Your projects represent a considerable amount of time and effort, and collaborative efforts. To what extent were they beneficial to your own growth? Is the effort commensurate with the benefits-or should time be better spent in other ways? What might those other ways be? Is writing a long paper (10-20 pages) for one potential reader a relic of the 20th century?
I think both a long paper and projects like ours are beneficial in different ways. I really appreciated the nature of our project because I was able to explore many different aspects in all of the books we were reading, which allowed me to make connections I otherwise would not have seen. Learning how to use new technologies (of making a website, creating video podcasts, and developing forums) was not only fun but a valuable skill for the future. Although a paper might have allowed me to delve very deeply into a certain theme in one of the books, I think the project is better at making us learn a new and different skill, and in producing something unique to be proud of. Since we write many papers throughout our college careers, a project of this magnitude was a unique opportunity to explore new technology and develop different skills. I don’t think writing a 10-20 page paper is a relic, but since we have to do that often in other classes throughout our college career, the chance to work on such a large and self-directed group project is a unique and valuable experience. Working as a group on such a large project is also a more realistic reflection or practice of a future skill that we don’t practice much in our academic careers, a skill of working together instead of independently. Both are valuable, but since we work less often in groups, that aspect of our project was beneficial to our growth.
I actually think that our final projects were a very good use of time. I understand Anna Karenina much better now than I ever would have before. I’ll admit that I was not very excited by the prospect of a final project at the beginning of the year, and even less so when I ended up with the 800 page book, but I’m glad in retrospect. I do not think that writing a long paper would have been as good for me or as helpful. I’m not very good at writing literary analysis papers, nor do I enjoy them, but I also think that in this case projects were better. Working as a group to fully develop and analyze one particular book leads, in my opinion, to a better understanding of the course in general. This class was not focused on deep analysis of the novels, nor should it be. We learned that it is quite challenging for us to understand Russian literature as it was originally intended without having the mindset of a 19th century Russian. Knowledge of how society functioned and particularly familiarity with the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church is hard for 21st century American students to understand.
I do not think that 20-page papers are a relic of the 20th century, but I do think that final projects are a good way to ensure a level of accountability. I could write a paper and be highly unmotivated, or express a poor understanding of the text(s) in question, but to make a large-scale project with a group requires coordination, being on the same page, and inevitably, understanding the material. In addition, working with the goal of presenting on your material is a surefire way to ensure that one will have something useful/interesting to present.
Along with all of this, group projects ensure a kind of discussion that we have all experienced through the class itself, which would be otherwise lacking from the experience of a final paper. I could not have really hammered out a lot of Anna’s details without some discussion with my group-mates, and imagine the experience must have been somewhat similar all around.
I’m glad we had to do the final project, because it makes you strive for a higher level of proficiency than the limited time frame in the classroom can allow. Especially because the nature of my group’s project was particularly open ended, I ended up doing further research and taking notes on thing that I might have ordinarily dealt with differently (aka realized that I don’t know what the author is talking and move on). I have pages upon pages of sticky notes on the books we read this year, not all of which made it anywhere near our website, but that just show that I was doing an extra level of thinking and analysis. I think those “long paper” assignments do the same type of thing, in that they allow you to get a very in-depth look at one particular aspect of the course. From personal experience I would say that when you do a more extensive project/paper on something, the information tends to stay with you much longer.
It seems that everyone above is a fan of the long paper, and I am too. I think that insisting that college-educated people have the ability to write on a topic at length remains important in this day in age, and I don’t think that this importance will fade. People can combine their knowledge on Wikipedia pages, sure, but that doesn’t mean that articles, manuscripts, books, and speeches — typically solo endeavors — have gone to the wayside. But would this format have applied to our class specifically? I’m not so sure. It certainly would have worked, but the syllabus was too comprehensive for me to feel comfortable in saying that that would have been the best fit. I really enjoyed the project, for different reasons. It allowed us to specialize on a piece of what we had covered, while also staying general enough for us to expand our grasp farther than a single paper would have allowed. I found it harder than a paper, probably because of the unfamiliar technological requirements, but also because it was simply more work than a paper — I ended up writing a lot as it was. But this difficulty is where I found the benefit; the whole semester seemed geared toward what a literature class in the 21st century should be, and in the end the project gave me technological experience that I feel a 21st century college student should have. While learning about timeless literature, we’ve ended up becoming more in tune with our own times and finding out how to work together to contribute this new knowledge to others’ lives. That was my favorite part, sharing what I learned, and a traditional paper would not have been nearly as accessible in this regard.
