Wednesday, October 9, 2013

october 10

JOURNAL TOPIC: [today's tunes: "Melancholy Mood" by Horace Silver; "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" by James Brown]

Hamlet is confronted by a difficult situation.  What does it suggest about society's values at the time? Why does it challenge him so deeply?  How would your response-- as a reflection of both your personality/psychology and our society's values-- be similar or different?

AGENDA:
1. Hamlet: Act I Scene ii (25 minutes)
2. Journal (10 minutes max)
3. Chart a course for Chaucer-esque characters and P2P evaluation (15 minutes)

HW:
1. Please comment to this post re: Agenda item #3
2. Please read and comment on Hamlet's first big soliloquy 
3. Please read this article and post a response to your blog about it (title: LITERARY FICTION & EMPATHY).  How can reading fiction help you understand others?  Use Hamlet as an example to explore your own thinking process and reactions to a character's innermost thoughts/struggles.


28 comments:

  1. Mia levy
    Javier solis
    Kevin lake

    Our ideas:
    We liked the idea of having a point system that results in rewards.
    Our idea was possibly dividing it into catergories(talk, act, college acceptance, etc). For example if Javi helped an old lady across the street either he or I could post the incident on the blog, the way the voting works is through upvotes. Students go on the page and upvotes what they think deserves one.
    There would be leaderboards to keep track and the first place winner would get the golden warrior award, second place could be excused from a vocab quiz or whatever DR. Preston decides is best!

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    1. Great ideas! Can members create categories to account for something that doesn't seem to fit? How much do incentives like Golden Warrior awards and grades matter?

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    2. Not very much... Just sayin, I could care less about a piece of paper and pin... Not that I disagree with the rest of the idea, just that small part.

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    3. I like that idea! Or maybe their is just a catergory specifically labeled 'Other'.
      I agree that some awards are better then others, the main idea was to present an incentive for their good work!

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    4. Wouldn't first place be excused from the Vocabulary Quiz ? Golden Warriors are nice but Vocab's been kickin' my butt lately.

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  2. The idea that Mia's group came up with was the best so far and much better then our ideas. So i second there PVP group.

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    1. OK. Can you and your group riff on their ideas to add/improve?

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    2. And don't make me bug you about THERE, THEIR, and THEY'RE... :)

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  3. This point system sounds awesome and I think that if everyone got involved we would have a really good outcome. Maybe there could be a way to post things that we see our classmates doing onto some kind of page on the blog and Dr. Preston could distribute points based on what we post. I also like the idea of rewarding the people with the most points because based on my understanding, the P2P evaluation is meant to bring the acts that go unnoticed and unrewarded to the surface for everyone to see. I like the idea of including college acceptances, scholarships and volunteer work because it's not only rewarding to the person doing the work to be noticed for it, but also a good way to show other students what is being done and what can be done. Hopefully seeing what is being accomplished will encourage and inspire other students to get out and do things to.

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  4. I like the ideas so far, but I think that there needs to be a more actual evaluative aspect to this. So far I think it just focused on votes, and rewards. If there was a way to add in comments for people who, lets say, aren't getting a lot of votes, there should be a place where people can give suggestions about their work. That way there can be improvement and recognition for that. So for example, if people are recognizing someone for a particularly amazing essay, and someone feels like they want help on how to make their's better, I think it would be beneficial for them to be able to ask everyone for their opinions. I guess my whole lengthy description comes down to having a place where good work can be shown, but also a place where we can go to our peers and ask for what we could do better so we can improve our work!

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  5. You may take me as really boring and habitual, but as for the peer to peer evaluation website i think we should use something like blogger or blogger itself. The fact that we all already have one is quite convenient. This blog would only be used to evaluate essays and to give feedback.I'm not quite sure where i am going with this... I am honestly confused about the whole point and reward thing, but i will ask Mia about it tomorrow.

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  6. I think that a website should be created that we can customize and create to our liking. On this website, pages for all the people in our classes could be created and it would be like a wall, where people can go in and write comments for the person for something good that they did. Points can be given but the focus should be on the comments received. I also don't think this should be like a competition because people then don't have a pure incentive for doing something kind; it becomes about the reward and not the will to help.


    Does anyone know how to write HTML? I have a few ideas and have done some research, but I don't know how to write HTML.

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    Replies
    1. Izamar, I know very basic HTML. It all depends on what you need! I can try looking at what you need help with, but I probably won't be able to help much!

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    2. I'm pretty good at HTML, and I can do CSS too. However, that's just markup, I can't do any programming (JavaScript, Java, C, etc.) so I couldn't build a website from scratch. But, I can still make things look pretty on Blogger, etc. I also happen to know a LOT about wikitext, so in case we wanted to do something formatted as a wiki I could code some really cool stuff (I was really proud of learning the finer points of wikitext, like template variables and parser functions, but I was disappointed to learn that outside of wikis they're completely useless haha!)

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  7. Lindsey, I definitely agree with you. With peers, we always end up going to people who we know really well and that becomes hard for others to criticize their work. I think creating a different blog for good work and a blog where we can go to peers for help is needed.

