Reflections on the Project and Plough Boys

This project has provided a really interesting learning opportunity.  Rather than knowing right at the start what our final product would look like, we, as a class, embarked on a journey.  The end result was a curriculum model and platform that I don't think any of us had expected at the start.  At the beginning of the semester, we struggled with the question of how to create an eBook that would be more than just a digital version of an anthology.  But what we created wasn't even an eBook.  Instead, our book evolved into a curriculum which took form not in writing, but in videos.  

So then we were, and remain, faced with new questions: who would use the system we had put together and how much of it would they use?  Would it be used primarily by high school/middle school instructors as supplementary material?  What about university level and homeschooling families?  If used in a classroom, what might be used?  The introduction videos? The quizzes?  It is certainly a lot of questions to answer.  My preliminary thought is that these videos would be useful as a part of an online course.  Online courses are being used more and more in today's society and the online medium would allow for easy integration of videos, online badge systems, and links to external study sources.

This learning process has also meant a lot of creative work on the part of the individual theme groups.  While we were only able to work on three of our six themes for the final product, each theme group had ideas and concerns about our individual topics.  As a member of the Plough Boys and Bibles group, I wondered how Plough Boys would have developed if we had time to create this theme's curriculum.  One of the question we had as a class generally which tied in particularly with this theme was the question of faith.  As students at a church-owned university, there is a (I think) natural desire to share our religious knowledge as well as or in conjunction with our secular knowledge.  Since the Plough Boys theme is all about the accessibility of religion, there is a ready-made connection here.  Like early Protestants, we want to make our religious beliefs accessible and understandable to others.  But we certainly don't want to cram our beliefs down anyone's throat or be so religiously focused that it adds a bias to our work.  This would limit our audience.  In short, the idea of "how much religion?" is both important to the Plough Boys theme and to our class in general.

Insta-knowledge

One thing that I noticed while reading Writing About Literature in the Digital Age, was how the writing was not following conventional rules. There was the basic skeleton, but for the most part, the writing deviated from our typical scholarly, textbook writing. Personally, I was a fan. I liked that the writer in the Introduction used personal pronouns to pull me into the ideas he was discussing. I liked that the book felt more like a blog. It was personal, and user friendly.
Writing in the digital age needs to cater to an entirely different pallet than writing from any other time. People today are used to getting the information they need in a matter of seconds. Just the other day I was watching the TV show Friends. In one particular scene, Ross and Pheobe's new boyfriend, Mike, were discussing the difference between loggers and beer. Ross finally spoke up and said "Let's look it up." (View video to see examples. This moment happens around 2:00. I enjoy the whole thing though hah)
 I was surprised when I noticed a dictionary sitting between them in the next scene. I was surprised that I was surprised. Friends is a TV show that hasn't been around for a lot of years, and yet in the show cell phones aren't barely used, and computers are not all that common, when in our society today it is hard to find a teenager without either.
It wasn't that long ago that I was using a paper copy of a dictionary for a school project. But using a dictionary for anything not school related? Hasn't happened for a while. Google, Dictionary.com, and YouTube have become my new sources for information. I use Pinterest to find recipes, ideas for outfits, and ideas home improvement projects. I am living in a society where instant information is the norm. It isn't unusual to have a question and then be able to go to google and find the answer almost immediately. PRESTO! Answers!
Because of this, books and text books in school should be able to change as the times change. I think as a part of our ebook, the tweethis idea is a good one. It gives a good brief summary of the chapter's contents, but caters to the insta-knowledge ideals in our current society.