Literary Kinds has brought with it myriad new ideas in a new (for me at least) format--blogging.  My high school career was marked by very little technology use, so the transition to this class was a bit abrupt.  However, I have grown to love our online discussion and hope that it has proven useful to those outside of our class as well--after all, knowledge and ideas are not things that are supposed to be limited to just one room or one group of people when they could be spread and put to good use.  I also find the format of Serendip very easy to use, especially for those like myself who have never blogged or posted on a group forum before.  And even though the recent process of building our "sy

So far, this class has been wonderful.  

So far I have found this class to be highly engaging, unusual, and flexible. I especially appreciate the online component of the class, as it has given me a  platform to develop my thoughts and see how they evolve, a process often lost when I do not have such an open space in which to think and wonder. I initially struggled with the informality of the class discussions, but at this point I would not suggest a restructuring of class discussion as I find I am pushing myself to adapt to the openness of the class and in the process am growing in unexpected ways.

So far this class has been formatted mainly around the internet and the study of the genre/platform of blogs. Our weekly web-posting-blogs have been a helpful way to organize ongoing thoughts in a public way so that we can continue discussions outside of class and in a format relevant to our studies. Posting our papers online also allowed for us to reply to our instructor's comments (I am not sure what percentage of us did this, but it was definitely possible). Although I was at first overwhelmed by the theory (on a topic I didn't quite understand to begin with), looking back I can connect the articles with later self-discoveries that our class made (so helpful indeed).

 Anne mentioned at the beginning of class that last week we got stuck talking about specific works we might read for the rest of the semester, so today we broke up into small groups again and discussed possibilities for the rest of the semester's syllabus.  I was in a group with jrf, rachelr, and aseidman.  The four of us discussed the possibility of focusing on parody through mystery.  At the beginning of class, Anne had also mentioned what a brilliant idea she thought focusing on parody would be, and two groups in addition to ours brought up the idea of parody as well in their proposed syllabi.  The fourth group was interested in focusing on the idea of the self as viewed through identity, memory, and reality.

I really like the idea of  following a theme of villains. It definitely offers a lot of possibilities for things that we can read/watch. I don't know if anyone would be interested in reading East of Eden as the novel, since a majority of the class probably has in high school, but its antagonist was meant by Steinbeck to be "pure evil" (she was modeled after his ex wife haha). 

 So I don't know which way our course ideas will take us, but I just wanted to say that I LOVE The Great Mouse Detective and its fairly short, so I think that it would be really fun to get that into our syllabus (or ship…). That and The Butterfly Effect.