We are still having problems with Sandie’s access to post to this blog, so here is her dairy for the last few months<\/p>\n
2 April 2008 Searching for useful Anglo-Saxon and Old English websites to use for the MOSAIC project has been illuminating. As well as the better-known academic sites and databases, I\u2019ve come across a number of sites produced by people not affiliated to an educational institution or publisher or such. Some of these are large, complex, and beautifully illustrated, clearly the work of dedication and devotion. I\u2019m including a number of these in the course, and listing others for further exploration, because the enthusiasm is infectious and I hope that in looking at them participants will see that learning about the Anglo-Saxon world can be a great pleasure, and fun. One site contains photographs of \u2018Anglo-Saxon\u2019 villagers going about daily tasks, and includes detailed descriptions of the villagers and their respective occupations. That should be very useful for participants writing the diary\u2019 of Anglo-Saxon life activity I hope to include. 10 April 2008 I\u2019ve amassed a huge collection of possible existing online material on Anglo-Saxon history and Old English literature to use for the MOSAIC project. The problem will be in making a selection so that the course is not dauntingly huge, and the amount of required reading is of a practical length. Also, there is quite a lot of overlap between some sites. I might want to include one section of one site but to leave out others because they contain the same sort of material as another. I hope that when we start to contact the site owners and to clear copyright that they will allow partial as well as complete use of their respective sites. 20 April 2008 The units are coming together and I\u2019ve managed to prune each one so that the required reading and other activities are comparable in amount (words) and duration (i.e. total study and participation time) to the other courses we run at this level. There is a difference between the structure of this course and the other (literature) courses I\u2019ve written. The writing of the literature courses always comes before the production of the live online course, and follows a structure that I am familiar with and a set order. For this course, writing and production are chicken and egg. In the literature courses, participants read course materials I have written, follow links to external materials, and read textbooks. Activities might be reading, discussing, or writing criticism. In this course, there will be no textbook and in a sense all the activities are reading \u2013 reading online material. As I don\u2019t know which sites will be embedded in the course so that they follow my introductions and links seamlessly, which will open in new windows, and which will be accessed by participants clicking on links, I don\u2019t know where reading the course ends and reading as an activity begins. Also, of course, I\u2019m still writing under the assumption that we shall be given permission to use the sites I\u2019ve chosen, and that may not be the case. The thing to do will be to stay flexible and regard what I\u2019ve written as a succession of drafts \u2013 starting points from which we can work but which will change and develop over time. 1 May 2008 Tact will have to be employed in the negotiations with copyright holders. Some of the websites that I\u2019ve included in the units have minor mistakes of spelling, punctuation and grammar which I\u2019d like to correct before they appear in our course, but I\u2019d hate to give offense. I hope that the copyright holders will regard this as just another stage in production \u2013 an extra copy-edit \u2013 since we all make mistakes, and typos are hard to spot in one\u2019s own writing. 10 May 2008 I think that the ten units now comprise a coherent course. It moves from introducing the Anglo-Saxon peoples at the points of their various arrivals in the British Isles, to their culture, their language, their literature, their dominance over the country and its establishment as 5 June 2008 Meeting with Marion and Tom in the TALL office. We are still having problems with Sandie’s access to post to this blog, so here is her dairy for the last few months 2 April 2008 Searching for useful Anglo-Saxon and Old English websites to use for the MOSAIC project … Continue reading