Monday, August 29, 2011

AN INTRODUCTION TO READING AND RESEARCHING IN WOMEN’S STUDIES

Thursday 1 September – Welcome to Our Course!
•    HANDED OUT: Syllabus, Learning Communities, How to Read (it’s not so obvious!), and Good Advice (all on website for download as well)
•    CLASS BUDDIES, CLASS WEBSITE
•    Zandt, Share: bring to this first class if at all possible. In fact bring all the books you have so far!
How our portal course is intended to help you conscientiously practice feminist scholarship and its related actions. Helping each other and practicing solidarity. Reading ahead, reading to discuss, reading for research, rereading for further work and to grasp complexity, reading in libraries, on the web, with electronic devices, with other people. Our workshops and planning assignments ahead of time. Inspection exercises with Zandt. Who is she?

Tuesday 6 September – Scholarship and Practice: portals in the plural
•    Zandt, preface, chaps 1-3
(note for Th: Zandt & Davis Conclusions too; read all of it for this class and you will be ahead for the whole week)
•    MORE CLASS BUDDIES, RESEARCH ACTIONS IN BOOKS AND ON THE WEB
Have you used the Wikipedia? How and why? Have you ever been told NOT to use the Wikipedia? Why was that? What is crowdsourcing, and what are the limitations and powers of the Wikipedia? How does Zandt’s book help us think about the Wikipedia in a social media landscape? Why does that matter? 


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change.org on women not editors on the Wikipedia 

• BBC World Service's Lesley Curwen from Business Daily interviews Sue Gardner, executive director of Wikipedia. They discuss recruiting women to write for the Wikipedia.

Recent article in the NY Times says

"Jane Margolis, co-author of a book on sexism in computer science, 'Unlocking the Clubhouse,' argues that Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems of the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. “In almost every space, who are the authorities, the politicians, writers for op-ed pages?” said Ms. Margolis, a senior researcher at the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles

"According to the OpEd Project, an organization based in New York that monitors the gender breakdown of contributors to “public thought-leadership forums,” a participation rate of roughly 85-to-15 percent, men to women, is common — whether members of Congress, or writers on The New York Times and Washington Post Op-Ed pages.

"It would seem to be an irony that Wikipedia, where the amateur contributor is celebrated, is experiencing the same problem as forums that require expertise. But Catherine Orenstein, the founder and director of the OpEd Project, said many women lacked the confidence to put forth their views. “When you are a minority voice, you begin to doubt your own competencies,” she said."

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 Sharing is Daring!




Thursday 8 September – Starting slow then getting intense: how to share the difficulties
• Bring all our books so we can inspect them together
Zandt & Davis: read each book’s conclusion 
• MORE BUDDIES, READING SIMULTANEOUSLY, KEEPING RECORDS
This portal course will be intense! We will start somewhat slowly, offering lots of “how to do” important things. But as we get closer to each workshop date, the readings and the projects will start to pile up. So planning ahead will be crucial! And you will need to be reading, reReading, and reading ahead, all at the same time! Keeping records of what needs to be done, and what you have done, and where you got what sort of information, all these are part of good scholarly practice. Fie on cutting and pasting last minute off the Web! Let’s learn to DO IT RIGHT! and enjoy it! Helping each other will make it a lot more fun.

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