(from syllabus)
Blog Entries
1 minimum per week, beginning week 2; (100-200 words. Credit/no credit assigned).
Every student will create and maintain a blog throughout the semester, preferably using Wordpress
Blog entries due Wednesday each week, starting week 2, unless otherwise noted (e.g. weeks 8 & 14).
Elaborating upon today’s class, specific suggestions for blogging below.
Note: more technical instructions for blogging coming soon (i.e. setup / “tech. support”) — need not create your blog until next week (over weekend?)
Also, optional / additional ideas:
as part of blogging, use Twitter, Facebook, or other social media (?).
More on this below — could be very interesting and unique approach!
Weekly entries are informal (ungraded); consider as “Reading Journal”: e.g. post associative links/images, pose questions, note observations, describe insights – particularly connections between texts within and those outside of class. An enjoyable and productive way of engaging our “objects of study,” this on-going work serves as “research” and material for the final project.
Specific suggestions for blogging:
On a general level of the course, blogging itself is precisely (an) experience and (your) expression. The benefit to our method (experiment) is both to practice and develop our engaging with literature, as well as generate ideas through the process — consider as analogy the creative moments that occur during “band practice,” (not just refining old songs but generating a creative impulse!). For progress in our experiment (semester), this practice involves “warming-up”: not just “tuning,” but ourselves becoming in tune or “attuned” to different frequencies.
One perspective is our scholarly examination of our “objects of study” (literature); at minimum, your “reading journal” entries might note a specific literary topic/issue, such as one we discuss that particular week. This strategy helps generate ideas specifically for assignments.
We are also interested in additional “frequencies”: observations and connections from your unique perspective, involving any relevant personal/experiential knowledge. Specifically, explore insights through associations or connections between our texts and any content/material “outside” of class–this very much includes your experience from the past and at present (e.g. other courses, activities, media). We’ll try to develop a “three-dimensional” or “360°” perspective on “experience and expression.”
In both cases, also very interesting and productive to present new questions that our reading generates (i.e. how /what you are considering, newly or differently, as a result of reading).
Finally, your blog is the “experience narrative” of this particular semester, with all of the unique events and culture contextualized during “fall 2009.” The “incidental” associations that occur might likely provide fruitful avenues to explore for our project. We’ll want to be especially attuned to any “surprising” (accidental?) connections, especially any triggered by “involuntary memory” (more on this last concept later).
Optional / additional ideas, for blogging:
I have considered the potential use of Twitter, as part of blogging, and it might be interesting/productive in two ways. First, because we don’t know when an insight will occur, it is often useful to review our own experience as a narrative — a stream of “tweets” (entries) creates this narrative, showing us our process of engaging material (all courses, media, etc.). Alternatively, there is a new trend of users “tweeting” in character, taking up a role from literature/culture and writing in this voice. This is of great interest for us as a strategy of imagining and expressing others’ experience, which we will attempt to do at the end of the term.
The opposite of Tweeting “in character,” and yet very much the “three-dimensional” perspective of the course, would be using Facebook as part of the process. Both our novels and our class are “social networks” themselves; a new perspective would be testing what occurs when you conduct our experiment (method/process) within your established social network, especially regarding feedback.
Anyone interested in either of these options should contact me, perhaps for additional prompts/suggestions and certainly for technical advice (and to discuss how to integrate into your weekly requirement of 200-word blog entries).