I think papers are still as relevant as ever. Writing a paper still requires you to examine and think about the text thoroughly and creatively, even if it’s not always very thrilling for either the writer or the reader. Since we’re still reading books in much the same way as always, there’s no reason why writing papers about them in the same way as always is no longer effective. That said, when we were first assigned these projects I was definitely thinking I would prefer just to write a paper, but the project ended up being much more fun, and it did get me to think about the literature in a way I wouldn’t have thought about it otherwise: not just as an academic text, but as a representation of a way of living and thinking that differs often comically from my own. I don’t think we should be afraid to let our ways of studying literature evolve in this way, but I also don’t think we should get rid of papers. I would know a lot more about Anna Karenina right now if I’d been required to write a 20-page paper about it.
As a Physics major, I would not have enjoyed having to write a 20 page paper on literature. I don’t think I would be able to write that long of a paper and feel that I had written something that was worthwhile. In this respect, I think that this project was invaluable. It made the course more accessible to people not used to writing long papers, and while the project was certainly a lot of work, it was more manageable than a long paper would have been. The group dynamic definitely helped me gain a deeper understanding of Anna Karenina. A paper would have been more focused on one aspect of a book, so it would not have given me insight into Anna Karenina as a whole. Though I still think Dostoevsky is a better writer than Tolstoy, I’ve gained a deeper appreciation for Anna Karenina because of this project. It is nice to come out of a semester and have something to show for it. I’ve never allowed my parents to read my essays because I really don’t write anything of interest. On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind them looking at my project. I think that everybody’s projects were innovative and valuable for different reasons, and each group got to delve deeper into different novels and topics.
The future of literature lies in technology. Bloggers now seem to carry almost as much weight as journalists, especially in some more technologically inclined countries such as China or Japan. In reality, in terms of our own marketability once we graduate, maybe in the evolving American economy, the skills required to make a website outweigh those of writing an essay. Accordingly, I believe this project makes complete sense and is very logical way for our class to spend our time reflecting literature. For me, this argument can almost be expanded, to a general argument of a university vs. a liberal arts education. The large, emerging economics of the world such as India and China have grown to preeminence a large part due to their emphasis on mathematically and technologically oriented educations. The United States seems to be the only country that really values a liberal arts education anymore. If a Chinese teacher was to choose between a blog and a long research paper, I think the blog would win in their eyes hands down. I disagree honestly. The new generation, surrounded by iPods instead of CD-players, kindles instead of books, and TV news, if even that, instead of newspapers, seems like a step back to me. These new innovations may make sense, but I believe that literary creativity, liberal arts creativity, the very thing that, albeit horrible to deal with, the twenty-page paper represents is lost along the way. So what is the right path, logic or creativity, technology or twenty-page paper? For me, either will do but that is just me, maybe someone else will favor one or the other. What is important is that neither one is stifled nor emphasized too much, as technical progress without creativity has no direction, but creativity without practicality leads to nothing getting done. So maybe, now that I am done with this course, you should just make the students do both.
I thought that the project worked well, but I actually have a hard time working in groups for things like literature. I think that it would have been productive to have had a group component but also have a personal essay – and the personal essay might not have had to be strictly analytical either… What I would maybe suggest in the future is to have some sort of final essay that takes into account a certain novel – it can be done creatively, can be purely analyzing the work, or a research paper on the novel’s context. Then, all of the people who wrote something personal on one particular novel could get together and prepare an multimedia presentation combining everything they had personally accomplished. A system like that, where we would begin individually and then come together with some ownership over the text, seems like it would ensure a more profound engagement. I did have a great time with my group and I think we learned a ton, but I guess I wished I had a little more space to think about the texts we read on an individual level.
