We'll begin today with a round in which people reflect on the experience of posting on the forum and reading a bit of what others have had to say. This may not take the whole time period: our immediate task is to learn as much as we can from reading the work of others, and to begin deepening our understanding by responding to each other's work, and using the responses to make our own work more useful. To do that we need to start reading.

Working with the published reports

As I said last time, we're going to be reading and discussing these reports on line. Here are the next steps.

By the end of class time today, I expect that all the reports will be available in the "Reading and discussing reports on preliminary explorations" forum. Obviously everyone can't read all of them, but it seems to me that we should be able to read at least nine or ten.  Here's a way to make sure that they all get read with equal frequency. The table below has three columns, each with seven or eight names in it (distributed at random). Your first job is to read the other reports in the same column as yours, and respond thoughtfully to them (more on thoughtful responding below). Then choose any two or three others you like, and read and respond to them.
 

Thoughtful responding

This is a different kind of reading and responding than you've probably done before. The basic purpose of it is to help the author of the report you're reading make her report more useful and informative to you. It should be clear that expressions of approval (or not) aren't much help; it should also be clear that suggestions for improving style, format, spelling, grammar, etc., won't help either (unless something's so confusing you really don't understand). What might help? Mainly, real questions about matters you think the writer might have learned from reading in her book (or books) and that you genuinely would like to know more about. So: read with attention, thinking about what the writer's saying that you don't know already, and what more she might have said, and what more she might be able to find by going back to her sources.

If it were me, I'd print out the ones I want to read, and take them out in the sunshine.

Deadlines

Do this by the end of the weekend (that is, Sunday night). After that, read through the comments and questions on your own report and start thinking about how you might edit, expand, and revise your report to respond to them. You'll do this not by adding responses to questions at the end, but by revising the report so that it addresses those questions and makes them  unnecessary. You do not, of course, have to respond to all the questions and issues (some may be impossible, some may be dumb. Your call). But use what you can to make your report better. Do this by working with the original text (or copying what you posted to a word processor file), revising and editing, and then posting it as a final reply to the discussion under your original report. On Monday we'll discuss issues raised in the online discussion and problems people have with responding; I'll respond to questions about the period (insofar as I can).

The revised versions of the reports will be what we'll work with on Wednesday.