Make It Public; Make It Matter

Over at Composition Southeast, Sharon is on fire. One of the things that I've been chewing on lately about blogs and composition and teaching and regionalism and "service" is this, and this is something I said to my colleagues in the 4Cs blogging SIG:

Blogs are designed to make it easy for people to publish content online. When we use blogs in our classes, very often we use them to replace journals or in-class writing or, as I have done, to "farm out" elements of the class that might take time away from writing or teaching writing. In doing this, even if we are gleefully watching our students form blogging communities or consider audience when they write, we ignore the larger implications of placing content online.

The blogosphere is, in the end, a kind of million monkeys at a million typewriters hammering out not Hamlet, but instead rapidly discovering and filling in every imaginable niche and crevice. That is, if you're interested in, say, the history of fire hydrant design, someone else out there is, too, and blogs make it easy for those people to make their information public.

The question I rolled around in my mind for a few days way this: why, then, when we have this amazing mechanism for publishing ideas online, do we seemingly ignore the degree to which it might be used as a kind of service learning? Why do we not use blogs in the classroom as a means of making public the intellectual work that goes on in our classrooms. And even more, why do we not focus on making that intellectual work a resource for both the university and the larger community?

I started thinking about this because we have a large service initiative here where I teach, and so teachers across the university very often experiment with various kinds of service learning. As might be expected, this form this service learning takes varies—some people work with Habitat, some people work with homeless shelters. But last semester, one of our professors attempted a service project in which her students interviewed some of the last remaining survivors of the Japanese internment camps who were living in Salt Lake City. The project was an interesting one, I thought, and when I asked what was to be done with the material when it was all over, I was told that the interviews would be bound and given to those they had interviewed.

This is what I am talking about. A project such as this, as Sharon rightly notes both on the blog and in email with me, is a golden opportunity to consider the publishing of blogs as a kind of service learning that does not ignore the intellectual work that goes on in the university and, instead, makes that work a public resource for the community.