As you are already aware, English 121B is a service-learning course. In this class, you are required to spend twenty to forty hours during the quarter at a local Boys and Girls Club. The idea here is that your service-learning will augment your academic learning. For example, rather than abstractly speaking about how the technologies and media that we use ostensibly impact communities, you will instead have the concrete opportunity to use technology to articulate your service-learning experiences and speak for, about, and with local Boys and Girls Clubs. Such concrete opportunities should not only enhance your academic learning, but also increase your awareness of how your academic work here at the UW intersects with public practices.

But wait. What’s service-learning anyway?

For this in-class blog (to be written on Thursday, January 10th), please write briefly about some sort of community or volunteer service that you have performed (e.g., helping a friend, participating in a local organization, or tutoring a student). Or, if you prefer, you can reverse the dynamic here. That is, you can write about a time when someone volunteered to help you, presumably when you were in need of some help. (Of note, this experience needn’t be “positive,” per se. Be honest here.)

As you write, please mention the following three things:

• The specific context of the community or volunteer service (e.g., the who, what, when, where, and how)
• How you now recall that service as an experience (e.g., negative, positive, productive, or unproductive)
• And how that service experience might help you approach “service-learning” in this class.

No need to write formally here, people. The function of the blog in this class is to collaboratively log, discuss, and feed back into class activities, service-learning, and sonic culture. Get your ideas out for conversation and polish them in the response and major papers.

Before you publish your blog post, please categorize it under “#1 – Service-Learning?”.

And, of course, since this is your first blog post, ask me technical questions. After all, this isn’t a computer science course, so I’m certainly not assuming that you have “blogging proficiency.”

Thanks!