SHAKESPEARE

SHAKESPEARE IN COMMUNITY

Spring is in the air and I have just started my new course with COURSERA: this time it is something different. It is SHAKESPEARE IN COMMUNITY and it will be a different MOOC course. I am looking forward to doing it and while searching the web I found an interesting quiz which was presented on the day of Shakespeare's birthday. If you want to know more just follow this link:https://twitter.com/thersc

This is my certificate after I took the quiz : I feel I need to revise something !! I made some mistakes but it was great to do it. I am going to be on line for the next four weeks, what a pleasure to read some of the best plays by the BARD .

ACT I

Assignment

Play

We won’t be studying Hamlet closely in this course, so choose first words from one of the plays we will be discussing, and write about them some of your own first words.

Two households, both alike in dignity

~ Romeo and Juliet

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour / Draws on apace

~ A Midsummer Night’s Dream

I learn in this letter

~ Much Ado About Nothing

MASTER Boatswain!

BOATSWAIN Here, master. What cheer?

~ The Tempest

https://soundcloud.com/malaikaleigh/the-tempest

For this first assignment, we want you to start where you live—to find the corner of the web where you feel most comfortable and share something about the first words from one of our plays. And if you’re not yet comfortable on the web, don’t worry, this course will help you get to a place where you are. In the meantime, if you’re not sure where on the web to share your first words, find someone(s) nearby you in the world and speak, proclaim, utter, or whisper the words to that person or those people.

Since Shakespeare is for everyone, it is good to engage out on the web somewhere, anywhere, not just inside this course. And we also hope that you will interact immediately, right now, with living people wherever you are; get them engaging with Shakespeare too.

Don’t fret about whether you’ve read the rest of the play or not. Take the words “at their word,” so to speak. What do they mean to you? What do they make you think of? Do the words create pictures in your mind? Do the words appeal to your senses of smell and touch and taste as well as to sight and sound? If so, which senses are activated in you by these words? Where do they send your imagination? What kind of excitement, trepidation, or confusion do they unfurl in you? Put your words some place on the web. There is no special space to put your comments. Write in our forum. Or on your blog. In a video. In a comic. Onto Twitter or Facebook or some other. Tell someone in the course or at your home about your words. Ask them to respond. Wonder at what you hear back.

ACT II

Assignment

Analysis

Close-analysis is playful and voracious—about getting inside of (inhabiting) a literary text. There are many many ways to dive into analyzing a Shakespeare play. There are digital tools that can help you analyze, which we’ll be encouraging you to experiment with later in this course. But you can also start with the most immediate of tools, like eyes, ears, or fingers.

For this assignment, start with a chunk of text from Romeo and Juliet, one monologue (like the Queen Mab speech from Mercutio or the Nurse’s speech in Act 1, scene 3) or one scene (like the first balcony scene). Read the section silently to yourself several times. Then, read it aloud several times more. If you can, find someone and read it aloud with or to them.

Some other things you might do to help you get inside the language. Do one, or more, or none of the following:

Cut and paste the passage, scene, or monologue into Wordle. What do you notice? What words loom large? Fuss with the various settings until you’ve created something visually striking.
Write out several lines and fill the page around them with your own reflections on the words. Look the words up in a dictionary or concordance. If you’re reading a print edition of the play, look at the notes. Think about why the characters are saying these things at this time.
Tweet your favorite line(s) using our course hashtag: #moocspeare.
Write what Jesse calls a “Twitter Essay,” using the constrained space of a single Tweet to work through your ideas about this play.

Now, reflect on the words you’ve begun to analyze by writing a short response. Not a traditional academic paper, but an essay, one that describes what you’re seeing / hearing in the words and begins to grasp at conclusions, however tentative. Cut and paste your essay into the discussion forum OR share it on your blog and link to it with #moocspeare on Twitter. The best reason to do the assignments for this course: because they help you engage the texts in new ways and your work will help inspire your classmates to engage the texts in new ways. The worst reason: because a teacher told you to.

assignments

A note about blogging: The Coursera discussion forum is a great place for having discussion, asking questions, sharing ideas, and getting feedback. Many of the assignments suggest using tools and sharing work on the open web, but none of this is required. In fact, nothing is required. If you do want to blog for the course and don’t yet have a blog, most of the major platforms have useful guides for getting started. Here’s the one for Wordpress, which is incredibly powerful but has a bit of a learning curve. If you want an even easier way to get started, here’s a guide to setting up a blog at Medium. And one last open-source tool to consider: Known. There are lots of other tools that can help you start carving out a space of your own on the web.

