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.

Plough Boys Backdrop - Draft Version

On Saturday I worked on creating a backdrop for our Plough Boys avatar.  We decide that we really liked the stick figures idea and wanted to run with that, so I did a computer-drawing farm as a backdrop to match the stick-figure farm boy.  The farm boy himself is yet to be born, but here is the draft of his farm:

It's rough, I know.  But I'm going to play around with it more when I can get on a computer with some better picture features.

The Tempest and Christian Forgiveness

"As you from crimes would pardon'd be, 

Let your indulgences set me free."

-The Tempest, Epilogue

These lines bring to close Shakespeare's play of discovery, love, and forgiveness.  Perhaps the greatest of these themes is forgiveness since it permeates both the play and the entire character of Prospero.  In the Renaissance world of renewed religious fervor, due to the Protestant Reformation, Prospero stands as an example of the ideal Christian: both forgiving and desiring to be forgiven.

Prospero's gift for forgiveness is no small matter in this play.  He is betrayed by his brother and king, exiled from his land, and left to the mercies of the sea with the young Miranda.  But the seas and Providence are merciful and Prospero and Miranda make it safely to their new island home.  Now, years later, those who betrayed Prospero are delivered into his hands.  But what is shocking is that rather than take revenge on his brother and the king for their betrayals, Prospero returns the mercy shown to him by God and forgives his enemies.  

Now, in the final scene of the play, Prospero turns the role of mercy to the audience.  Using the imagery of judgement and forgiveness, Prospero begs the audience for their applause and approval.  Watch the following clip of the British Shakespeare Company's The Tempest Epilogue and then respond to the Questions For Thought.

Questions For Thought 

1. How is the audience to exemplify the idea of mercy based off of Prospero's epilogue?

2. Prospero asks the audience to let their praise free him "as you from crimes would pardon'd be."  Is this referring just to temporal crimes?  Or is their a spiritual element to this?

3. Much of the Protestant Reformation focused on having a personal relationship with God.  Are there instances/allusions in the play which demonstrate a personal relationship between Prospero and God?

Rental Computers, Southern Baptists, and Hurtles

Boy oh boy was I nervous at first about including video as part of our project. First of all, I like standing behind the camera, not in front of it.  But then when we viewed everyone's videos and I saw how some students had really great introductory videos both being on screen and off, I felt a lot more comfortable with the idea.

I agree that there are a lot of problems that go along with including videos (or any sort of multimedia).  It's time consuming.  We have varying skills with videos, video-editing, etc.  Some of us don't have the technology to work easily with videos at home (for example, my laptop kicked-the-bucket a couple of weeks ago and I've been using a rental computer... the webcam doesn't even work).

HOWEVER.  Opening ourselves up to using multimedia is brilliant because, as someone pointed out in class, it gives us a greater potential audience.  Some people would rather read through material.  Some would rather watch a video. We can provide both.  And knowing that we have video editing software available to us on campus solves the problem of personal computers lacking that capability.  The key, I think, to keep from getting stressed out is to set and adhere to time limits.  Now this doesn't mean you close your computer after working two hours on a project regardless of whether or not it's finished, but we have to set general limits.  It's easy to go overboard.  The results can be fantastic, but we also have to look realistically at what we need to accomplish.

Thinking about videos and multimedia in regard to the themes I am working on, I think both could benefit greatly from this idea.  Brave New Worlds is rather obvious.  There is a lot you can do there with the theme of exploration.  In addition, the idea of using multimedia is, in and of itself, a Brave New World.  The way we are going about the project is already an exemplification of the theme.

Plough Boys was a little harder to think about.  You say reformation, I think old men haranguing congregations about Hell fire and damnation.  Maybe that's just the ghosts of my Southern-Baptist ancestors clinging to my mind though.  But the more I thought about it, this idea totally works.  The Reformation was all about making things more accessible to the common man.  Multimedia is one way our project becomes more accessible.  But even more than that, think about it.  Sure, a big part of the Reformation was people reading the Word of God.  An even bigger part though?  Hearing it!  They weren't just reading.  They were going to church and listening to preachers.  What a better way to exemplify this that actually have an audio/visual component???

Anyway, that's the skinny on my thinking as we move ahead in the project.  There are a lot of hurtles to jump, but I'm excited to see where this goes.

Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller

Well, I may not be the most eloquent on video, but I dare say that lack of eloquence is typical when exploring a new medium... or genre, like Thomas Nashe was doing.  Watch the video for more on Nashe then take a look at the full text of his prose narrative The Unfortunate Traveller here.  See if you can spot some similarities with how I deal with being on video and how Nashe dealt with the new genre of prose narrative.

It's Not Business, It's Personal

Nothing puts me to sleep faster than reading criticism written from the highly impersonal third-person perspective.  That, "As one reads this book, one finds..." makes me want to tear the essay to shreds.  The constant use of "one" or "the reader" is more distracting than any bias I might note by the writer using the personal "I."  That is one of the reasons I loved reading through some of the chapters in Writing About Literature in the Digital Age.  Not only did the writers use the personal "I" and easy, understandable prose, but they also addressed the very issue I mentioned above.  I especially enjoyed Ben Wagner's chapter about the need to make literary criticism more personal.  When he used a personal anecdote to demonstrate his point, not only was his point easier to understand, but I was also instantly more interested in what he had to say.  By making writing personal rather than business, we show that we care, and that makes a reader more interested than anything (as pointed out by Dr. Burton in chapter 2).

Just like the students whose pieces we read for today, we are undertaking a big task that may not receive much attention.  Or any attention.  But we have to set it apart in some way.  I think that reading through these chapters showed me that more than anything, we must make this personal.  We have to be personally invested in this because readers can tell when you are and that, in turn, makes them interested.  It's not all about the personal "I" writing either.  We should want to develop a personal relationship with our texts, like the Renaissance man was creating a personal relationship with books and (this is for you, Plough Boys) the Bible.  For me, I now want to really find a way to connect with each of my texts so that when I write about that text, readers will be able to tell that I am excited about what I am reading and writing.

It's not personal, it's business.
It's not business, it's personal.