Final Part 1: In Medias Res

"The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed."

Question 1. Book groups: the additional texts have been a key component of the course. How has the work in your book groups differed from that which takes place in our discussions of the other texts in class and elsewhere (plurk & blogs)? What kinds of discussions are possible in the setting of the book groups? What is not possible within these settings?

My book group may not be the best example to look at when assessing what is possible in this educational medium. Ours has been a near total failure in any reasonable scale: communication failures were not simply problems but became the status quo, discussions though what one might expect from the average student (and how little is expected of us these days!) did not progress far beyond opinions and initial reactions and failed to result in any collective or collaborative theories regarding the book, and administrative decisions concerning the activities of the group centered not so much around what we could or should hope to achieve as compiling the shortest and least demanding checklist of minimum requirements possible for the evaluation rubric. These were not the failings of any one person in the group but of our collective failure to generate any system of organization that we could use to approach and methodically answer a progressive series of question or explore topics. So instead, I would like to focus on what a book group should be, and one can infer that my group did the opposite in almost every scenario.

Book groups should involve a significant amount of collaborative and independently directed learning. The main difference of a book group from the class is the lack of an authority or guiding figure holding our hands and telling us what topics within a given subject to explore or how to go about doing this. It is much like a senior seminar (or at least, the philosophy department’s senior seminar) in this regard: people (in this case the group) independently explore and research their subject and (ideally) develop new and original ideas and interpretations through discussions, debates and other forms of independent interactions with their peers.

This interaction between peers can take any form the group decides on, and though we did not use it to its full potential, I think the decision to use a forum to communicate was a good one. Plurk, because of its 140-character limit, does not allow for the type of long, expository discussions that a successful book group demands. Similarly, although a blog allows for the exposition, it does not promote collaboration as comments made by peers will have to either be addressed in the next blog post or the blog that the comments referred to will have to be endlessly updated as the dialogue progresses. A forum offers, I think, the best of both worlds; book group members need not explore every aspect of the topic they wish to discuss as a back-and-forth dialogue is expected, but are not given a crippling limit of 140 characters. Our forum had a limit of 60,000 characters and (barring large essay-sized posts which can be broken up into multiple parts) this is a more than reasonable amount. Furthermore, there are a variety of useful tools available on forums such as the search bar and ability to quote previous posts, that Plurk and blogs do not have.

As I mentioned before, discussions in these book groups should result in the emergence of well-developed collaborative theories regarding the book. A book group member can introduce ideas and interpretations they have about some particular part of the reading (ideally these have already been critically analyzed and developed by the individual before being introduced) and other members of the group further these ideas by offering critical analysis from a completely different perspective, picking up on complications that the person missed, and helping to revise and refine their ideas and interpretations. Furthermore, the ideas and interpretations may inspire another group member to think about the book in a different way and develop further theories.

Ideally, a book group should only be limited by time constraints (all book groups should eventually stop talking and move on to other books to avoid intellectual stagnation) and individual capacities of its members. Unfortunately, the latter limitation is quite a formidable one, as all group members need to be on the same page in order to contribute equally. This means that the “lowest common denominator,” the group member who is least capable of critical analysis or following the ideas of others is the one who sets the limits of how much the book group is able to accomplish. Some group members may be able to go further than this limitation on their own but it ceases to be a collective product of the book group.