psychology, economics, literature, medicine, history, and education – have explored narrative as a foundational component of our human capacities, relationships, and achievements. Exploring the uses and misuses of narrative offers insight for teachers and learners of all ages. The paper closes with a discussion of the role this investigation is having in my personal and professional development
Taboo and Collaborative Knowledge Production: Evidence from Wikipedia
By definition, people are reticent or even unwilling to talk about taboo
subjects. Because subjects like sexuality, health, and violence are taboo in
most cultures, important information on each of these subjects can be difficult
to obtain. Are peer produced knowledge bases like Wikipedia a promising
approach for providing people with information on taboo subjects? With its
reliance on volunteers who might also be averse to taboo, can the peer
production model produce high-quality information on taboo subjects? In this
paper, we seek to understand the role of taboo in knowledge bases produced by
volunteers. We do so by developing a novel computational approach to identify
taboo subjects and by using this method to identify a set of articles on taboo
subjects in English Wikipedia. We find that articles on taboo subjects are more
popular than non-taboo articles and that they are frequently vandalized.
Despite frequent vandalism attacks, we also find that taboo articles are higher
quality than non-taboo articles. We hypothesize that stigmatizing societal
attitudes will lead contributors to taboo subjects to seek to be less
identifiable. Although our results are consistent with this proposal in several
ways, we surprisingly find that contributors make themselves more identifiable
in others
Are anonymity-seekers just like everybody else? An analysis of contributions to Wikipedia from Tor
User-generated content sites routinely block contributions from users of
privacy-enhancing proxies like Tor because of a perception that proxies are a
source of vandalism, spam, and abuse. Although these blocks might be effective,
collateral damage in the form of unrealized valuable contributions from
anonymity seekers is invisible. One of the largest and most important
user-generated content sites, Wikipedia, has attempted to block contributions
from Tor users since as early as 2005. We demonstrate that these blocks have
been imperfect and that thousands of attempts to edit on Wikipedia through Tor
have been successful. We draw upon several data sources and analytical
techniques to measure and describe the history of Tor editing on Wikipedia over
time and to compare contributions from Tor users to those from other groups of
Wikipedia users. Our analysis suggests that although Tor users who slip through
Wikipedia's ban contribute content that is more likely to be reverted and to
revert others, their contributions are otherwise similar in quality to those
from other unregistered participants and to the initial contributions of
registered users.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, May 202