By Friday morning there should be six reports recommending plays we might read. During class time, read the available reports and choose one play to do further work on. Announce your choice, and your reasons for making it, on the forum that is linked from the "Recommending some plays" wiki page. Use the title of the play as your subject line.

Between then and Wednesday, do that "further work."  It should include finding, reading a significant amount of, the text (I think all should be available either in one of the anthologies or on line; if someone recommends a play that you can't get a text of, that might suggest we won't want to focus on it). It should also include finding out what you can in about the play, its author, and its influence or importance in whatever way you like (and can find in an hour or so), either on line or in the library. Write a short description of the play and a summary of what you've found and post it as a "reply" to your announcement of a choice.

Reflecting on the process

As I've said, this course has a number of aims; one is to help people come to a deeper knowledge and understanding of the drama and theatre of the Restoration and eighteenth century, and the society surrounding them. But another, and in some ways more important, aim is to help people to be more aware of the ways in which knowledge and information, and understanding, about literature and society is developed, extended, and shared. That's been an important purpose driving the work in the stacks, the attention to literary historical texts, and the explorations of internet and online resources, through the library and on the open Web.

But there have been very few postings to the main place for tracking either kind of learning -- the weekly learning journals -- and so I have no way of knowing what's working and how, and, more important, I think participants in the course don't have much of a way to becoming conscious of the kinds of learning that are going on. So, this week, rather than simply a posting in your learning journal, here is an additional assignment. Think of it as part of a sort of midcourse assessment.

In a posting to your learning journal, before midnight Monday night, [this week's deadline is Monday because of the holiday] write a thoughtful and reflective response to as many of these questions as you can, and as you think you have something to say about. Begin each response as though the question began, "What have I learned . . .

• . . . about the way information is organized in libraries?
• . . . about how to find information on line and in the library?
• . . . about the range of approaches writers might take to a text or an event or a person?
• . . . about my own assumptions about literature and plays?
• . . . about how plays and writers come to be regarded as important?
• . . . by reading in different forms about the various ways of writing about literature for different audiences and different purposes?

I'll be inviting you to read the reflections by others and add to your own in light of them. This is part of the way in which I try to help people change the way they habitually think about learning, and to become more aware of the processes by which they learn things. It's also (as you may remember from the course introduction) part of the way I assess whether people are learning through their engagement in the course when the sheer number of tasks completed either doesn't demonstrate that someone should get a passing grade, or should get a grade above a minimum guaranteed by doing three-fourths or more of the counted tasks.