CURRENT COURSES HOME LINKS
RECENT WORK CONTACT STUDENT WORK

FORUM ASSIGNMENT 

(SEE PAGE BOTTOM FOR SAMPLES)

Over the course of the semester, you will conduct an e-mail forum with one of your classmates.  A forum is not a chat room, or a string of instant messages, but a series of extended responses to a particular subject.  Try to follow your thoughts out to an end.  As a rough guideline, expect to produce at least eight one-page responses each, for a total of sixteen pages combined.  You may go longer.   

The subject of your forum should be fairly broad, allowing you to raise a variety of different issues, questions, ideas, and may shift or change through the course of your discussion.  Possible topics will be suggested, but you are encouraged to pursue your own.  The only requirement is that your forum directly relate to the work we are doing in class.  This doesn’t mean that you have to be talking about a particular text(s) all the time, but that you always bring your points back to the text(s).  For example, you may have something very significant to say about the sitcom, Seinfeld, but make sure it is significant to some course matter if you intend to discuss it. 

On a predetermined day, you and your partner will present the evolving results of your forum to the class, describing the direction your discussion is taking, important questions, issues, and ideas raised, etc.  In other words, you will open your work up for general discussion with your classmates.  The quality of this presentation will influence the grade you receive when submitting a hard copy of the completed forum at semester‘s end.  Since this is a group assignment, you will each receive the same grade, so make sure that you and your partner are holding up your ends.  Though I’d like you to go over the material before handing it in, correcting sloppy mistakes and making clarifications where necessary, you will not be graded on the quality of your prose, but on the quality of your ideas and discussion.  Have you raised important issues?  Did you bring a new understanding to the course texts?  I am primarily interested in your ability to think critically and creatively.

CLICK ON LINKS FOR SAMPLES

SAMPLE ONE            SAMPLE TWO

 

CURRENT COURSES HOME LINKS
RECENT WORK CONTACT STUDENT WORK