Our class is under way

As of Monday our class is under way! I realize that this is the first online course most of you have taken, and I expect a certain amount of confusion and anxiety. I hope the first chat session helped clear some of that up, and I will try to address a few issues I have heard about here.

I have now received addresses form about half of you for your blogs, and I have been adding them to the class blog page on our website. If you have not set up your blog and emailed me your URL, please do so as soon as possible. I encourage you to visit some of the blogs of your classmates. I also encourage you to do what some of your classmates and I have already done, and put a picture of yourself on your blogsite (unless you feel uncomfortable doing so). I think it important in an online course to do what we can to establish the sorts of human contact and interaction taken for granted in a face to face course. With enough pictures we can get an approximation of a class, rather than a group of isolated individuals sitting at different times in front of computer screens and keyboards. Finally, I encourage you to look at some of the blogs from the students who took this course in previous summer sessions, to get a better idea of how to write your blog entries about the readings. (Don't copy their entries, of course!)

Note that the better posts tend to focus on one or two poems, quote and analyze specific passages, and dig beneath the surface. Avoid the tendency to generalize about large chunks of the readings, or merely to restate the poems in your own words. As you read ask yourself the following: Why did the author write the poem or text this way and not some other way? How does the text make me feel? What about the text produces that response? Why might the author wanted to have produced that response? These questions will not have clear cut, obvious answers, of course, but that is true of most of the interesting questions worth thinking about!

I also would like you to listen to the first podcast for the course. Note that I recorded this introduction to the course and to myself the first time I taught this course online. While the information on the course will tend to correct, the personal information for me and my family is two years out of date. You can either subscribe to the podcasts via the Apple iTunes Store, or download them from our website. Some students told me in the chat sessions that they ran into problems downloading from iTunes, while it worked for others. If you run into a problem, just download the podcasts from our web site. I would suggest as you begin reading the literary texts that you read first, then listen to the appropriate podcast as you look back over the text.

Finally, as I mentioned in our chats I am going out of town and will be away from my computer (and web access) until Memorial Day. I will begin reading and commenting on your blog posts and answering your questions then.

In our next chat sessions will discuss the early Romantics (up to Coleridge). I look forward to hearing what you have to say!