Class Discussion (March 13, 2013)

Major questions asked during class:

• Do we make introductions to each of our six topics that can be incorporated by professors and teachers of English Renaissance?
• Are we actually making a mini-course?
• If we make a mini-course, are we
• 1) focusing on the themes and use Renaissance texts to teach that?  OR
• 2) focusing on the Renaissance texts and incorporating or explaining the topics in each text?

Suggestions:

• Make it modular, so people can pick and choose what they want.
• There are content authoring tools (quicklessons.com) that helps to create a structured course: learning objectives, and create content, etc.
• Possibly integrating:
• Short assessments
• Badges
• Links to our videos that introduce each text
• ebook outlets (whole ebook, by chapter, by theme)
• Lesson possibilities:
• Breaking up lessons with videos, that require reading/understanding texts 
• Interactive plays
• You are a character in (ex.) The Tempest, and interact during a scene
• 1) The Tempest
• 2) Ad Fontes: Recovering the Past and Returning to Sources
• 3) Brave New Worlds: Travel and Social Change
• 4) What a Piece of Work is Man: Humanism and Rhetoric
• 5) Plough Boys and Bibles: The Protestant Reformation
• 6) Typographia Conservatrix: Printing's Cultural Impression
• 7) Sprezzatura: Courting Culture
• Using the tiered information module:
• Short (marketing)
• Longer (learning)
• Longest (studying/researching)
• Scrivener or Apple's iBooks Author to make our eBook Anthology that goes along with our structured course (if we decided to use that course).

So, it seems like we're all on board for a mini-course.  There was a lot of energy in class today and ideas were being thrown around left and right.

Things to have done by March 18, 2013:

• Identify a representative film clip
• Some way of introducing your theme from that clip
• Post it on the wiki