Orientation of Angel Course & Assignments

Although I will go over this quickly during lab orientation, I know many of you might get overwhelmed with information, so just to remind everyone how to navigate the course and what to expect, here is a brief overview with accompanying assignments.  The following assignments are covered in more detail below, but make sure you check all these off your list of things to do by next Wednesday:

1. the self-assessment survey --demonstrating your familiarity with the Google survey form to prepare for conference appointments by giving self-assessments of your writing.  Make sure you hit the "submit" button and see the words "Your response has been recorded."
2. the diagnostic essay on "What is Literature?"--demonstrating the use of the Turnitin drop box and your strengths as a writer
3. the syllabus quiz --demonstrating the use of Angel's quiz feature and your familiarity with the syllabus
4. the literary character discussion post --demonstrating the manner in which you will post discussion responses when appropriate
5. the email response --demonstrating you know how to email me in Angel.  Be on the lookout for an email from me for you to respond to via a reply.

Because my Monday class will not meet next week due to the MLK Holiday, make doubly sure you fulfill all assignments by the Wednesday deadline.  If you have questions, please feel free to come see me, email me, or attend the Wednesday class at the same room and time.

The Blog Writing about Literature @ SFC (what you are reading now): 
This is the heart of the course, which can also be accessed directly at <http://sfcenc1102.blogspot.com/>.  I will often link to assignments in the course here or at least direct you to the right place.  Hitting your browser's refresh button while you are anywhere else in the course website should return you to the blog.

• Note the quick access course links within the blog to:
  • Course Main Page
  • Course Questions & Discussions
  • Send a Message
  • Check Your Inbox
  • Get Back to Where You Once Belonged (The last place you were in Angel)

  These links will not work if you access the blog outside of Angel.

• My contact information from the syllabus is also here, along with an abbreviated calendar.  Along with my class schedule and office hours in brown, this will be especially useful for keeping track of 1) assignment deadlines/student presentations in green  and 2) student conferences in orange.  

Note that you can turn each calendars on or off as needed by clicking on drop-down arrow in the upper-right corner.

• There is also a link to daily poems in case you want to find fresh, contemporary poems published out there that have not been forced through the English professor textbook mills.  Some might not be great, but you might find some inspiring jewels.  These are also viable for your weekly poetry reaction posts in the last section of the class, just make sure you indicate where you found them.

Most importantly, the blog is where ALL assignment due dates will be located.  Whatever is posted in here trumps anywhere else.  If a date in Turnitin is earlier than the one stated here in the blog, the blog wins out and I need to move the TII date back.  I will never change a date to give you LESS time.  I will often include major dates in the calendar, but the weekly discussions and reaction assignments should be routine, and other than their first occurrence, their due dates will appear only in the blog.

The rest of the course can be accessed in the menu that is above the main content window:

Course: This is where you can find the syllabus, a roster of all students, any polls that I might give the class, a link to Turnitin, and links to other sections in the course, such as "Course Mail" and the current "Discussion Forums" (which includes all ACTIVE forums).  There is also a link here to return to the the blog, or you can simply hit your browser's refresh button.

Calendar: This is actually a link to three Google course calendars, not Angel's calendar application. While major assignment due dates do show up in the calendar, I will not post all of the discussion and response due dates.  Instead, I will use the blog to remind you of upcoming assignments because that is where I will be discussing each assignment.  The calendar will be most useful for keeping track of:

• my class schedule and office hours, 
• student presentation schedules,  and 
• scheduled student conferences.  

I do encourage you to make use of the SFC Google calendar inside your SFC Gmail account for your own purposes (you can create your own due dates or copy mine over).  NOTE: Turnitin also has a calendar with all the due dates for essays, peer reviews, and revisions, but these should merely reflect the dates given in the blog and on the calendar.

Lessons:  This is where all of the course content is located.  If the blog is the heart or brain of the class, then this is the body.  Though I will often point you here from the blog, it is a good idea to explore these folders to find out where things are located, especially semester-long projects that you might forget about, like the Adaptation Projects.  Here is an outline of the Lesson folders:

• Course Questions & Discussions
  Hopefully you are already making use of this discussion forum, but it is also accessible at various places within the site, including the Course page and the Communicate page. Although I occasionally monitor this site, if you need a direct answer from me, use the Course Mail. This discussion is primarily a place for you to ask each other questions and help each other out.  It is the online equivalent of meeting with your classmates before and after class.

