These students have been blogging as they have been studying Nineteenth Century Literature and The Age of Shakespeare. Some of these students have been doing both courses. They each had to showcase their best blogs and also write a Summative Comment explaining what they have learned from the course and how the content still has application to living in the 21st Century: Literature and Life! Indeed that is what it is all about. How can studying literature enhance, amplify, inform your life as a human being living in the here and now. That IS what it is all about! As well as providing you with a great deal of fun and an expansion of your human experience. This group of students is the Crème de la Crème, there were at least 80 more students, but these were the most innovative and thoughtful.

It was fabulous going through all the amazing creative work that has been put into your ePortfolios during the last semester. It was good to hear also from many of you how much you found the blogging experience a more relaxed and interactive way of expanding your knoweldge of authors, texts and ideas of the period. It was also so good to hear how the peer-review process, where you had to comment on each other’s work each week, really helped many of you to feel linked to a larger community of interest and helped you see your own ideas from a new perspective.

As Michellie Willner said at the start of her ePortfolio:

“Within the last 12 weeks I have composed various creative and critical blog posts highlighting my knowledge of 19th Century Literature in many ways. It has been an experience that has expanded my knowledge through the use of technology and allowed me to explore the different resources available online for many of my texts being studied and the creative ways to interpret my answers. The relaxed atmosphere surrounding the ‘blogging’ society has left me wanting to learn more, and even explore other reasons as to why people blog.”