What is a playgoer's guide?

I'll distribute a selection of them -- both some that have been prepared by earlier versions of this class, and some professionally prepared ones -- so you can get a sense of what kind of thing has been seen as appropriate.

Selecting some items for inclusion

We'll have a selection of research reports to work with: the ones from last time, which should be on line, and the new question reports from this morning. They are all available on the course Web site: there's a link to "Research reports on The Rover (as per Prompt #15), which is made up of two tables, arranged by students' names, and then one to "Questions for research on  The Rover (as per Prompt #16" with the questions from last time and links to the reports by the people who selected them.

Our job is to decide which pieces of information should be included in a Playgoer's Guide, and then to edit and polish them so that they'll fit into the format we have.

The first thing to do is decide the overall shape of the guide -- that is, what sections there might be and what should be in them. The best way I know to give everyone a role in this process is to set up three or four groups and give each group a half hour to prepare an outline -- a list of sections of a guide and, in each, an indication of what report should form the basis of it. You can do this in the lab, or with the sets of reports I'll have printed out. At the end of that time, by 10:00, you should write your outline on the whiteboard. It should list sections (possibly with headers) and which reports, or parts of reports, might be included in each.

Selecting and editing

We'll select among the outlines and come up with one outline we agree is the best compromise. Everyone will select one section to edit into a coherent section by Monday (depending on how many sections we decide there should be, there will be two to four people working in parallel on a section). By Monday morning at 9:00 each person should have posted the text of one section in her engl2223/ folder, as a file called rovguide.htm. I will have created a table of links to these edited sections on the course Web site. During the day Monday everybody will indicate, via an email to the engl2223 list, which ones should be included in the Guide.

Moving on

I'll send out an email on Monday night, determining the final shape and inviting people to find on the Web appropriate graphics to be used at various points in the Guide -- and on Wednesday in class, with some luck, we'll assemble the final version and edit and print it.