I enjoyed the project a lot. I found it exciting to find resources for our website and browse the web for quality sites. Learning how to edit a website, create links, etc. are in my opinion very valuable skills. In my project we did not work with a specific book, but tried to brainstorm overarching themes and events concerning all the novels. The project was very time consuming and a 15 page paper would not have taken me as long to produce, but I believe that there is always benefit in working in groups as it requires an amount of communication and understanding of each member’s expectations and reconciliation of different ideas, which is unfortunately not seen enough in undergraduate education. The skills we learned (creating a website and working in teams) combined with the factual knowledge we acquired cannot be topped by any research paper.
I agree with others, that a research paper is not a relic of the 20th century. A creative paper component to the course, maybe 5-7 pages after spring break would allow a more in depth study of a work from a personal angle, given that time allowed us to only touch upon the very surface of most the novels we have read. The same could maybe be accomplished by freeing the blogs a little so that every person has to creatively come up with what they found interesting and intriguing rather than having to answer certain questions.
Although I learned a great deal from what my partners contributed to our project, most of my contribution involved something we rarely touched upon during our class discussions: issues with translation. I gathered research (in both English and Russian) on basically anything having to do with the various translations of Dead Souls and Notes from the Underground. At the end of my research, I was left with a lot of information in both Russian and English. I translated the Russian into English, and vice versa, and separated the information into two documents, one in English and one in Russian. The Russian one would later become my discourse in our “PBS report” and the English would be the voice-over. Through this I not only learned about the translation of the novels itself, but I also had to employ translation myself, which gave me more of an understanding for how incredibly difficult it is to efficiently and professionally translate a whole novel, especially one originally in Russian. My effort was definitely commensurate with the benefits of our project, especially since the research had to do with something I am interested in doing after college. I enjoyed this much more than I would have enjoyed writing a long paper, mostly because it is more easily attainable to more people as opposed to a single professor. For a longer paper on the same topic, however, I would simply have to have done more of the same work I did for our project (except for the movie editing, choosing and organizing live dramatic readings of passages, etc.). So yes, a longer paper would probably have been a bit more beneficial to me, but not more enjoyable.
I really enjoyed the final project and think that it forced me to look at literature in a new and interesting way. Papers have not gone out of fashion, and I write plenty of them in my other classes. In fact, it was a relief to have an assignment in a literature class that was not a paper. Our website incorporated analytical literary writing while remaining a fresh and “twenty-first century” look at “Fathers and Sons”. I do see the value of writing papers, though, and think that a short paper or two throughout the semester in addition to the final project may have given students a chance to display their writing capabilities. Overall, it is satisfying to see that a semester’s worth of work is online and available to others rather than being stored in a filing cabinet never to be glanced at again.
This is a tough one. I like projects because for the most part they involve creating something that is useful and a good project will require near endless tweaking to make it work perfectly – getting it into a marketable format. They hopefully have an audience outside of the class room and in this are superior to papers (not to say that papers don’t require ridiculous amounts of editing). A paper isn’t necessarily useful. I was watching a clip of Eric From on ABC from the 1950’s a few days ago and one the themes he pressed upon was the need for man to feel that his production is valuable. A paper that is never read beyond the assigning of a grade is of questionable value. That said, educational purpose may provide that value, but at the college level it seems that we ought to move towards output with impact. Unfortunately, I question whether our own projects (and mine in particular) were in this way relevant. Our projects were very good about using new media to teach Russian literature, but I don’t believe that they categorically identified its significance in the present day. It’s great that I can map Raskolnikov’s path around Petersburg – I now have a better understanding of the geography of the place, but does it really contribute to the development of the book’s themes? Or does it explain how in a world of CCTV and forensic evidence one ought to commit murder? Or if such an intensely rational assassination is even possible? Take terrorism for instance, it can be terribly well thought out (Timothy McVeigh, etc.) or more savage (Moscow metro) or even incompetent (underpants bomber), but it’s always done in the name of the greater good. Dostoevsky seems to believe Raskolnikov’s greater good to be unknowable, but what happens when that same act of violence is justified by religious fervor? I could explore this idea for several hundred/thousand more words and I think that might produce an end result with more utility than my project and I think that in that lies the value of writing papers. It seems I’ve made a bit of a circle on this issue. In the end it comes down to goals and what is important to the student. A student who hopes to teach literature find utility in a project aimed at creating pedagogical tools, one who hopes to affect policy may derive more from a written analysis, etc. Variety is the spice of life – it’s a fun class.
