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Students in this class will either present a brief oral report to the class or keep an online journal (weblog) of their reading this semester. Both options will involve about the same amount of work, but with the weblog option, you'll be spreading the work out over the entire semester.

If you choose to keep a weblog AND present a report, you do not need to take the final exam.

Weblog Option . A weblog (or blog) is a way for you to keep an informal online journal recording your thoughts on the readings. It is your space to write down your thoughts, insights, and opinions about the literature. You can discuss what interests you most about the work we've read, connect the work to something in contemporary culture, analyze a theme or image, write alternative dialogues for the characters, ask questions, and so on. Your weblog posts can serve as an idea board for your paper.

You do not need to have any knowledge about creating web pages to choose this option; the beauty of a weblog is that all the technical work is done for you. You simply type in your comments and click on the "publish" button.

Many free blogging sites are available.which would work well for our class. Creating an account and setting up your weblog on any of the free sites will take about five minutes. You should try to choose a site that allows the creation of an RSS feed and permits comments, as Blogger does (and as most sites do). Blogger (www.blogger.com) and Wordpress (www.wordpress.com) are two popular free blogging sites.

Class members who read your blog and post comments will receive class participation credit for doing so.

Requirements for the Weblog Option

1. Write 10 entries of approximately 300-500 words each. If you choose the weblog option, you'll write at least one entry each week, for a total of ten entries in all. These posts can be long entries To allow for exams, holidays, and papers, some weeks have no weblog post due.

2. Post your entry to your weblog by the Thursday due date at 9 p.m. You do not need to wait for Thursday. You can post at any time during the week, but 9 p.m. on Thursday is the due date each week; after that, your post will count for the next week. You can miss a few posts and still receive credit, but your grade would be reduced.

3. Respond to at least one post by another person by Thursday at 9 p.m.

The weblog will be graded primarily on your satisfactory completion of the above criteria (75%), although the quality of your posts (25%) will also be a factor.

Topics

The topics you write about on your weblog are up to you, as long as they relate to the class. You should think of the weblog as a series of response papers or as a professional journal in which you record your thoughts on the films. Corrigan has some good suggestions both for keeping track of the films you watch and for writing down the details in a concise manner by using a screening report or a movie review (8).. Here are some possible topics for your blog:

1. Response to a film. You can write about what you liked and what you didn't, of course, but the more significant question is why you liked or disliked certain elements.
2. Singling out a film element such as plot or character to analyze. Was the plot logical? Were the characters complex? What were their motivations?
3. Choose a specific motif, visual image, or piece of music and follow it throughout the film. What does it contribute to the whole?
4. Themes. See Corrigan (p. 39) for some good questions to address.
5. What is the structure of the film (Corrigan, p. 47)? How is point of view handled?