We’ve gotten started on our group work. This is stage one of our semester-long project: to make a digital textbook.
Here are some big things to keep in mind:
– – the grand goal of this part of the project is to enable readers of Whitman’s poem to enjoy and understand the poem more deeply. Practical consequence: all of your work should be focused on and by “Song of Myself.” There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there on the “interwebs” – – but we’re only interested in interesting stuff that makes reading Whitman that much richer and rewarding.
– – another goal of the project is for you to become “novice experts” in your context/topic. Practical consequence: as you collect material, you need to think about how information connects with information, about how particular objects, texts, image, data relate to bigger themes, ideas, and arguments. Ultimately, part of the evaluation of your work will depend on the level of expertise you’ve demonstrated.
– – some more particular purposes of the project: to learn how to work, and enjoy working, together; to learn about new media (e.g. how to edit wiki pages, how to assemble multi-media, etc.); to practice critical reading and writing.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4232212558646621307&hl=en#
Here’s how we’ll divide up our work process:
1) collecting and sharing. You’re collecting as much information related to your topics/contexts as you can. Except for the big umbrella guide – – e.g. stuff that might make Whitman’s poem more engaging and valuable for readers – – the emphasis here should be on volume and quantity. You should collect, individually, at least ten pieces of quality information related to your topic. As you’ve already started doing, share this via the Group pages.
2) planning and filtering. After you’ve collected a lot of information, you’ll need to figure out what’s important and what’s not. And, you’ll need to start thinking about how to shape this material. For this task, you need to collaborate, e.g. deciding as a group what information really helps understand your context and the poem. As you plan, remember, you will be shaping all this information into a wiki page or pages that will be linked to the electronic version of Whitman’s poem.
3) creating and publishing. After you’ve come up with a good plan, you’ll need to start creating the actual pages that will accompany the wiki-text of Whitman’s poem. A key word here is “design,” e.g. think about what makes a good web page – – how a good page arranges information and objects (images, sound, video, etc.) for the reader, what kinds of design features make pages easy to use (internal links, tables of contents, etc.). Find a web page that really succeeds in making a topic or subject interesting and post it to your group. You’ll work together to draft and re-draft the page – – one of the beauties of electronic texts is their ease of revision. You might run through several or many versions (1.0, 2.0, etc.) of the page before you get to a final draft. (Not unlike Whitman’s own constant, restless revision of Leaves of Grass.)
Nota Bene: you want to complete phase one (collecting and sharing) by next Thursday (2/10), and you want to enter class with a plan for your page already posted to our main activity stream, e.g. once you’ve co-created a detailed plan, go to “Dashboard” on our community site and click on “New Post.” Copy your plan into this post – – title it with the name of your group – – publish the post. We only need to see one copy of the plan, so designate a group member to be the official poster of the plan. That way we can all see your plan.