Digital Rheflection

My inclination in reflecting on my learning is to examine the trajectory it has followed over the past three semesters, because there are themes and interlocking segments that are not linear but confluent. I have been trying to narrow my studies to a singular yet broad point I can pursue as a thesis, but I find interests too broad and the wide scope of my inquiries too fascinating to begin to get a manageable grasp on them for this reflection. So, I will limit myself to the content of the Digital Rhetoric class and the work I did.

The collaborative Service Learning Project was the most involved project I have done I can remember. My perceptions of the Service Learning aspect of the class and my conception of the project itself have changed dramatically over the semester. My initial reaction to a project done in conjunction with a campus department that involved an outside organization was cold. I was afraid there would be too many constraints that would turn the project into the completion of a checklist for a micromanaging tyrant and I wouldn’t be able to express my understanding of the texts of the class. I am pleased to see that none of the groups is strictly bound by their service organization, and that my group especially had both the ability and fortune to create a project that satisfies both the organization’s and my expectations.

Planning the project in light of Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous was confusing and misplaced. I appreciate his concepts of the organization and categorization of information, but I didn’t find them relevant to the project. Weinberger was relevant, though, as a portal to Manovich who was foundational to the rhetorical choices I made in the planning and production of the Banned Books Week project, which I will address during the presentation.

The most surprising, productive, fun, and horribly difficult of the semester was the Service Learning Project. If given a choice, I would work alone. Groups can carry too many opinions and disparate visions, but working in this group I found responsible, thorough, clever, and hard-working collaborators who had lots of ideas and a general shared sense of what would work. Even though schedules are difficult to align, we managed to work independently at home and in the same room on the same computer equally well.

I still am a little trepidatious about Service Learning Projects because I feel I got lucky to have such a productive group, such accessible and accepting community agents, and a topic that I am passionate about. I understand the importance of Service Learning Projects and that they lead to participation in the community by usually cloistered academics, and I feel that I have a much deeper sense of the Boise Public Library’s place between the American Library Association and the City of Boise. I also feel that the project we made extends beyond our immediate community to serve American libraries in general.