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  8. I like the idea of a website, but I honestly would have noooo idea about how to go about that, and I would hate for it to fall on one person. I hate to be the pilgrim here, but does it have to be a website...? Couldn't we just go old fashioned and just have an actual scoreboard with everyone's name on it? Or is this contradicting the point of "open source learning"? Or as far as Chaucer goes, couldn't we just pick a partner and just individually evaluate each other's and turn in our responses?
    OR maybe, we could just have scoreboards for each AP class, so the class with the highest score gets something cool, and it's not a huge hassle to try to account for every single person. Scoreboard widgets are easy enough to find, and we could just them on here.
    Just ideas... Throwin' it out there.

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    1. I like the idea of going old school. I also didn't know if it was against the open source learning. Your idea about doing it by classes would be really interesting and that does seem simpler than each individual.

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  9. I don't want people's successes or selfless acts to be voted on because then it creates an awkward competition; but I do understand the reason behind rewards and recognition. Personally, I'd feel selfish talking about any of my own accomplishments and hoping others think I deserve them, based on votes. I'd rather have a P2P Evaluation page more focused on giving/receiving help, and we could include a "brag sheet" as well for giving credit where it's due. I mean, it would be nice for everyone to be evaluated by peers who aren't all close friends of theirs.

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  10. Can you explain what you mean with "chart a course for Chaucer-esque characters"? And The leader board with points is a good idea. I just think that the points should be awarded based on the help that is given. I think it would be better To use a quality over quantity kind of Approach to it.

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  11. I feel as if a scoreboard might be a good idea but who really has the power to measure the value in points someone else's contribution to the class and/or community? Also, if one person is never recognized for their contributions what happens to them? Do they always have to nominate themselves because that could be uncomfortable.

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  12. I would have to agree with the points that Erica and Miki made previously. I think that if we create an over reaching peer to peer blog where we all hook up our blogs and become "authors" of it. This will allow us to have all of the evaluations and pieces of literature open to everyone in the class with easy access. Again, I would agree with Miki's comment about we are often inclined to comment on someone's blog that we know and good friends with. So I would suggest I that we should have to evaluate someone's piece of work that doesn't have as many comments or views and give them feedback.

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  13. I agree with the others. I have a feeling if we do do a specific P2P, people would just choose their friends and not give an equal evaluation to the others that they are not familiar with. But, I do feel we could have a P2P evaluation. I just think everyone needs an equal opportunity to receive helpful feedback. Awards can be granted, but I feel we should emphasize more on the helpful feedback that all of us need.

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  14. I really like the idea of rewarding those who do well, instead of criticizing those who struggle!

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  15. Like others have said above a scoreboard can be seen as selfish and giving points to someone for small acts that, in my opinion, should be done anyways because we are all good citizens or should strive to be. If a peer to peer evaluation is required an idea I have is old school a real life board hung in the classroom or a site (that I do not know how to make) that can keep track of "likes" and the number of "likes" is the point system.

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  16. I agree with Brenna. I think that the P2P should be more focused on building on our skills with the help of constructive peer criticisms. There should be a way to make sure that everyone gets evaluations and that people are evaluating out of their circle of close friends. A competition might get too competitive and cause us to lose track of the real reason for creating P2P evaluations.

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  17. Although I feel that a P2P evaluation is a good idea,just as Brenna has said ,I feel that I would be uncomfortable and selfish for talking about my accomplishments. Also, I agree with Izamar that points can be given but the focus should be on the comments received. As other people have said, I feel that the points would create a competition instead of us trying to help people out of kindness.

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  18. I like the idea of making it a game/competition, but I'm a little unsure of a "like" or "upvote" system of awarding points. For example, let's say Alice puts a lot of work into a really insightful 5-page Hamlet essay, and Bob makes a funny Hamlet image macro. Who did more work? Buuuuuut who's gonna get more likes? See what I mean?

    A couple people voiced the concern that if it's a competition, then it defeats the purpose of selfless acts, because there's now selfish motivation. However, I'd argue that there already is selfish motivation, and that's college/scholarships. My guess is that most high school students only volunteer because they need it for college (or, even the ones that truly do volunteer out of the goodness of their hearts at least think about the college part of it as an "added bonus," y'know?). So, I don't think the competition element would really change anything.

    Finally, I'd like to mention that a wiki might be a good format if we want to do a website. Brenna mentioned a "brag sheet," which could be easily achieved through userpages, and users can leave messages/comments for each other through user talk pages (most wikifarms have an option to send an email whenever a user gets a new message on their talk page). The different namespaces allow for regular pages as well as image and video uploads, forums, and categories. Plus basic wikitext is reeeeally easy to learn (much more so than HTML), which is helpful. Admittedly, I'm pretty biased in favor the wiki format, but hopefully the class will consider it!

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  19. I feel like if we do a recognition based evaluation, it should be completely anonymous and actually deserve merit. I have seen so many people praise their friend just so they look good and gain points with the teacher. I don't feel like that does anything besides waste time. Like we are responsible almost adults here, we don't need *snaps* or brownie points, we should just do them for ourselves like Brenna said.
    As for p2p evaluation, maybe we shouldn't evaluate our friends (or class period) so we can have an unbiased opinion of each other and their writing.

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