Class assignments Jan. 13, 2011

Dear Scholars,

The WiZiQ class last week was missing audio. This week will work better.

The assignment was to submit your own suggestions regarding subject matter and the writing process. What would you like to write about, with whom and under what conditions — online collaboration, realtime, etc.

I presented a few suggestions. Please be prepared to submit your preferences from among these together with your suggestions of others.

• Dramatic and comedic dialog writing.
• Research and research paper writing the easy way.
• Rewriting and editing — starting with an existing work and producing something new and different.
• Skit writing and production.
• Comic monologue writing.
• Letter writing — from personal correspondence to business letters and applications.
• Let’s see how much fun Shakespeare can be. Perhaps we will write some of our own pseudoshakespeare.
• Collaborative story writing — groups of different sizes working together.
• Completing and publishing our literary journal issue and starting on the next one.

You were also asked to bring to class any appropriate material that has inspired you and which demonstrates language or ideas that you feel would be of value to the rest of the class: videos, articles, books, films — whatever you find interesting. Be sure to post your thoughts. Please everyone have something to suggest.

Please review the lecture Learning Languages Like Children. and post your thoughts.

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Assignments:
Here’s a new lecture by Eagleton on The Metaphysics of Terror. It is somewhat heavy going, but as is the case with all of Eagleton’s lectures, it uses brilliant and flawless language. I have added a list of “vocabulary to look for” to the page.

Here is an interesting lecture by a Canadian scholar on how to inspire students about mathematics. The prose is unremarkable, but the ideas are very interesting.

Here is a series of short videos by David Berlinski, a very rare bird, partly because he is a scholar who presents serious criticisms of Darwinism, but even more so because he is an American who can really speak.

Agenda this week: Discuss, define, choose projects to work on. Anything is fine as long as it involves words. Let’s go over submitted projects: Amanda’s After Christmas and Dorothy’s newest installment of The Stuttering Dinosaur. Let’s go over some of the vocabulary in the assignments for this week: lecture by Eagleton on The Metaphysics of Terror and a series of short videos by David Berlinski. These are rather challenging and discussion of some terminology in advance might make them more accessible. Let’s listen to this very short lecture on teaching and learning by violinist Hilary Hahn. Let’s talk about the memorization of text and poetry. Here is an interesting article on the subject. Progress on our literary journal. Any subjects anyone wants to introduce.