Shall I go on? These are all names for My Obscure Online Class (or MOOC, to coin a term).
I feel ill prepared to write the second assigned blog post, which asks us to “map out an assignment for the course you will be teaching that considers the role of the web in framing your course.” So far this semester I believe I have thought a lot about liberal arts, about online learning in theory, and about my own pedagogy. I have been reassured that tools do exist and that someone can show them to me sometime. But my own course remains very slippery, to put it mildly, and this post will not complete the assignment very well.
So. Instead of adapting an existing course to an online course, I applied for the OLI by proposing a brand new course. This seemed easier to me than adapting one (which would also mean replanning for a summer timelime rather than a full semester), and I had an idea that seemed made for an online experience. In retrospect, it may not have been smart because now everything about this course needs to be, well, made, and Tim’s screechy good-for-nothing printers don’t seem to be spitting out my syllabus.
My course will fundamentally engage the web because our primary text is on it: The Modernist Journals Project, or MJP, which is an in-progress digitized archive of periodicals from the early twentieth century, reproduced cover to cover. We will likely focus mostly or solely on the magazine Poetry, which has complete digitization for the years spanned by the archive and which was a major journal in the making of modernist aesthetics.
Another reason that Poetry will be a rich place to focus is that the magazine includes not only poetry but also reviews, letters, and short essays, which can allow us to consider modernist literature not as a finalized THING but as a work in progress, tracing the debates and definitions. One assignment that I can imagine is having students organize into partners or groups of three, and having each group use a wiki to report on the evolution of a concept or question–for instance, what the proper audience is for poetry, whether or not free verse actually exists, what the school of Imagism stands for, whether or not America is a literary wasteland… This assignment would require an immersion in the magazine’s prose items to track the major voices on a topic, the major strands of argument or definition, and the changes over time– and then the intellectual work of distilling, organizing, and presenting that material for us in a way that honored its fluidity but made it comprehensible. When I use digital technologies in my typical courses, I like to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities that they offer, and I would want that for this assignment also. The reports could link to specific pages of the MJP and to external resources on modern poetry (like that of the Academy of American Poets) for definitions, biographies, examples; they could incorporate images of poems as they were published, of major figures, and so on. The students might even be able to include audio for some of the reports, since a small collection of early lectures on modern poetry have been made available through Poetry‘s contemporary site and elsewhere.
And I’m out.