Midterm changes

I am pleased with the course structure and encouraged by the contributions many of you are making in class, and the experiments we’ve done in class and in the wiki. (We’ll be doing more of those.) But we can do better in some areas, so I’m going to make a few changes in the way our class works. Once I see your midterm comments, I may make other changes. I welcome suggestions or comments from you about the class in general.

Class participation

I have often said I thought our “discussions” are very one-sided. In the second half of the semester, I ask that you do three things to improve this:

  1. Come to class each day with an informal list of issues raised by the readings—questions, comments, points to debate, whatever. Ideally, you’ll key these lists of issues to particular sections of our texts. Questions are just as useful as comments or summaries.
  2. I have updated our schedule to include starting points for discussion. Please complete these activities, if appropriate, and consider any questions as you read.
  3. If you don’t work well with the readings on-screen, print them out.

I am increasing the amount of points allocated to class participation in the second half of the semester. Everyone can and should benefit from this change: find things in the readings to talk about, whether things you don’t understand or ideas you disagree with. Ask and answer questions. Provide examples of the categories of things we’re considering. Relate ideas or activities discussed in the readings to your own experience.

Weblogs

I would also to see more folks using weblogs to discuss the course readings and other things, so I am increasing the number of second-half points devoted to blogging as well. Please use your blog to take our in-class discussions outside of the bounds of the classroom, to talk about your projects, to make connections between keywords which we don’t cover in class, etc. Also, please “make the rounds” of other weblogs—see what me and other folks are saying about what we’re doing, answer their questions, etc.

To allow these changes, I have reduced the amount of points allocated to Glossolalia work and to in-class writing experiments. The changes are not retroactive, so everyone begins with a clean slate: your grade in the first part of the semester will have nothing to do with that in the second.

Please contact me if you want to discuss any of these changes.