• Class Readings
  This is more or less organized in the order that we will handle material--1) literary approaches, 2) drama and film, 3) fiction, and finally 4) poetry.  While I might supplement this material with further outside reading from the blog, you can get ahead by reading course material before it is assigned, especially the four content-based texts that discuss the various elements of literature and will be the basis for your section quizzes:
  
  • Elements of Drama, 
  • Literary and Film Terms
  • Elements of Fiction, and
  • Elements of Poetry
  There are also two supplementary folders, Terms, Glossaries, & Explorations, and Writing & Documentation, that will help you navigate the study of literature as well as the frustration of MLA documentation.
  
  •  The links in the "Writing & Documentation" folder on "Writing for Specific Fields: Drama" and "Writing About Film" will help you in writing your first portfolio essay on drama and film adaptations.
  •  The links in the "Writing & Documentation" folder on "Advice on Writing about Fiction" and "Literary Theory @ Purdue OWL" will help you in writing your second portfolio essay on fiction and its historical and cultural relationships, especially the sections on Marxist, New Historicist, Post-Colonial, and Feminist Criticism.
  • The links in the "Writing & Documentation" folder on "Advice on Writing about Poetry" and "Reader-Response Theory @ Purdue OWL" will help you in writing your third portfolio essay on poetry.
   
  
• The Assignments folder contains six sub-folders:

• Sign-Ups, Surveys, and Self-Assessments As the title suggests, this is where you will go to find sign-ups for conferences, fill out surveys for conferences, and complete self-assessment forms.  Although I will direct you here from the blog, it is always good to know where this is located.  We will be having two conferences during the semester.
• Your first survey is Pre-Course Survey & Best Available Times, which should be relatively self-explanatory when you take it.  

• Reading Responses, Online Discussions, & Homework Posts Due prior to discussion in class, but sometimes a discussion in response to a class discussion. These do NOT appear until they are assigned with a due date.  After the due date, you can still read the posts, but unless it is an ongoing forum, such as when I have you try your own hand at poetry, you will not be able to post past the due date.  Due dates are always in the blog, so make sure you check back often and keep track of what you have and have not read. As stated in the syllabus, points for discussion will not be calculated until the end of the semester.
• First Response and Discussion Questions:
  
  What literary character are you? (Discussion)
  "This is Just to Say" Adaptation (Response)

• Portfolio Assignments Again, somewhat self explanatory, but each written assignment (including the "What is Literature?" Diagnostic) is laid out here in detail, along with links to Turnitin for submitting your work.  When in doubt about the specifics of a writing assignment, consult these portfolio instructions first.  For the most part these instructions will remain the same, but I may change some of the choices prior to beginning a section.  If you plan on working ahead, notify me of an essay choice before investing too much time to make sure it will still be an option.

You will need to sign up for a Turnitin account, if you do not already have one, before you can submit your diagnostic essay.  The information for registering for the class is as follows:

• class ID: 5977592
• enrollment password: write

• Section Quizzes + Syllabus Quiz This lesson folder is  where you will take all of your quizzes, including the syllabus quiz.  This quiz serves two purposes: 1) to demonstrate your familiarity with the quiz feature within Angel, and 2) to demonstrate your familiarity with the course criteria laid out in the syllabus.  You can, however, take the quiz as many times as you like before the deadline. 

• Historical Context Project This is where you will find both instructions and supplemental information for your historical research, which will accompany the fiction discussion.
• FYI, although we will not go into much depth with all of the literary approaches, this section relies heavily upon placing text in a historical context.
• There is a discussion forum in here for signing up for in-class presentations; although it is a bit early to start signing up, those who want to get their choice in first are welcome to come see me for an early explanation. 
• However, if you want to sign up for a topic that someone has already signed up for in your section, you will need to wait until all other topics have been covered before I double up assignments. (I am potentially changing some of the fiction readings, so the schedule will not be set until the third week of class).

• Adaptation Projects This if for the final week(s) of class when everyone will present an adaptation of their choosing.  The first discussion forum, Instructions & Proposals for Your Adaptation Projects, provides the instructions for the project as well as provides a means to propose your project for approval.  The second forum, Open Discussion for Adaptation Proposals, is an open forum where you can request members for a group project, post ideas, post drafts or rough cuts, or simply solicit feedback.
• I must approve each project BEFORE a set deadline, so don't forget to do this ahead of schedule. This assignment is due at the end of the semester, but it is something that you can begin working on NOW.

Communicate: More or less duplicates all the ways to communicate in the Course section, including "Course Mail" and the "Discussion Forum." As noted in the first day of class and in the syllabus, I prefer that you communicate with me via Course Mail rather than through my Santa Fe mail.  It is more dependable, and allows us the ability to track messages if something is lost (like an attached assignment).

