Reading Swift

We should now have made a decision about which one work (or possibly two) of Swift we'll read over the holidays as a way of finishing our work on him, so that we are ready at the beginning of the second term to scout out other major writers of nonfiction we should attend to. When you've had a chance to do the reading, at latest during the nice long leisurely week after New Year's and before classes resume, post whatever you'd like to say about it to the appropriate section of the Reading Swift forum that we've been using.

Ending the term

What you should do is essentially the same process we did at the end of October. That is, you should look at the records page, to see what your total tasks completed for first term is (by the end of today there will be a total column, and a link to the minima I've determined). As usual, if you're satisfied with your minimum, you don't need to compose a learning reflection; I'll send that to the Registrar as a midterm mark.  If you decide to write a learning reflection, you should have yet another look at the section of the course introduction on evaluation, and spend a bit of time with my posting offering yet more advice on composing such reflections.

The examination for this course is scheduled for a week from now: Wednesday, December 14. That will be the deadline for posting a midterm learning reflection.  You may, of course, do it any time you want before that. I've set up a location for posting them that is a wiki rather than a forum; it will look and work pretty much the same, but unlike a forum you'll be able to edit your own any time you like, so you might want to post a draft and edit it there as you like.

Feedback

I'd like everybody either to offer some anonymous feedback on the course, or decide not to (what I want to avoid is having folks simply intend to do it and then put it off and forget about it). So I'm changing the structure (as well as the kinds of questions I'm asking).

After tomorrow, and before the deadline for posting a reflection, click on the link to Feedback for Russ, fill in your name, and either skip down and click "submit" or go through the form and respond to as many questions as you like.

What happens next is that the form is automatically submitted to the department assistant, who strips the names off and saves the responses. After the 14th she'll send me the names of everybody who's submitted the form (that way I'll know nobody just forgot); after Christmas at some point she'll send me a long file with all the responses, disconnected from the names. I'll read them and, as I did before, post them on the course Web site.