I think that writing a 10-20 page paper that only one person will read is useful in the sense that it provides practice for organizing one’s ideas and expressing them in a clear, coherent manner. Yet the application of this practice in the form of group project that will be recognized on a larger scale is equally as important for it gives credence to what is accomplished throughout most literature classes. The former can exist without the latter yet it would lack practicality if the latter were never an option. One can never sufficiently replace the other and a balance needs to be struck between the two. As of now the scale leans to far in favor of generic paper topics and group presentations that are nothing more than a powerpoint. The idea of taking a project that allows for creativity and unconventional presentations of material is something that I feel should be more widely endorsed because it avoids the sense of futility one can feel while churning out paper after paper. I enjoyed working on the project for this class and felt that it was good chance to analyze Russian Literature in a way I never had thought of doing before. In a sense it was a refreshing, perhaps necessary alternative but not a replacement as a whole.
Like others have said, the paper presented more unique learning opportunities than did a paper. But what I think is most interesting is the audience that each is for. The projects are much more accessible to people than a lengthy paper is. After all, the paper is written with a very narrow audience in mind. What good does a lengthy paper do if only one person is going to read it? If the other people in the class don’t even get to hear the conclusions you have reached as a result of your reading and research, how does it contribute to the class as a whole? The projects are much more accessible in this regard, and because of this I don’t see the lengthy paper as outdated but largely useless if it’s only going to sit buried in folders on a single student’s and professor’s computer.
And this reminds me of something I was thinking of earlier — what if instead of lengthy papers, one had to write a shorter paper but deliver it as a speech in front of the class. That would work on public speaking skills, as well as refining essays. It would expand the audience, and also make it more accessible (because ideally it would not be overly academically inflated as many essays are wont to become). While there could be (and probably are) many kinks in this idea, I think it would take the medium of the paper and make it more useful and accessible.
I think a long, traditional analytical paper would have been antithetical to the course. I felt that this class’ character was distinct: informal and friendly, yet rewarding, and took pride in approaching literature in a unique way. I was also impressed with the amount of control the students had in determining the course’s worth. Thus, I feel it is appropriate to have our final project be very open-ended, with the quality, sincerity and depth determined by students themselves. I particularly enjoyed this different project, as it broke up the monotony of my three other final papers, taught me to use final cut pro, and also strangely made me want to be a documentary filmmaker. I love a good analytical paper, and I am staunchly against the position that they are outdated, but this assignment maintained the attitude of the course and I can’t imagine 19c Russian Lit any other way. I do agree with Jacob that working in a group is difficult, especially for something as potentially subjective as literature analysis. Individual work, however, probably couldn’t yield the same types of results as this group project. So I guess I do recommend including an individual evaluation in addition to the project, in which one can talk about his/her process and experience making the work.
I thought the project was a great idea to show what we have learned in this course, though a focused project would probably be better than a broad and general project like ours, the Toolkit for the 21st Century Reader. I liked the website on Fathers and Sons, because I can see that they learned a lot about the book by doing the project.
We swept briefly over a variety of topics because we interpreted the project as a broad toolkit, so we said a lot, but our depth was limited, even though I personally wish I had our website before the class started. It would also be great if you could give future classes the first week to do background reading on what was going on in 19th century Russia, so that when they read the novel they won’t be hung up on the small details or miss the implication of a symbol or motif.
I don’t think a 10-20 page paper would have been great for me, because we spent at the most three class periods on a book, and these books are quite dense. Besides, we write blogs every class.