Reflection+Journal

=Reflection Journal=

In the spring 08 semester, six students, Diane Aiken, Kathryn Kummer, Lindsay Milbourne, Allie Myers, Stephanie Polukis, and Julie Wigley, and I began an undergraduate research project. Our goal was to continue collaborative research on areas of interest in British literature and to improve the wiki as a tool for teaching and learning. This journal records our reflections on the process. Chris Penna 2/20/08

3/1/08 Well good evening Reflection Journal! I am just going to write a brief entry about what I have experienced so far with this wiki project. Personally, it is an excellent stress reliever for me. I guess because it is a combination of accomplishment and enjoyable work. Usually I find myself doing the wiki when I notice I have many things on my plate and I just want to have something to cross off the list that doesn't break my back in the process. I really enjoy editing these pages and making a differerence overall on this site. So far, I have only worked on the Victorian main page, but I do think it is coming along nicely. I am also looking forward to helping the new students with this project in the near future. Well, that is all I have for today. To anyone who reads this: if you are using this site as a resource, I hope it is helpful and accessible.

KK

3/2/08 I worked on the wiki tonight and tried to make the Romantic section more presentable. I reformatted the page to make it uniform with all of the others, but thought it best to combine Background & Literature for the time being. In my opinion, the Romantic Age is primarily an artistic movement and doesn't have as much political background as the the Restoration and Victorian Age do--- both are centered around monarchs (Charles II and Queen Victoria)....However, on second thought, it may be a good idea to include information about the Industrial Revolution. I'm not sure about the French Revolution just yet since I don't know what the original authors of the page were implying or what sources they read. What does the French Revolution have to do with Romanticism?

I also noticed that the original page focused on The Augustan Age more than the Romantic Age. I cut out the majority of the information about the Augustan Age, but kept the link. It might be a good idea to relabel the link as "Restoration" as some people may not know that the two terms are synonymous.

That's pretty much all for tonight. Oh! I also added a quote from Wordsworth which, I think, summarizes the Romantic Age.

SP

3/2/08 We have only been working on this for a few weeks, and already I feel that we have made some small but critical changes that have already improved the pages. I have not been able to put the amount of time in that I wished I would of been able to this week, but I am excited to get rolling with this in the coming weeks. Although it is fun to edit the current pages, I am really excited to work on the new projects that will give this site its own identity. Overall I think the idea of structuring the pages to have a matching format really adds to the clarity of the pages. Hopefully we will be able to really make this site something that will be able to be easily added to, and helpful for anyone that is using it as a resource. JW

3/10/08 So far I've been working primarily on the Restoration pages within the wiki site. Now that the main pages are primarily done, I'm working on the pages within the Restoration site. I'm first going to reorganize or create pages for the each writer's home page and then work on the poems or novels within each writers page. I think working from the outside in is the best way to approach the organizing and editing aspect of our project. I really enjoy working on the wiki pages because it's not a stressful project. Its easy to do a little bit at a time on each page without feeling pressured to complete everything right away. I think organizing the pages and having a universal layout will be really helpful to those people that are using this site. DA

3/10/08 Working on the wiki site has been interesting with reworking and revising pages. In working with the Restoration page, I felt I was back in class again as I was working with a new page. It was fun going back through the books from class and relearning information to add. Now I'm going to work on the sub-pages of the Restoration, most specifically the satire page. I felt as though this page needed a lot of work and hopefully I can clean it up and make it look a little bit more presentable. Also today, with being a peer mentor for the John Keats' page, I hope that I will be able to help the students working on the page. I have a lot of questions myself, but I know that I'll do my best to work with them and to help them make that page really interesting. But for the moment, I really want to tackle and finish the satire page. //or maybe not...//=) ~LM

3/17/08 Now that the home pages are for the most part done, I am moving on to the sub-pages within the Restoration section. I started out with the author pages and did a little bit of work on them so that I would have a general layout for "author" pages. I moved further into Henry Fielding's sub-pages and rearranged and edited the Joseph Andrews pages. Outside of editing the sub-pages in the Restoration section, I introduced myself as a peer mentor to the students working on the Rise of the Novel page and did some touch-ups on the home page. I also spent this past week thinking about what my individual project would be. I have narrowed my choices down to: a Dicken's novel (not Great Expectations), Vanity Fair or Middlemarch. I'm looking forward to getting started this week! DA

