Our group's intent was to incorporate a variety of literary kinds in order to satisfy the different interests expressed through other students's online posts. It was obvious that many other groups also wanted to achieve the same thing. The proposal we came up with questioned how time travel gets handled in different forms and how this travel influences the identity of main characters. We were also curious in exploring other questions: how technological and platform changes affect the same topic (time and travel), how the placement of a reader in time effects the novel, continuing questions of platform vs. genre, and how does one's identity change with time. 

We first discussed maybe connecting novels with graphic novels but then moved on to the idea of "themes of identity" because we thought it would easily address everyone's needs if we explored different mediums.  We could spend 1-2 week(s) on each thing depending on length of the work.  The only problem would be that it might be hard for people (or at least our group) who don't know much about graphic novels to know which ones would fit into a theme, so we thought our class could pick works, maybe?

reading through everyones posts, it occured to me that everyone seems to be primarily concerned with what medium we should be using for the second half of the semster. while this is important, i think we shouldnt forget about what it is we're trying to explore

talking about blogs has brought up a lot of different questions in class, questions related to identity - who do you create an ientity for? when does this change? does it change?

the idea of building oneself id also an important one - do we have hard wiring or are we told that we do? how much does this affect our lives? how do we build ourselves and what do we use as a base?

 Okay guys, I hope no one hates me for this, but I would really love to go the route of the long novels (Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Uncle Tom's Cabin) that was proposed in class, spending roughly two weeks on each book (maybe a little bit more time for Moby Dick and a little less for The Scarlet Letter, just because of the respective lengths of each book).  I just think that we've spent enough time with blogs and the Internet.  This is the first English class I've taken that spent an extensive amount of time dealing with contemporary readings on the Internet, and although I have enjoyed that, I'm ready to go back to books.

 As many others have said, I'd like to stick with this exploration of the new(ish) medium that is the internet.  Looking at different genres on this platform is fascinating to me, and I propose that the next genre we tackle is the database.  The Walt Whitman archive we read about is an idea... I think the study of this genre  and this medium would be beneficial in that it would show everyone new things that are being formed in the world.  Enough of this old stuff!  I have loved this class and the opportunity it has given me to investigate new and developing ways of publishing texts, and while I do love novels, I'm sure we all have had plenty of exposure to them in previous English classes.

I think it would be an interesting idea for us to study serial fiction as a genre.

 I agree with TPB1988's opinion that "it would be a shame to return to the routine of a stereotypical English class." I've definitely enjoyed the uncharacteristically light reading requirements for the class thus far, but I'm pretty sure that most of us weren't given the opportunity in high schools or in other more "focused" literature classes to really study and analyze how the internet is quickly becoming a server for academic work, information, and just the formation of communities in general via blogging. A few months ago I met and chatted over coffee with a former editor for a publishing firm, and he warned me that print medium is taking a backseat to the media and technology.

While I love to read classic novels that are normally studied in English classes I believe that our Literary Kinds class is special. This class has provided me with an opportunity to re-evaluate what a "genre" can be, and to be honest I think this will be one of the few English classes that doesn't mandate reading actual books. I think that we should take advantage of the opporunity to study different variations of text because we may never get a chance to do so again.