Service Learning and the On and Offline Communities

For all the foolishness the Internet has engendered, it has offered new opportunities for service to the community:  the traditional community and the online community both.  I direct my students toward the former and in one of my courses I require participation in the latter. 

Many of you may be familiar with one or the other of the resources I’m presenting this evening–and for boring you with what you already know I apologize.  But perhaps some aren’t familiar with both or with either, and with that in mind let me introduce everyone to

IDEALIST.  I love plays on words, puns and double entendres.  Whomever dreamed up the name for this website must have loved them, too.    In its own words,

    Idealist is a project of Action Without Borders, a nonprofit organization founded in 1995 with offices in the United States and Argentina. Idealist is an interactive site where people and organizations can exchange resources and ideas, locate opportunities and supporters, and take steps toward building a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives.

Briefly put, Idealist connects not for profit agencies with persons looking for opportunities to be of service, in both paid and volunteer capacities.  As I type this (about 8:00 Sunday evening), there are 4, 498 jobs listed, 17, 749 volunteer opportunities listed, as well as 2,723 internships.  The latest volunteer opportunity was posted within the hour (Washington DC–a bit of a commute).  There are also listings for events.  I note, for example that there will be a Graduate School Fair in Providence on September 13.  Brown University is hosting, and 75 graduate schools and programs will be represented, including RWU hooray, hooray.

For those who would like community service in the comfort of their own house, there's 

PROJECT GUTENBERG.  Anyone whose scholarly interest leads  to searching for out of print materials probably winds up at Project Gutenberg sooner or later.  Gutenberg is the grand-daddy of e-text production, begun in 1971.  Over 30,000 books have been produced by Project Gutenberg since its inception.  My guess (quite possibly wrong) is that most who use Project Gutenberg are unaware that the books they use are produced by thousands of volunteers through a process and program known as Distributed Proofreading.  To date, over 15,000 of the Gutenberg books have been produced this way. 

My History 203 students have an assignment at Distributed Proofreaders.  Each is responsible for proofreading a minimum of ten pages to receive credit for the course, and from that point onward, can enhance their grade by exceeding the minimum requirement.  The process is very simple.  Pages are provided as photographic images online, and scanned using optical character recognition software.  The proofreader has an interface which lets him/her see the photograph and the OCR proof simultaneously and make corrections on the proof.  The process is repeated several times to minimize proofreader error.   For the ten pages minimum, students upload the image to their “blog” on Blackboard and their proofread corrections as well.  I check for accuracy.  If their first ten pages are accurate in the main, I just take the tally of the total pages they’ve done to assess their grade for this project.

I was surprised how into it some of the students got.  There was the element of competition, plus a desire to see what was on the next page.  My star pupil proofread over 500 pages, and is till proofreading for fun, long after the course ended last May.  I proofread for my own pleasure as well.   This is an obsessive-compulsive’s dream project.

 

The online e-text is growing by leaps and bounds.  Project Gutenberg is only one of a number of providers housed under the umbrella of Ibiblio.org.  Through the associates of Ibiblio, over 100, books are available online, for free.  This is only one reason I keep saying that the Internet is the most democratizing medium since the invention of moveable type.  Ibiblio is a project of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  It has long been my dream that Roger Williams University make a contribution of some sort to the online world of knowledge.  I’ll mention a few of the other projects from time to time in this blog.