There it is in a nutshell, well, maybe a coconut shell.  Note that if you need to refer back to an old blog post, like this one, there is a directory of old posts over to the right under "Blog Archive."

"What is Literature?" Diagnostic

What is Literature?

This is the question that I want you to begin the semester with.  Although we will be placing a lot of emphasis on what I call the "text" this semester (we will define that next week), I want you to begin this class by writing a diagnostic essay in which you define what you think "literature" means.  To avoid the time-worn student trick of looking up "literature" in the dictionary and starting from there  (this would include such ambiguous and irrelevant definitions as "the body of writings on a particular subject" or "printed matter (as leaflets or circulars)," I want you to instead focus on an academic definition, and then incorporate that definition into your own.

Well what do I mean by an “academic” definition?  In this case, it is a definition posed by a scholar (a professor, a researcher, or even a student) trying to grapple with what the word means in relation to, usually, creative works of writing.  As you might guess, however, it does NOT have a clear-cut, black and white definition.  In fact, as you look at the search I provide below, barely anyone agrees 100% on what literature means, and many sit on opposite sides of their camps.  Some feel literature is a term that is reserved only for the most austere works of creative writing that have been tested through the passage of time (Shakespeare, the first author we will tackle in this class, makes it onto almost ANY list).  On the other hand, there are scholars out there who feel literature includes such diverse material as Hamlet, comic books, television commercials, or even a Willow Smith song.  I, for one, include the genre of film in my own definition, and will utilize film in the class.

But for the start of this paper, I want you to give me your definition based upon your own experience and thoughts on the topic (and if you have NEVER thought about it, that is relevant as well).  How was it presented in school?  In your English classes? In your history classes?  In your math classes?  Have your friends or family ever talked about it?  How have they defined it?  If you were raised to read the Bible or not, would you consider that to be literature?  The main goal here is that you present an argument and you defend it.  The purpose of the assignment is two-fold: 1) to assess your writing before we begin more formal writing assignments in order to gauge areas that you might need help in, and 2) to begin the conversation that will be the focus of this entire course.

Once you have established your definition as you define it (this should evolve into your thesis), I then want you to find an academic definition that either fits with your own definition or one that you could argue against in your discussion (or both, if you are feeling enterprising).  The criteria for this definition is not that stiff; I am using a Google search for the term "What is literature?" and limiting it to only scholarly websites (sites with "edu" in the address):

• "What is literature?"

This is not a perfect  search and will still contain lots of useless information or information that is off-topic, and it will by no means be comprehensive, but it is a start for doing your own academic research in this class.  We will be doing much more in-depth academic searches when we begin discussing fiction, but your job right now is to filter through the results from the above search and find one (or more) definitions that fits well with the essay that is forming in your head.  Try to limit yourself to signed articles, that is essays that someone has identified as writing him or herself (as opposed to an unsigned encyclopedia article or anonymous blog posts).  

After selecting your academic definition, incorporate it into your essay, providing additional examples, analogies, causes and effects, comparison and contrasts, descriptions, divisions and classifications, etc. to develop your argument, and finally concluding with your assessment of what defines literature by the end of your essay.

If this seems daunting, do not be too worried.  This essay will be a work in progress and is only being used for assessment.  To receive full credit, the simple criteria are that you must:

1. complete and submit essay by deadline in Turnitin,
2. address the basic issues covered above (there is no wrong or right response, just a relevant one), and
3. write at minimum of  500 words with a:
1. clear introduction,
2. a body,
3. a conclusion, and
4. a work(s) cited page that includes your online "academic" definition.

Emailing Me in Angel

As I noted in the syllabus, unless Angel is strangely unavailable, please send all email messages or questions through Angel's mail--not to my SFC email.

SFC has a bad reputation of eating student papers due to all of the automatic SPAM protection.  Furthermore, Angel provides an easy way to track student email, so even if your message is lost for some reason, the IT people can track it in case it ever involves verification for points or deadlines.

• I am sending you an email in Angel for you to respond to, but in case anyone is having problems figuring it out when you send one from scratch, make sure you click the "To:" button.

•  to CHOOSE the person, group, or team and insert:

On the subject of emails, it is significant to point out that many people think email is the wild, wild West when it comes to following basic writing decorum.  Especially when you are sending a message to your potential employer, your congressman, or (gasp) your English teacher, take the time to at least spell check your message (you can and should set this up to be automatic) and make sure your message is clear and focused.  Although I will not take off for poorly written emails, I do reserve the right to return them unanswered if you have clearly demonstrated the inability (or indifference) toward any common rules of usage.