Social Networking and Teaching Shakespeare

I just thought I'd share some of the cool experiences I've been having while trying to incorporate more social networking into my research. I mentioned in my annotated bibliography that I posted some questions to Goodreads, English Companion Ning, and Facebook... and Facebook certainly had the quickest results. The initial question I posted and the comments I began receiving are below. Note that, as discussed in class, I opened up the discussion with a pretty broad topic, just to get a general sense of opinions and interest in the topic. I did also mention (although, perhaps I shouldn't have) that the question was for a class/grade... this was mainly for the same reason that was brought up a few times in class: I was worried about people not responding. Luckily, I had a big response... and some conversations that continued after this first post.

As you can see, Paul Baltes (a neighbor from home) mentions that he has been involved in not only studying Shakespeare, but in teaching it as well. Because I'm really interested in gearing my paper toward teaching, I messaged Paul with more specifics about my topic of interest, and asked if he could provide any feedback:

And WOW did he have stuff to share! The screenshot below is only a tiny portion of a huge email that Paul sent me detailing some of his experiences with Shakespeare, both as a student and as a teacher. It turns out that he has been particularly involved in adapting Shakespeare to better fit current students--he has worked with others to develop software and other programs to improve instruction in the classroom... basically, he has worked directly with my topic. If anyone writing their paper from a perspective of teaching (or anyone else) is interested, I'd be happy to share his full email with you (he gave me permission to share anything):

In general, this was just a really awesome experience for me. It makes me wish that I had involved social networking, etc. in more of the papers and projects that I've worked on in the past. To think that all of this knowledge could just be lurking near me, and that I'm just not taking advantage of it... scary.

Now I'm just trying to work out exactly how I'm going to work A Midsummer Night's Dream into my overall topic, and how I'm going to make my paper original after seeing Kasey's awesome, but similar-topic paper from another class. :) This has made me a lot more excited about the paper, though... to find out that it's a relevant issue that people are really interested in discussing. I also emailed Dr. Crowe (in the English department) and I'm planning to talk to him tomorrow to see if he has any different/similar insights. Try out some social networking, people. You might be surprised what you learn about people that you thought you already knew.