Service Learning and DH in the Technical Writing Classroom: the iFixit Project

For this panel, I will discuss and promote a service learning project with a company called iFixit that I was involved with as an instructor of technical writing at the University of South Florida. iFixit advocates self-repair of electronic devices to help reduce the global spread of e-waste (pollution caused by the dumping of used electronic devices into third-world countries). To assist the self-repair movement, iFixit publishes repair guides on their website, and we at USF had engineering students work with the company to create some of these guides. To do this, students researched a device they were given to find common problems, and then write a troubleshooting guide, device page, and sets of instructions to remove specific components of the device for repair. Students also had to take their own photographs and write accompanying text to walk users through the replacement of components. The assignment relates to DH not only in that it requires students to perform web design using a wiki-based program, but also in that it requires them to think about the lives of their electronic devices and what happens to these devices after they’re discarded.