Hunter.od

FINAL REFLECTIONS ON WIKIEDU: AFPRL290.26

Before this course I listened to rap music, but I had never thought about hip hop culture, history and aesthetics in an in-depth, organized way. Both articles we read for this course, and our class discussions made me begin to examine not only hip-hop’s most famous historical events and artists, but the way that I think about, define, and understand hip hop. In reimagining how I look about it, I feel like my thinking was influenced by a deepening understanding of hip-hop aesthetics.

While taking this course only made me realize how much more there is to discover about hip hop, it also provided me with new frameworks of inquiry, which makes me more committed to the process of learning about it. This, more than anything else, is what I took away from the course.

During this class we focused on the concept of deliberate practice as a way to enable students to study despite outside distractions. Rather than focusing on perfectionism, results and confidence, we focused on getting work done and competence. This really helped me push through crunch times during the semester, precisely because it went against the perfectionistic methods I had been taught in school all my life. These paradigms are strong and deeply embedded, so unlearning them was difficult and scary. However, this course provided a useful first step in the process of making myself a more effective student.

Meanwhile, we applied our deliberate practice to editing Wikipedia in order to expand the site’s coverage of hip hop. Throughout the course we learned that students have unique access to strong scholarly resources that enable us to add knowledge to Wikipedia that may not be available to folks outside of academic circles. This gives us the ability to provide information with a different perspective and verifiable citations. Meanwhile it can help us to develop our own academic writing by teaching us to summarize information and cite sources. The intersection of scholarship and students from marginalized communities who have access to academic resources allows us to provide perspectives that are otherwise lacking on Wikipedia, and in academia in general. Editing articles on hip-hop furthers this end, enabling us to be part of knowledge creation and fight systemic bias.

Upon entering the world of Wikipedia we found that it contains many of the same systemic biases as the rest of the society we live in. In that sense, this course was a reminder for me of the ways in which systemic bias plays out in all aspects of society, including areas that consider themselves to be neutral and democratic, like Wikipedia. This is because racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination permeate every aspect of the oppressive society we live in. By examining Wikipedia, and doing academic research on Hip Hop, I was reminded of the ways that systemic bias plays out in academia as well, from the topics that are given priority in terms of research, to the people who tend to occupy the most elite spaces at universities. Most of all I continued to develop an understanding that bias as a form of oppression must be combated on many fronts, including in academic work. This must be done not only constantly, but in a very conscious way.

In editing hip-hop articles on Wikipedia, we were able to see how the editors of the site could benefit from incorporating more hip-hop aesthetics into their work, although I think they already try to do so, to some extent. This would include understanding the politics of collaborative process and collaborating on a body of work in a way that allows all the collaborators voice’s to be heard, yet comes together into one cohesive piece. This is a concept that seems to have been developed far more in hip hop than in many Wikipedia articles. Hip-hop also highlights the importance of citing previous works for authenticity, which is linked to credibility. These and many more ideas are relevant not only to Wikipedia, but to the world of academia as a whole, which has much to learn from the collaborative processes of hip-hop culture.

During the course of this class we had the opportunity to do group work in cyphers, as well as an assignment to remix a piece by Foucault in relation to hip hop. These assignments allowed us the opportunity to break down barriers as individuals and think creatively in collective ways. Participating in the cypher for me emphasized the power of group work, since no one individual has to carry the whole process through. Instead we each bounce off each other’s thoughts and ideas, picking up where one person drops off in order to keep the flow going. I really enjoyed this aspect of class, since we do it so rarely in an academic setting.

Based on our class discussions, I found one of the most exciting aspects of the course to be the contributions of students, whether sharing music, enlightening the class on some aspect of hip-hop culture, or telling us about an upcoming event related to the course. While we all were contributing to Wikipedia, I felt that I learned so much more from the knowledge that we shared with each other. In future classes I think it would benefit the students to have more opportunities to share with the class, in order for us to continue learning in the spirit of the cypher.