A Note From The Blog's Designer

Encountering various literary works across multiple genres, readers will choose three (or more!) writing prompts on a WEEKLY basis and respond to them. Responses will be loaded through the use of technologies designed to assist participants in publishing their work. Thus, this blog is an example of active-learning enhanced with technology.

As a specimen of read/write active-learning, the blog is also designed to assist participants in their personal experience of making new meanings regarding various genres of literature--primarily by empowering them and their process of writing through reflection and discovery. Questions are designed to allow each reader to access his or her own thoughts and ideas through repeated readings and reveries--ultimately providing them a platform for composing and storing written artifacts that trace and record the readers' literary thinking and general cognitive development across time.

Technological enhancements for the blog include Google docs, forms, and of course, Blogger. The technology-enhanced "thinking template" for this program was designed to assist readers in creating post entries without having to worry about the technology itself getting in their way. Further, it was fashioned by the designer to assist readers in developing more focused critical-thinking and writing skills by providing them with a seamless, technologically functional mechanism that kept the technologies in service to the learning, not the other way around. The blog medium, as it occurs naturally in today's world, was chosen for its practicality in service to the participants' knowledge-making needs. It was perceived by the designer that they deserved a better practice area for self-expression and interpretation of literature across multiple genres, one that was not constrained by technological confinement within a proprietary field, but one that more clearly demonstrated constructivist principles. Thus, the blog was chosen as a vehicle to escape that ironic prison called an LMS (ah, a prison "by any other name"). A measure of celebration for assuming that freedom's price is that the artifacts here will obtain a certain permanence and is therefore an additional bonus in this regard.

While this blog is intended to be a private site, participants should be aware that an occasional visitor may wander in--either through the web (by accident), or through special invitation by the blog's designer. All inquiries should be sent to the blog's designer: ~lk.