CompPile: Share and Comment

WPA 2008 Roundtable: Glenn Blalock

Glenn

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Roundtable: How can we better document, preserve, protect, and share our learning?

We’ve built them, but who is coming, and what are they doing? Or why aren’t they doing what we hoped?

Glenn Blalock | WPA 2008, July 2008

In the beginning (or post-“listserves are cool”):

• WAC Clearinghouse
• Kairos
• CompPile
• CompFAQs
• New and Recent Books @ CompPile
• CompReviews @ CompPile
• The Research Exchange
• WPA/NMA
• WPA / National Conversation on Writing (NCoW)
• Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks, Web 1.0/2.0/3.0, and more.

Consider this:

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Three years ago, as the result of a conversation on WPA-L, we opened CompFAQs, a wiki environment open to all, as a way to provide research- and practice-based responses to questions that repeatedly appeared in our online forums. Though the site has grown in important ways, and colleagues continue to contribute, I can’t say that contributions are straining the server in ways we might have desired.

Or this:
One year ago, during this same conference in Tempe, WPA-L was abuzz with talk of “book reviews in comp journals,” a discussion that lead to the creation of two new features @ CompPile: “New/Recent Books @ CompPile and CompReviews. CompPile now lists hundreds of recently published books, from over 30 publishers, with easy access to an interface that invites “reviews” of these books. And the new CompPile interface now has a “review” link for every one of the nearly 95,000 entries in CompPile. How many reviews in one year? 14.

What do these few examples have in common?

They represent the various ways our profession attempts to use new tools to enact theoretical principles we espouse in our scholarship and at our conferences: how we are all part of various kinds of communities (of knowledge and practice), of various activity systems. And how we value participation, open access, non-proprietary spaces where we can share and build our knowledge production and improve our practices. We have unprecedented means now to share, collaborate, cooperate, communicate.

But the tools listed above also represent a surprising? disappointing? lack of active participation by members of our professional community. Or to revert to a riff on a cliche: We’ve built them, but who is coming, and what are they doing? Or why aren’t they doing what we hoped?

How long before more of us, a critical mass, use these tools in innovative ways?

I’ve puzzled over this issue for years, and I continue to be stymied by what seems to me to be an insurmountable obstacle: We are workers in a system that prevents, inhibits, discourages the kind of “work” that would help fulfill the promise / potential of these new ways of “working.” Any work we contribute to these online ventures represents time and energy that “could” / “should” be invested in the production of peer-reviewed, print-based scholarly articles (but only in top-tier journals) or monographs (but only those published by respected publishers).

If we are graduate students, earning the Ph.D. or M.A. and hoping to find a first position, we fret about our c.v., and especially about our “publications” and how they will be valued by search committees. If we find the first tenure-track position and expect to earn tenure, the promised land of academia, we must follow established guidelines and fulfill long-established criteria, usually not at all amenable to the kind of work we might do in the new online, open access sources now available to us. When we earn tenure, our advance through the ranks—in title and in salary—depends on similar guidelines and criteria.

How to break this cycle, or if not “break” begin to redirect it noticeably? Position and Guideline statements from professional organizations (WPA, CCCC, NCTE, for example) are necessary, but not even close to sufficient. The scholarly equivalent of “early adopters” is also necessary, because those who create, maintain, and promote these various tools and calls for change are necessary, but not sufficient. Where’s the “crowd” (a la Shirky)? How many ways can we make the “crowd” possible? What might be a short list of actions that are part of an intentional and sustained plan to change the ways we engage our work in our communities of knowledge and practice?

At this stage of my career, run aground in Waco, Texas, I’ve decided to commit myself to CompPile and the various associated projects that complement and supplement CompPile and that attempt to fulfill the same vision or our professional potentials—or what might be more accurate, to the professional principles that inform CompPile-like work. And to me, that means more than techno-wizardry. New servers, new interfaces, new programs, new widgets, new functionalities—all of this kind of stuff is important. And I will continue to devote more than my share of time to keeping the doors open and exploring the use of the latest techno-innovation. But none of the tools I listed above will be sustained if we don’t find a way to make it possible, even preferable, for more members of our profession to join in this work, and to know it will be valued and rewarded in all the various ways that matters.

If we share the vision, if we have the tools, if we have the motivation, how do we enable?

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