# Syllabus: a new media object for collective knowledge production

(or: Collaborative Syllabi Infrastruture: A study and pilot for a new media object)

# Research questions or problems

In a world were social inequalities are on the rise, it is hard to achieve the goal of providing innovative, inclusive and engaging educational processes accessible to all. A whole range of obstacles stand in the way of imagining pedagogical infrastructures beyond the traditional institutions of education and academia, which in many contexts have been recognised as being institutions 'in crisis', due to a combination of cuts to public funds and privatizations. The challenge of imagining new pedagogical infrastructures for our times is becoming even more acute following the global impact of the CoV SARS 2 epidemic, which has profoundly altered the rythms and modes of learning, studying, researching togher across physical distance.

While technology is widely recognised as an essential pedagogical infrastructure, shaiping the way in which we read, write, learn and organize, previous attempts to think about free and scalable digital tool, such as the MOOCs (massive open online courses), have been shown as replicating existing biases and patterns of exclusion. Other attempts to to promote open access within academia have been met by much resistance by major publishing conglomerates (such as Elzevier, for instance), which might lead to proprietary deadlocks impeding a wide and diverse access to knowledge.

We imagine it is possible to address this multi-layered crisis in educational provisions by bringing critical pedagogy and autonomous technology together. In order to do that we believe it is imprtant to meet and organize the learning together with the social movements using the tools and workflows coming from the autonomous tech communities. The context in which we see this synergy as possible is the context of collaborative development of the syllabi.

This research project wants to investigate the role of the 'online syllabus' as an emergent new media object across two interrelated contexts and sets of challenges: one pertaining to the evolution of popular and grassroots education and the second inherent to the transformation of academia.

These two realms are where the online syllabus has increaseangly become a key tool in the processes of knowledge production and dissemination, as educators are, sometimes formally - but much more often informally, sharing resources for teaching and reading lists, or asking for and offering pedagogical advises on social media networks.

In the context of popular and grassroots education, a recent trend exploded online since 2014 involving the crowdsourced production of hashtag syllabi in response to significant moments of civic mobilizations (notable examples include \#FergusonSyllabus or \#StandingRockSyllabus). In the context of formal education, the growing importance of online syllabi is linked with the increase demand of hybrid modes of teaching and learning; current trends in separation of careers between teaching and research; and the horizon of decreasing investments in critical arts and humanities subjects.

The project aims are articulated through four phases. The first is going to comprise a gathring with activists and educators that have been experimenting with online syllabi, to reveal elements of good practice that we will be able to build upon; the second is an archival and historical research; the second one will involve the development of an ad hoc free software tool and a workflow to support the creation, sharing and remixing of collaborative online syllabi; and the third will activate the online syllabi through a series of pilot events organised with partner organizations (both within and from outside academia).

The fields such as media theory, STS, critical pedagogy knew the tech is never enough on its own. Experiments like MOOC proved that.

(-end)

The importance of developing toosl that allow educators and learners to qucikly share and re-adapt relevant syllabi is especially felt in subject matters situated within the humanities, such as critical theory, political philosophy, cultural studies and visual cultures, cultural geography, area studies, social history, human rights and critical legal studies, post-colonial studies, anthropology, and socially engaged arts. Across these diverse areas of study, indeed, there is often crucial a specific need for these educators to update and revisit their teaching materials often, not only in relation to the most recent findings in their respective disciplines, but also, crucially, to be able to offer relevant resources for the learners to respond to current social and political events, events that can happen fast and deeply impact the learning communities in their specific local contexts.
In this sense, the online sharing of syllabi also functions as a bridge between academia and activism eduction. In fact, educators relating to the above disciplines often are queally active in processes of civic education, articulating their practices between informal and formal educational setting, in order to achieve wide social benefits and reach diverse constituencies.

- Theorise and historically contextualise the emergence of the online
syllabus.
- *Research questions:* when and where the migration of syllabi online begun to take place? In which social contexts? To meet whose and which demands? What are the continuities with prior sharing and archiving activities of offline syllabi? What are the discontinuities and novelties introduced by the online environment? What are the current limitations in the predominant practices of creating, utilising, and archiving syllabi online?

- Develop an ad hoc free software tool and a workflow to support the creation, sharing and remixing of collaborative online syllabi.
- *Research questions:* How does the technological infrastructure impact the functionality and accessibility of online syllabi? To what extend educators (both in informal education settings and academic contexts) have access to different tools for creating and maintaining their online syllabi? What could a state-of-the-art, inclusive and easy to use free software tool look like to produce, share and maintain such materials with a degree of autonomy from corporate software solutions (not available to many)?

- Test and promote the benefits of easily accessible and usable collaborative online syllabi via a number of activation workshops and events with partner organizations.

- *Research questions:* What skills and support would be necessary in order to encourage best practices around an open access approach to the online syllabus? Would the development of a collaborative workflow aid to achieve standards of rigour and transparency that can grow the user's base over time?In which ways educators can use collaborative online syllabi (which are open, re-mixable and properly archived) as a resource for achieving wider social benefits, such as:
- decolonising the curriculum and identifying / addressing other biases in the repertoire of sources;
- activating historical materials / making information more available to new audiences who may not be able to access university education;
- enabling educators to gain greater insight into the topics they are
teaching (particularly those outside their specialism)?

