We'll begin that process of finding out what you're in for this morning, and we'll spend some additional time on it between now and next Wednesday. I want to avoid, if I can, someone saying in November, or February, that if they'd only known . . . . And also, I'd like to make it possible for a reader to tell someone else that this is a course they might really like, and to invite them to join us.
As with other activities in this course, especially early on, I'll provide some structure. Today it'll work like this. I'll begin by asking you to create . . .
A stake in the sand
As a way of marking, for you and for everyone, a beginning point for our exploration, take out a piece of paper, put your name at the top of it, and write down everything you know, or can vaguely remember, or think you remember, about the period between 1660 and the French Revolution. Events, writers, ideas, music, whatever. If you know more than you can write down in ten minutes, start with the important stuff. If you don't know enough to fill out a sentence, guess. This is going to be something we'll come back to at the end of the process; it's a way of marking your location right now so you can assess where you, and we, have come to by April.
When you've done that -- I'll allow ten minutes or so -- I'll take a few minutes for some administrative stuff and a couple of general observations.
When that's done, I'll hand out copies of the course introduction, and invite you to take them away and read them. (If you've taken a course with me before, you may have read similar documents; but, in my experience, it will be useful to spend some time with it, because things change every year and with every course.) Read it carefully, marking things you'd like to know more about, putting question marks in the margin, etc.
Between now and Wednesday we'll begin a discussion of the document, starting on line. By Monday night, you should write a reflection on the document.
The document should take at least a half hour to write, and should be no less than a few hundred words; the longer the better. It doesn't have to be organized; it doesn't have to have an introduction, body, and conclusion; don't worry about grammar and spelling, as long as someone else is going to be able to figure out what you're getting at. It doesn't need to be anything other than reflections on reading the course introduction -- questions, confusions, expressions of interest in specifics, explanation of how you understand aspects of it, whatever. The best way to do it is simply to sit down, start writing, and quit when you've spent a half hour or have about 250 words, whichever takes longest.
Now here's the fun part: post what you've written on the course introduction Forum. There's a link to it from the main course Web site. If you haven't used a Moodle Forum before, all you need to know, really, is that it's pretty much like any word processor, with a set of editing icons at the top of the page. Log in to Moodle, click on "Add a new discussion topic," and you're off.
After Monday night, and before class time next Wednesday morning, read what everybody else has written, and respond to one or two, either by answering a question, agreeing that one's important, extending what someone says, or saying something else of use to the rest of us. We'll build a short discussion in class on the basis of whatever's there.