An Annotated Contact List for Social Discovery

As part of teaching my students to integrate a social component into their research, I've asked them to brainstorm four kinds of people to contact (see "Socializing Preliminary Literary Research" and its links). As part of this, I have suggested creating an annotated contact list.


Directions:

At the top of your annotated contact list, briefly state the topic and status of your research project. If you have arrived at a claim, state what that is. If you have some lingering questions or issues related to your topic, briefly mention these. (See the example below)


Create a list divided into the four categories of people described in the blog posts linked above (homies, peers, enthusiasts, and experts).

Include a few people under each category. (These are loose and overlapping categories, so don't worry too much about which category they belong in. The idea is to go from more personal and informal social sources [homies, peers] to less personal and more formal social sources [enthusiasts, experts]).

With each person listed, say something about who they are and why they would be a relevant person with which to discuss the topic at hand. If possible and appropriate, link to that person's online profile or relevant website.

Click through to see an example annotated contact list

Six Principles for Project-Based Learning

In my current Renaissance Literature course, we have turned a corner and begun a new phase. While we will continue reading Renaissance literature, we will do so for the express purpose of producing an ebook which we will publish by semester's end.

We've moved to a new classroom, a computer lab, signally formally a shift from lecture-and-discussion to management-and-production.

I want to orient my students for what is to come, because project-based learning is just not the same animal as traditional, classroom-based instruction. Here are six principles for succeeding at this project-based approach to learning:

1. Keep the End in View
2. Be Flexible
3. Take Initiative
4. Work Together
5. Own It
6. Find the Stakes and Stakeholders

Assignment: Thematic Chapter Based on The Tempest

As my students begin synthesizing and writing about the six themes to which they have been introduced, I want them to shed any semblance of their writing being an exploratory response to a text, or a mere report of a researched source. It's time to begin drafting our book.

My current arrangement for the book is three sections:

1. Part One: Six Renaissance Themes
2. Part Two: Shakespeare's Tempest in Six Themes
3. Part Three: Six Lenses on Our Digital Renaissance

In Part One, teams will work together to introduce their assigned theme. This must be based on direct readings of primary texts by the student authors.

Part Two will be a collective reading of Shakespeare's Tempest that uses this play as a way to demonstrate how the six themes are deeply integrated within a well known Renaissance text and therefore really represent Renaissance thought.  More on drafting this below.

Part Three will be focused on the present and the changes and opportunities open to our society through a massive change in our media. The Renaissance themes will be used as a way to talk about and critique current digital age culture.

For the moment, I want my students to focus on Part Two.

Revisiting Research Resources

The Renaissance humanists set about recovering old and forgotten texts and bringing these to light: Petrarch found Cicero's Familiar Letters gathering dust, and later publishers like Aldus Manutius would print and disseminate such works. They went back to the primary sources of knowledge from western culture and found more there than they expected.

Similarly, today we benefit from renewed access to otherwise forgotten or barely accessible works. This began with Project Gutenberg when, in 1971, a University of Illinois college freshman, Michael Hart, keyed in the Declaration of Independence and envisioned thousands of freely available electronic texts (Lebert). His dream was realized as first the world wide web in 1990 and then an army of volunteers organized in 2000 began ramping up production. Today, almost 50,000 public domain texts reside on the site.

Little did the Finnish poet know
that his works would be
available to billions

Well known works in the western canon were the first to be digitized in this project, such as Shakespeare and the Bible. But Project Gutenberg -- like other platforms for digital content -- soon found itself accommodating far more obscure works. So, while the well known Old English epic, Beowulf was put into digital form, so also was the less known grammar by Ælfric of Eynsham. This text recovery process quickly began expanding into many different languages: one can peruse the Finnish poet Veikko Antero Koskenniemi's Lyyra ja paimenhuilu in its original tongue, or works in Mayan, Frisian, or Yiddish. The variety of newly available sources goes beyond languages, and includes a multitude of both common and obscure genres (from plays to CIA Factbooks) and formats (from novels and periodicals to computer-generated audiobooks and sheet music).

The Literary Past Meets the Digital Present: eRenaissance (a student ebook project)

a mockup cover
for our prospective eBook

Two years ago my students and I created this blog (and other online resources) in an effort to create an ebook connecting the study of literature from the European Renaissance of the 15th-17th centuries with our current digital renaissance. It was our belief that one good renaissance deserves another, and so we titled our work eRenassiance: Literary Past, Digital Present. I am now inviting a second group of students to build upon this foundation and complete that project.

The European Renaissance was a long period filled with many false starts; this will always be the case when some watershed event in culture (like the arrival of a new medium) overturns familiar assumptions and practices. So I do not feel bad that in 2013 we failed to complete and publish our book. In fact, in the meantime (working with other students) I've found an improved ebook publishing platform (LeanPub), and had students successfully publish a book somewhat similar to this one, Digitally Disruptive: Current Topics, Historical Perspectives. Given that success, and the foundation laid from the prior students, I am confident we can complete and perfect what they began.

Students recently published
this ebook in 2015 on LeanPub.com

As always with my courses, I invite my students to make their process public, precisely so that others can (as we are doing with a prior generation of students) build on what now do.  That is why we will be blogging our way toward publication.

In addition to the blog, at our disposal is the Open Renaissance Wiki where prior students collected and organized content and ideas. And we can, of course, communicate directly with those previous students and even invite them along if they have interest in resuming participation. We may engage other online tools, too, to help us reach our destination.

I am confident that over the course of the next few months we will in fact produce a completed book that will not just document student learning; it will become a resource for others' learning and a contribution to the conversation about how we come to terms with a world being radically revised by its communications media.

Six Themes
I have identified six themes, lenses by which we can understand Renaissance literature. These have proven to be handy concepts for understanding our present day, and also for conceptualizing our own project:

A Final Presentation

As my students have been braving a new world of Renaissance literary study, they have pioneered the creation of a mini-curriculum for introducing newcomers to the Renaissance and mostly to the British literature of that period.

They will present their accomplishments and preliminary findings during our final exam next week, which will be conducted as an academic conference which students presenting to a small but prepared audience. Some students (who were not part of developing the curricula) will be on hand to provide informed feedback.

In their presentation they will showcase their Renaissance literature curriculum, reporting on results to date, and outlining next steps.We will film the event to show to future students so that they can both understand and build upon the work this group has done so far.

Each of six themes will be presented on, and the students will comment on how that theme is being handled as content, and on how that theme has or can still inform the methods by which they are choosing to introduce newcomers to Renaissance literature.

Along the way, they must be prepared to discuss how a curriculum like this is justified, especially given how different it is from traditional semester- and institution-based teaching about the Renaissance. They must also describe their intended audience(s) and how this literature, and this way of presenting such literature, can engage those people.

New Medium, New Literacy

The first literary text to be put into electronic form was John Milton's Paradise Lost (shown here in the Project Gutenberg edition that's on my new Kobo Mini eReader). This was originally prepared for the computer in 1964-65 by Dr. Joseph Raben of Queens College, New York. That was no small feat, either. It required some 100,000 IBM paper punch cards that each could hold 80 characters.

Dr. Raben was pioneering the adaptation of old texts for a new medium, one now emerging from its cradle state and becoming a force to be reckoned with. He was like the Renaissance scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam, or his collaborator, the Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius. Their painstaking scholarship and printing innovations in the early 16th century laid the groundwork for centuries of literary flowering.

As the printed book came into its own, it changed how people read and wrote. It made modern schooling and modern scholarship possible. It set the grounds for how knowledge would work, publicly and privately, for centuries to come. Print was a game-changer.