# Research context

In August 2014, the killing of Michael Brown by a police office in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent protests of black American citizens that followed, prompted Dr. Marcia Chatelain (Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University) to launch an online call for educators and scholars to assemble texts and other teaching materials that could be used to reflect on the unfolding situation and learn about the histories of institutional racism in the US. Her call went viral on social media and before long the crowdsourced \#FergusonSyllabus was trending across twitter and other platforms. Since then, online syllabi collectively generated in response to a range of social and political issues have been proliferating. A partial survey would include: *TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism, Trump 101 and Trump Syllabus 2.0, \#StandingRockSyllabus, All Monuments Must Fall Syllabus, \#Blkwomensyllabus, \#BLMSyllabus, \#BlackIslamSyllabus, \#CharlestonSyllabus, \#ColinKaepernickSyllabus, \#ImmigrationSyllabus, Puerto Rico Syllabus (\#PRSyllabus), \#SayHerNameSyllabus, Syllabus for White People to Educate Themselves, Syllabus: Women and Gender Non-conforming People Writing about Tech, \#WakandaSyllabus, What To Do Instead of Calling the Police. A Guide, A Syllabus, A Conversation, A Process, \#YourBaltimoreSyllabus,* and many more.

At the same time, universities have also been moving their syllabi online. In Texas, for example, a legislation introduced in 2009 made it compulsory for state universities to post all course syllabi on their websites and no more than \'three clicks away\' from their home page (Ramsey & McChaughey, 2012). This process is complemented by the fact that discussing syllabi online, asking peers for suggestions over social networks and sharing them online has become a frequent practice among academics themselves. In this context, the online syllabi has also raised debates, both over the ownership of these materials (does it lie with the teacher or the institution?) and over the ownership of the tools used for their digitalisation. Major commercial academic publishers becoming more and more interested in developing systems that capture the entire workflow of knowledge production, from teaching and learning to research and publishing. For example, Elsevier's \'research intelligence\' offering now encompases the Scopus citation database; Mendeley reference manager; the research performance analytics tools SciVal and Research Metrics; the centralised research management system Pure; the institutional repository and publishing platform bepress; and the grant discovery and funding flow tools Funding Institutional and Elsevier Funding Solutions. Given how central digital services are becoming in today\'s universities, whoever owns these platforms increasingly *is* the university, a monopolist tendency that has been raising many debates over governance, access and allocation of resources.

Uniting these two distinct ambits in which the online syllabus operates as a new and relational document within the living field of knowledge.

# Research methods

The project comprises of four distinct and interrelated research activities, each comprising its own specific research methodologies:

Symposium and

## HISTORIES AND GENEALOGIES

### Research Questions

What are the genealogies and predecessors of the online syllabus? What other form of documentations and teaching materials used to be assembled and activated within popular pedagogy and grassroots education prior to the digital age? And how did this document evolve to become a standard within academia in its present form? Where there processes that sustained a collective inputing into these resources? How were they circulated, preserved, update and made public? What can be learned in terms of best practices that could be applied to our current post-digital condition?

### Lead Investigator: Valeria Graziano

### Activities

- Archival research in x3 international archives ( location tbc)
- Literature Review (primary and secondary)

### Outputs

- x2 Peer- reviewed articles
- x1 International Conference

## TOOLS AND WORKFLOWS

### Research Question

What tools and organisational processes best support the elaboration of syllabi that can best acknowledge its specificities, that is, the fact that it is a document that is not self-contained, but one that points to a number of other texts, histories and resources? What can academia learn from the crowdsourced \#syllabi phenomenon in terms of relevance for societal transformations and adaptability to situated conditions? How can the digital tools used to develop online syllabi can function as opens access documents?

### Principal Investigators: Marcell Mars

### Activities

- Software development
- x3 workshops
- x1 launch event

With the tools and workflows for the syllabus we want to offer a technological framework and pedagogical process that can allow others to activate these resources for their own learning processes and also to adapt them to their own conditions. We want the syllabi to be easily preserved, so they include digitised documents relevant to the actions of specific struggles, and that they come integrated with well-maintained and catalogued collections of reading materials.

#### Tool

An experimental syllabus framework will be built from plaintext documents that are written in a very simple and human-readable Markdown markup language, rendered into a static HTML website that doesn't require a resource-intensive and easily breakable database system, and which keeps its files on a git version control system that allows collaborative writing and easy forking to create new versions. Such a syllabus can be then equally hosted on an internet server and used/shared offline from a USB stick, while still preserving the internal links between the documents and the links to the texts in the accompanying searchable resource collection.

#### Workflow

Three workshops will be organised with partner organisations involving activist and popular education teachers with whom we will develop a small number of pilot collective syllabi testing both the software tool and the workflows involved in the collaborative process. One of these syllabi will be a 'syllabus on how to make as syllabus', or a guide to be published alongside the software tool to support other educators and learning in engaging with the process.

#### Activation

After the syllabus is developed, following the workflow which is enabled by the tools developed or adapted to the workflow, the activation is the phase of "learning together".