Sorry I have let the reflection journal slip my mind a little bit. These past two weeks have been a little crazy. I have added on a little intro paragraph to the Industrial revolution on the Romantic's homepage. It is linked to the Industrial Revolution page, this is the page that I will be mentoring, which I think will be a good experience. I am excited to get started on the interviews and video projects. I need to still go through each of the sub-pages and start editing, and deciding what needs to be cut. I also want to add a paragraph like the Industrial Revolution for the French Revolution. I feel that the Romantic page still needs a lot more work. Hopefully I can have the French Revolution done by the end of the week, and get through some of the sub-pages. JW

4/6/08 Working on the Restoration Newspaper page has been very interesting, trying to see how the page should look. I enjoy learning about the history of journalism so I thought this would be an interesting challenge. And it has been a challenge, just researching and attempting to find anything that could be useful. I'm still not exactly sure how everything is going to work out. Hopefully I'm on the right track, but I'm going to keep working on it. As for the home pages, reworking the Restoration page has been difficult. Trying to find whether information belongs here or there, or on the page at all. It's definitely a process, but hopefully one that will come out great in the end. I've done some editing work as well, just reading through some pages mostly and changing page formats that were discussed in our meetings as the way all the pages should look. Finally I'm very excited about the Keat's page I was assigned to Peer Mentor for. Hopefully there will be signs of life on that page pretty soon. ~LM

4/7/08 I've been working on all of the Jonathan Swift pages. Most recently I've been reorganizing the //"Description of a Morning"// and //"Description of a City Shower"// poems. I enjoy looking closely at the underlying meanings in poems and I'm going to add my own annotations to the pages for next week. Over the break, I have been reading //Middlemarch// by George Eliot and //Vanity Fair// by John Bunyan. For my independent project I am going to write about critical responses to one of those two Victorian novels. Working on the wiki pages has really helped me better understand all of the different literary movements since the 18th century, and the information provided on the pages compliments all of the knowledge I gained in my ENGL206 class. I think if I had had access to this information during the course, I would have benefited greatly. ~DA

I have started my page on the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. I have an introduction and a link to the work itself. I have learned when it comes to editing that clarity is most important. It is much easier to see those problems when editing rather than writing on my own. I hope to do further work on my page and in the meantime, browse around looking for things to edit. This is all I have for now, but I will write again soon. KK

4/14/08

I started to work on my own project, and am coming across a problem. I can't decide whether Jane Austen is a Romantic writer or not. The dates of her novels' publications fall into the Romantic Period, but I suspect she dislikes Romanticism. I think this is particularly apparent in the character of Marianne Dashwood in //Sense & Sensibility// and the consequences she suffers for being Romantic. I want to focus on this novel for now and gradually incorporate the others into my argument later. //Sense & Sensibility// seems like it will support my argument the best. I suspect that Austen is making a point against Romanticism by giving only sensible and pragmatic women happy endings in her novels. Do hopeless Romantics and dreamers like Catherine Morland, Emma Woodhouse, and Marrianne Dashwood have to learn to be sensible to be happy? Do they have to trade in their dreams of adventure, tragic romance, and true love for contentment with reality and the mundane? This is something I want to look at.

Another thing-- From one of Jane Austen's letters (March 2, 1814 to her sister Cassandra) and her allusion to //The Mysteries of Udolpho// in //Northanger Abbey,// we learn that she has read the novels of Anne Radcliffe, a contemporary. I started reading //Udolpho//, and it didn't take long to note the heavy contrast between the style of Radcliffe and Austen. Radcliffe is a romantic novelist through-and-through! Her landscape descriptions go on for pages, and nature, emotion, the desire to return to the simple life, and ALL characteristics of Romantic Age are found in her novels. I think sometime in the near(er) future, I want to focus some attention on Radcliffe and other Romantic novelists for comparison purposes as well.

As Wiki Guruing, there is nothing to comment on. No one in my group has so much as touched the page or even written in the discussion forum. I really hope they don't wait until the 25th to post an outline.

