{"id":103,"date":"2015-01-22T18:00:06","date_gmt":"2015-01-23T01:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/?p=103"},"modified":"2015-01-22T19:36:19","modified_gmt":"2015-01-23T02:36:19","slug":"week-3-to-donotes-on-reading-responses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/archives\/103","title":{"rendered":"Week 3 To-Do\/Notes on Reading Responses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Wednesday night (1\/28), post a short reading response for the\u00a0Caillois.<\/p>\n<p>As I mentioned today, I was generally really pleased with everyone&#8217;s first efforts! But there&#8217;s always room for improvement, so I wanted to reiterate a few points to keep in mind for your weekly responses:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One of the tricks or traps here (and something we&#8217;ll be working on all semester in our writing in <em>all<\/em> its permutations) is using\u00a0the readings as a springboard for your own thoughts, while at the same time spending some time thoughtfully dealing with the substance of the texts. That means striking a balance between particular (e.g., specific references to concepts, ideas, terms found in a text) and the more general (where the readings are going to inspire you to go). It&#8217;s something to pay attention to before submitting a response:\u00a0what specific references\u00a0<em>to our texts<\/em> are you making? A general hand wave in the direction of someone&#8217;s name is not enough. On the other hand, we don&#8217;t want to be rehashing the argument of a text. Don&#8217;t forget, you will have a lot of self-directed opportunities to expound on concepts that appeal to you (see the &#8220;Assignments&#8221; tab if you need a reminder!): the reading response is more of a check in.<\/li>\n<li>Pay attention to your prose and proofreading. Just because a blog seems like (and can be) a more casual format doesn&#8217;t mean formatting and general mechanics get thrown out the window. Paragraph breaks are your friend!<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t forget to think about how this interfaces with readings we&#8217;ve done in other weeks, or other historical issues you have come across in your studies. While each week has a different focus, I want us to be thinking about everything\u00a0<em>together<\/em>, as it builds from week to week, not simply in isolation.<\/li>\n<li>The primary function here is to respond to the readings. While pulling in personal experience can be useful or interesting, I want (and need) to see how you are working through the readings in a sustained, thoughtful manner. If you spend as much or more time in your reading response talking about you &amp; your experiences as\u00a0about the readings, the balance is off.<\/li>\n<li>While use of the reading guides is optional, I&#8217;d suggest you peruse them to see the\u00a0<em>kinds<\/em> of questions and topics\/big issues I am expecting you to bring up in your responses. Again, it is not supposed to be a laundry list of questions to answer, but to help you organize your own thoughts.<\/li>\n<li>Finally, I would ask if you&#8217;re making references to specific games that are not described in the readings (I refer here specifically to digital games, though plenty of board\/table games will also fall into the &#8216;not quite familiar&#8217; category), please provide a quick hyperlink to some place where those of us who may not be familiar with the game(s) can get a feel for what it is.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>NB:\u00a0<\/strong>I have added a supplemental reading that expands on Caillois &#8211; one I have found very useful over the years (it is intentionally limited to digital games, but I have used the ideas to talk about\u00a0<em>weiqi<\/em> and\u00a0mahjong, two Chinese table games).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Wednesday night (1\/28), post a short reading response for the\u00a0Caillois. As I mentioned today, I was generally really pleased with everyone&#8217;s first efforts! But there&#8217;s always room for improvement, so I wanted to reiterate a few points to keep in mind for your weekly responses: One of the tricks or traps here (and something&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/archives\/103\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-course-business","category-weekly-to-do","tag-week-3"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/FS-7365_34.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":516,"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sintellectual.org\/hstr491\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}