Today is March 1, 2013, and my current Shakespeare students are embarking upon the last six weeks of our semester. They have read many works by Shakespeare and have done self-directed learning and a lot of online writing within a private online forum in our learning management system. From here on out, however, they will become more public in their conversation as they interact with one another and with those beyond our class in proposing and refining their research questions, then developing and publishing their formal research papers.
Blogging
Each student will post three times weekly to this, our course blog, and will also post comments in response to at least two other students' posts. But the goal here is not simply to produce writing. The blogging is a vehicle to meet the larger goals.
Goals
As I explained to my students in class today, the goal is not simply to produce a high-quality academic research paper. The goal is to find and develop a topic about which they care, and about which others demonstrate interest. This requires both reflection and interaction.
Along the way, the goal is to develop improved abilities at conducting research and using online writing and networking. This includes consulting traditional sources of literary criticism, but it also includes researching by way of new media and by tapping into social networks and online communities where the topics in question are being discussed. The online tools (including blogging and some video production) are not ends in themselves; they are to improve student ability at clarifying and refining their arguments, and improving communication and collaboration skills within the drafting and beta states of knowledge (rather than focusing everything upon a final, finished academic product alone).
Rather than simply listing detailed assignments for each class period, I would like my students to have an overview of the process in terms of these goals, which I will recast as questions:
