What does an ‘outside visitor’ get from RAP?

Though there are some pedagogical reasons for posting RAP on the world wide web, thereby making it accessible to anyone online, the site cannot pretend to be authoritative or comprehensive. A visitor directed to this site by, say, Google (a search engine that seems to particularly value the site) might feel like she has intruded, or entered someone else’s conversation. There is no way to join in, for outsiders to post along with students or react to their observations.

There is that evolving inventory of 'most viewed' pages - so in that way, over time, visitors (and the search engines that steer them) could rework the prominence of certain pages. But that's mild participation, to say the least.

In fact RAP is a tool for a specific class, with visitors relegated to a read-only role. To wish more from it may be a result of its promise: the world (ok, a tiny sliver of it) may well wish to jump into a collaborative conversation about romanticism. Extending Wiki interaction beyond the confines of a traditionally defined class may be problematic, but it certainly has been done in other contexts – see, for example, Wikipeadia. The application of this technology to a humanities-based community outside of a classroom would be interesting – but RAP is not that application. RAP remains an archive of work done by one class, and thus is probably most of interest as a pedagogical experiment.

That said, the work that these eight students did becomes exemplary because of the search-engine visibility of this site; they can be framed as representative of thoughtful college-level engagement with romantic texts. It’s very conceivable that another student in, say, Australia doing a report on Ode to a Nightingale might regard the thoughts found here as authoritative. I've actually already experienced a certain 'loop back' effect, in which Bowdoin students cited pages I coded and posted for students at Berkeley some years back, not knowing they were the work of peers. The moral seems to be, when it comes to the web, caveat emptor. RAP is labeled as work generated at Bowdoin College by students, and disseminates across the internet as such.

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