Miller and Shepherd were on to something but then dropped it

While it was a bit unfocused and reached no applicable conclusion, I appreciated the Miller & Shepherd article we read this week. The article starts off with some very perceptive anecdotes about how current events prepared culture for blogs. I think the stories about Princess Diana, Bill Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky demonstrated well the cultural climate that allowed private stories to thrive. We were learning private things about public individuals, while private individuals became public. This phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to the nineties, but other big nineties stories fit this paradigm. Consider the extensive media coverage of the OJ Simpson trial, the rise of reality TV, and the Oklahoma City Bombing. It’s important to understand the implications of this type of cultural climate, because the generation we’re grading in 1301 grew up during this period. If we understand better the moral expectations and norms of the era, we might be able to instruct our students better.

What Miller & Shepherd’s article fails to consider, however, is the great force of collaborative learning as described by Bruffee and Trimbur. Blogs initiated this, but sites like Twitter and Facebook took it to another level. I believe the Internet instantiates collaborative learning, and redefines intellectual property. I bet an overwhelming majority of freshman are on Twitter and Facebook, asking their friends questions, sharing things they learned about Tech and Lubbock, and adding to the communal database of knowledge. I would like to read an essay that considered how the Internet encourages collaborative learning, and if it even does. If we understood that relationship better, freshman composition could take an exciting new turn.