Posted: March 26th, 2015

Assignment 3: Online Participation in Discussion Forums

Assignment 3: Online Participation in Discussion Forums
Total Marks: 100
This assignment is worth 10 per cent of your final grade and has two parts, each requiring two postings to discussion forums.
Assignment 3 relates to both poetry and drama (specifically, Shakespeare’s Othello). It is based on the material in the final units on poetry (3 and 4) and the introductory unit on drama and tragedy (5). If you are planning to complete the course in four months, you should have posted your final online comment no later than the end of week 9.
Purpose of the Discussion Forums
Assignment 3 is designed to encourage and develop student interaction and engagement with poetry and drama. Indeed, the discussion forums are the virtual classroom for ENGL 101, providing an opportunity for the exchange and debate of ideas at the peer level. While your instructor will be monitoring each of the forums and posting comments from time to time, it is your participation that will ensure both the liveliness and the quality of the evolving group’s “classroom” experience.
Please bear in mind, however, that given the built-in flexibility of due dates and the varying course completion rates of your fellow students, postings to discussion forums may be irregular. You may find yourself making all of your primary postings (your main or original contributions to the discussion forums) before you are able to make some of your secondary postings (your responses to the primary postings of fellow students).
General Requirements for Online Postings to Discussion Forums
While postings to the Literary Café are optional, postings to the two discussion forums for Units 3, 4, and 5 are required. There is one discussion forum for poetry and one discussion forum for drama. The requirements for each of the discussion forums are the same. To each forum—thus for each discussion topic—you must make at least two postings: your primary posting will consist of a single-paragraph response (in the range of 5–8 sentences) to the current topic, and your secondary posting will consist of a response to the primary posting of another student. Your mark for Assignment 3 will therefore be based on your primary and secondary postings to each of the two required discussion forums. Additional secondary postings are, of course, greatly encouraged, and you should feel free to monitor all of the discussion forums and offer any further comments and responses. Please note that the WebCT environment allows you to compose and to edit your postings and responses to discussion forums before you send them. This will allow you to ensure that your major postings, especially, represent not only your best thinking but also your best expression and writing. This is important because when your instructor evaluates your Assignment 3 postings, sentence structure, grammar and mechanics will be taken into account.
Part 1: Poetry Discussion (connected to Units 3 and 4)
To do the research for your primary posting to the Poetry discussion, you will visit “Poetry 180,” a new Web site from the American Library of Congress in Washington DC. “Poetry 180,” is the brainchild of former U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, and it was designed initially by Collins as a way to introduce the pleasure of poetry into the lives of high school students. The site consists of 180 poems, personally selected by Collins from poems published in the U.S. in the previous year. The poems are meant to be read aloud (but not discussed) by a teacher, one every morning, for the whole school year. Collins believes that just by listening to a year’s worth of good poems, young ears will learn to appreciate the fusion of sound and feeling that makes reading or listening to a poem a pleasing and stimulating experience.
All too often, says Collins, who has taught poetry at university for more than thirty years, students come into his Poetry 101 class thinking that what they have to do is tie a poem to a chair and “torture” a confession out of it. We hope that this process doesn’t sound too familiar, though we have probably all been guilty of it in our formal attempts to write about poetry.
STEP 1: As the first step in preparing your primary Poetry posting, please go now to the Poetry 180 Web site and read “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins: http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/001.html. As you will see, Collins’ poem might well be subtitled “how not to torture a poem.”
STEP 2: Now you are ready to do your research and prepare your primary Poetry posting. Your task is to pick any one of the poems from Poetry 180 and hold it to the light until it shines for you. Then prepare a brief essay-posting (about 200 words or six to nine sentences) in which you introduce the poem to your fellow students, indicate its subject and what you take to be its theme, and describe what you saw when you held it to the light. You will to want to focus on one particular aspect of the poem—or one stylistic device—and to show how this conveys meaning. But remember, no torturing allowed! Be sure your posting indicates the correct title, author and number of your “pick,” so that others may find it easily. All of the poems are listed at the following site: http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-list.html
Step 3: For your secondary posting, visit the site of a fellow student’s poetry “pick,” and add your own comments or feedback to those of the original posting. You may perform this part of the Poetry task after you have moved on to Unit 5, if you wish.
Part 2: Drama Discussion (connected to Unit 5)
Step 1: This part of Assignment 3 assumes you have read through Shakespeare’s Othello and the Unit 5 material. If you have not yet done this, you should do so now.
Step 2: Your first task here is to prepare one primary posting to the Drama discussion of Shakespeare’s Othello. Although the assigned topics here will vary over time, they will all be taken from the Study Questions posed in the printed Guide to Reading Othello, Unit 5 in the Course Units. For example, the Drama discussion forum may focus on Act I (or II, III, IV, or V) and your tutor may ask you to respond to any one of the various Study Questions for that act. Your primary posting should consist of about 200 words or six to nine sentences.
Step 3: Your final task here is to respond with a secondary posting to one of the primary postings of one of your fellow students.
Remember: To complete Assignment 3, you must make four postings in total, two to Poetry and two to Drama, with one primary and one secondary posting to each discussion.

Expert paper writers are just a few clicks away

Place an order in 3 easy steps. Takes less than 5 mins.

Calculate the price of your order

You will get a personal manager and a discount.
We'll send you the first draft for approval by at
Total price:
$0.00
Live Chat+1-631-333-0101EmailWhatsApp