SP

4/27/08

Working on my individual project, I seem to be having trouble working on the purpose/thesis for my page. I guess I wasn't really thinking about it before, but there really should be more meaning for the page then what I had before. It's definitely something to work on, as I will have to bring the thoughts that I have together and create new ideas. Unfortunately it's been difficult the past few days to think about any possible ideas as papers for other courses have been thrown at me left and right. Hopefully this week I will be able to get it going, and produce a better format for the page.

As for mentoring, I was happy to see that my group has begun to generate ideas. Unfortunately I made the mistake of saying hello on the homepage and I don't think they knew about the link to get to the page for Keat's Letters. I wrote them a note to hopefully help them out, and see them in the right direction. They have some good ideas, they just need to expand on them and get something going on the page. Hopefully they'll get something on the page this week, just as I hope to do some work on mine.

~LM

5/1/08

Hello Reflection Journal--- It's been a while, yeah... sorry about that. Anyways I am really happy with my group, they are throwing around some great ideas, and someone actually wants to do a video... So I am pretty Happy about that, hopefully they will follow through with it. My Interviews with teachers have been going really really well. I feel like I am getting free lectures, and have actually learned a lot. On Wednesday, I interviewed Professor Robinson. He is a very interesting knowledgeable guy and I feel like I got a lot of good footage from him. I have had a lot of trouble finding time to put my project together. (even time to write in the reflection journal) After next Tuesday, I will really be able to focus alot of attention on this project. We had decided that the best thing to do was to just cut the interview without having an in-between narrator, Both professors have such good information I wouldn't want to cut a lot of it out. Anyways... that is where I am right now with everything, but I feel that the end product will be really good, with my project, and my groups project. -JAW

5/5/08

Hey, so I haven't posted anything in awhile. Right now I'm in the middle of researching the everyday life of Victorian people and using my research to do a comparison of fact against the representation of Victorian life as it is described in the novel Middlemarch. Learning about the small, inconsequential aspects of Victorian life has been very interesting. I've been learning about aspects of life that I wouldn't think to research on a normal basis, for example I've been reading about the electricity and plumbing of the time and how the women of the house did chores such as laundry. My project is coming along pretty well. I just finished an outline of the standards of health and medicine during this the time, and I am comparing it with doctor in the story.

On another note, my peer mentor group is coming along nicely as well. They have brainstormed together about their topic and have an outline for the Rise of the Novel. They have assigned each section to a respective student and have a good head start on the project. I suggested that they check out the library databases for some information so they will hopefully be laying down some information soon.

-DA

5/12/08

I've been working on my newspaper page and I feel as though my intro has improved. Although, the page itself is still a work in progress and unfortunately every time I edit the page I realize how many other things that need to be done and I lose focus on the project. I plan on improving this week and hopefully getting the page to look like an actual page! I added a new link to go to a periodicals page, so as to list the different writers and their works on that page...I think this is better than having it fill up the main newspaper page. Next I think I'll work on some sort of time line, and also research more on the newspaper history. I guess I'm still having difficulty trying to figure out what should be on the page in general, but I'm working on it.

Also, I'm terribly sorry for not having the time to check up on my group's page. They seem to have added some nice information and layouts onto the page, but I didn't realize that there were some questions that they had. It's starting to come along though, and I'm happy that there is some work being done.

~LM

So Ive started to work more on the project. I have cut down and moved around some of Professor Flynn's Interview. I have also broken it up into different categories so it flows better. Everything is laid out except for pictures, which I will be working on this week. I am a little worried about my group.. I don't see much happening on the page... hopefully they are working on the video. I saw that someone had posted some questions. I just made sure that they are aware that professors have schedules too, and to try and set up an interview time ASAP. They also need to note that with doing video, you have to give yourself enough time for any technical difficulties so I made sure to tell them that too. Other then that.. I have not uploaded Robinson's interview yet, I am trying to stick to one thing at a time, But I might be able to even have that one edited by the end of the semester. While working on Flynn's interview I am seeing a lot of potential with this idea. I think that if this continues to grow, and we get more teachers it could be a real useful interesting thing, that you don't really see often. Anyways thats all. bye :) JAW