Christina:

Thanks for commenting! Sorry it took so long to surface, but my Disqus settings weren’t set to notify me right.

First, I’m really excited about the work you are participating in on the UBC Wiki, which aligns with what I now call “renewable assignments”—I’ve started posting on this blog more about what I’m pretentiously calling “Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning”—or #REAL—that is directly related to that kind of work. I’ll add your example to the list of #REAL examples I’m starting to collect.

Like you, I find returning to writings like Foucault’s can be thought-provoking as we labor in such practical realities of knowledge production. On the surface, CC BY does seem to be a mechanism that underwrites (ha ha) the author function. And in the #REAL context, CC BY is so important as it gives learners the opportunity to exercise their “authorial muscles” in a culture and economy where being able to claim authorship still counts for a lot.

OTOH, your example of a CC BY wiki does also seem to shift the author function as the work itself is not as tied to individual authorial activity as much as to the collective work of multiple authors. Practically, if I were attributing such a wiki, I’d likely attribute the “author” to the organization behind the wiki (eg, UBC), but with the hope that the wiki itself had an effective way of listing the individual authors that had contributed (which most do).

When we get to choral explanations, my next stop is the fedwiki work that @wardcunningham @holden & others have been up to that inspires the choir. I think of fedwiki as a distributed wiki, where the organization “behind” the information is not something as addressable as UBC, but instead is a network so much harder to attribute. The author function in fedwiki gets even more complicated as on one hand you can view it as individuals taking more of a central role in the production and sustenance of information they have authored, but also at the same time as a breaking apart of monolithic authorial activity. So on one hand, wiki-culture is eroding the established author function, but also making individual authorial activity even more evident as very specific and local authorial activity can now be tracked and surfaced far more effectively and completely than the collective activity in earlier discursive formations.

Which leads me to think that wikis are a very interesting place to be looking for and thinking about the archeology of knowledge as Foucault would inspire, and I’m betting there is a whole flock of folks already doing so that I need to read ;)

Hopefully we can talk about this more at #opened16 or elsewhere!