You should have your essay finished and posted as a file on your site before class on Thursday. Before noon on Thursday, you need to email to me the most interesting paragraph from your essay. You can interpret “most interesting” however you think most appropriate. Just decide on your most interesting paragraph and email it to me before noon this Thursday.

I just read this article, “The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz” even though it was published a few days ago, but I think it’s subject is intimately connected to the question I posed to you in the Google doc on Tuesday.

He began the show with the words, “One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an actual picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the 20th century has been to show that such an aim is unattainable.” For Dr. Bronowski, there was no absolute knowledge and anyone who claims it — whether a scientist, a politician or a religious believer — opens the door to tragedy. All scientific information is imperfect and we have to treat it with humility. Such, for him, was the human condition.

 

This is the condition for what we can know, but it is also, crucially, a moral lesson. It is the lesson of 20th-century painting from Cubism onwards, but also that of quantum physics. All we can do is to push deeper and deeper into better approximations of an ever-evasive reality. The goal of complete understanding seems to recede as we approach it.

 

There is no God’s eye view, Dr. Bronowski insisted, and the people who claim that there is and that they possess it are not just wrong, they are morally pernicious. Errors are inextricably bound up with pursuit of human knowledge, which requires not just mathematical calculation but insight, interpretation and a personal act of judgment for which we are responsible. The emphasis on the moral responsibility of knowledge was essential for all of Dr. Bronowski’s work. The acquisition of knowledge entails a responsibility for the integrity of what we are as ethical creatures.

Please try to read the article before class tomorrow (it’s an op-ed in the NYTimes, so not terribly long) and watch the 4-minute video clip embedded in it. Think about connections you see between this article and Maus. Let’s start our discussion tomorrow with the writing you did on Tuesday and this article.

• Read UC chpt 7 & Maus II chpts 3-4
• Write a long paragraph or so on your blog in which you reflect on the process of writing the collaborative essay in the Google doc in class today. What roles did you play in the process? How did you feel while you were working? What sorts of behaviors did you observe in your classmates or yourself that seem interesting?
• Start thinking about which pages you will choose to trace for your first project. I will bring tracing paper to class on Thursday.
• I’ve installed the Subscribe2 plugin, which allows me to automatically update you via email when new content is posted to the site. If you haven’t already replied to the information form to give me your gmail address, then do so now. (The twelve of you who have, I’ve signed you up to receive notifications via gmail. If you don’t want notifications, let me know.)

We’ll be working inside a Google document for today’s class. Here’s the link you will need to get into that document.

I Google hungout last night with the other folks involved in the collaborative writing project, which we have now officially named All Write. Here are links to a pair of Google docs that students put together in a somewhat similar experiment last spring: Environmental Education: A Vision Statement and Technology and Nature: A Discussion. Take a look at them, see if you can get a sense of how those students used the Google docs to carry on the discussion.

Participants will include a class from SUNY in upstate New York, another first year writing class working on graphic novel memoirs at Agnes Scott, a group of students in Taiwan, a first year writing class at SPSU on digital writing, a graduate class on digital literacies at the U of Pennsylvania, and some others.

• We’ll take our first run at the collaborative writing on Feb 12 or 13.  Janine’s students at SUNY-ESF will take the lead for that first document, which will be based around some sort of theme having to do with the food or education. We’ll talk about schedules post-snowpocalypse in class, but I had to reschedule my conference to Feb 13 & 14th, so won’t be in class on the 13th. I think I’ll require that your class time be spent working in the collaborative document that Janine’s students set up.
• Pete’s student will take the point the next week, with a document that takes up some issue of digital identity & social media.
• I’ve signed our class to take the lead on the following week, around Feb 25. You’ll have just finished your Maus projects and I said that we’ll do something on visual design and arguing with images. This kind of topic will lead really nicely into the other projects you’ll be completing this semester.
• On March 17 or 24, Jim Diedrick’s students at Agnes Scott will be the primary facilitators for a doc that revolves around graphic novel memoirs. He’s got some cool ideas about bringing in either Fun Home (which we will have just finished reading by then) or March, Book 1.

The SUNY students are running a photo contest through Twitter and would love it if some or all of you participated.

So, on Monday I’m going to have a Google hangout regarding the crazy collaborative writing thing we talked about yesterday. One class that will be involved is a writing and the environment group at SUNY-ESF, and they’ve been posting introductory tweets recently. Here they are, all collected into one Storify.

Posting that link for 2 reasons: a) you can see some of the other students we might be working with, but mainly b) you can see how they go about introducing themselves in 140 characters and with a single image. That’s not exactly what we’re doing with the badges, but might give you some inspiration as you work on them (and, not to give too much away, but you’ll be working on some “about me” text for your sites sometime soon, so …)

• Badge. As we talked about in class today, you need to make a badge for yourself. It should be 300 pixels by 150 pixels and it should include some sort of a visual and your name. The optimal thing would be for your badge to be visually striking and to somehow convey a sense of yourself or your interests. If you need a photo editing program, Picmonkey is a free browser-based photo editor that’s easy to use, but feel free to use whatever tool you’d like.

[Update! I meant to add about the badges: I think I said in class that you should email these to me when you finish them? I don’t know why I said that. Don’t email them to me. Make a new blog post add the badge to the post. To be an extra cool student, add a few sentences about the badge–why it looks the way it does, whether you’re happy with it, how you made it, whatever seems worth commenting on to you. Don’t forget to include any attribution details & links if you used someone else’s CC-licensed work!]

• Theme. Choose and install a new theme for your site besides the default theme. Here’s a document with some helpful guidance on changing themes. As I said, you can expect to find this process to be a little frustrating and you may try a few different themes before you find something that works for you. You can always change the theme again down the road.
• Survey. Fill out this simple Google form so I have some basic information about you. Once I have your gmail addresses, I’ll share the first set of Google docs with you for the group blogging assignment.

You’ll need to also read Understanding Comics chapter 4 & Maus I chapters 5-6.

The Readers should publish their blog post by Monday evening.

[Note: I’ve added a plug-in that allows me to set some posts as “sticky” (i.e., even though they retain the time and date stamp they were published on, they stay up at the top of the page and new posts come in underneath them).

I’m telling you this just in case you swing by here, see this post at the top and then think there must be nothing new. There are new posts beneath this one. One of them is even an XKCD comic!

I’m also telling you because I want to be transparent about how I manage this site, so if you’re wanting to try to do the same sort of thing, you can figure out how.]

Choose a single panel from the first 2 chapters of Maus that you consider to be the most important. Write a post on your own blog where you describe the panel and explain why it’s the most important panel.