ACT III

Assignment

Breaking Stuff

For this activity, you’ll break something as an act of literary analysis. Choose a selection of words from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and rearrange them into something else. You can use any or all of the words as many or as few times as you’d like. What you build from them can take any shape: text, image, video, a collage, a poem, a pile, digital, physical, sense-making or otherwise.

Think about what other sources you might draw upon: Shakespeare’s words, but also the words you yourself have produced for this course. Physical books are themselves raw material that can be repurposed, and so is the contents of this course. Take any of these raw materials and make something new with them. You've begun to do this already, if you made a word cloud as part of the last assignment. Now build something more ambitious. We're specifically not showing examples here, because the best response to this assignment is something none of us could have imagined. Need inspiration? Brainstorm your ideas in the discussion forum.

Authorship is a hotly contested topic (especially Shakespeare’s own authorship). Among authors and filmmakers, creative influence, collaboration, and borrowing are acceptable (even encouraged). For this assignment, you will borrow ideas but you should also make them truly your own—by playing with, manipulating, applying, and otherwise turning them on their head. This doesn’t give you license to copy something in its entirety and slap your name on it. (That’s just stealing.) Instead, think very consciously about how you’re influenced by and attributing your sources—by the way knowledge and creativity depend on a sort of inheritance. And think also about the real responsibility you have to those sources and the people who created them.

Give your work a title or a concerted lack of a title. Write a description or a narrative of your process. Share the work on your blog, in the discussion forum, in our Facebook group, or link to it with #moocspeare on Twitter. Remember, there is no one right way to do the work for this course. Interpret all of these instructions at will.

Self-reflection: This week, you’ll also do a mid-course reflection on your work thus far, in which you'll link to your assignments and/or representative forum posts. Completing this self-reflection is required to receive a Statement of Accomplishment from Coursera.

Looking forward: Begin thinking about the final project for the course, which we’ll describe in more detail at the start of the final week. For this project, we’ll each be sharing a short video (of less than 3 minutes), a reading of Shakespeare, an adaptation, a filmed performance of a short scene from the play. What you make for this week's assignment may appear in or build toward that short film.

ACT IV

Assignment

Distant Reading

This week’s text lectures have considered the way a Shakespeare play moves from one medium to another. The piece by Eric and Cathy suggests that big issues like genre and gender can be detected by the individual words used across a play. For the assignment this week, we encourage you to look at what else individual words can tell us, either in Much Ado About Nothing or in one of the other plays in this course. What words stand out when you close read the text on your own? What words stand out when you use a digital tool to visualize the words or to look at them from a distance?

The goal for this assignment is not to make something or break something, but to experiment with at least one tool you haven't used and to see how it might help you encounter Shakespeare in a new way. Try not to get frustrated if one of these tools doesn't work as expected. Just tinker and move on to another. Share your thinking on your blog, in the discussion forum, or link to it with #moocspeare on Twitter. If you play with one of the tools below, consider sharing the results, or talking about how the tool did (or didn’t) let you see the text in a new way. Playing with tools is not the thing, as is mentioned in one of the videos for the week, but rather finding different ways into the text (even if what you ultimately determine is that ears, eyes, or fingers are ultimately the best tools).

Tools to check out:

Wordle (a text analysis and visualization tool; for example, the words from every Emily Dickinson poem as a Wordle)
Hypothes.is (a tool for collaborative annotation of a written text; we started playing with this one last week, and here is an annotatable version of Much Ado)
Google Books Ngram Viewer (a tool which charts how frequent a word appears since 1800 across millions of published books)
Coggle (a mind-mapping tool for brainstorming and visualizing your thinking)
Tiki-Toki (a tool for creating interactive timelines)
Storify (a tool for curating tweets, links, videos, and images from the web; read a bit more about this tool)
Google Docs (a collaborative writing tool; read a bit more about creative ways to use Google Docs)

Some additional tools for textual analysis (these ones have a bit more of a learning curve but are worth checking out):

Serendip (a topic modeling and visualization tool developed at UW-Madison)
Ubiqu+Ity (a text-tagging tool that uses DocuScope’s tags)
WordHoard (a powerful word-counting tool with a corpus linguistics focus - it has all of Shakespeare’s plays uploaded and available for analysis)
Voyant (a web-based visualization suite)
Gephi (a tool for network analysis, can generate node-link graphs)

Individual assignments won’t be assessed. However, if you’re working towards a Statement of Accomplishment you’ll be writing several self reflections where you will be asked to link to / share the work you do on these assignments.be writing several self reflections where you will be asked to link to / share the work you do on these assignments.

Looking forward: As we mentioned last week, the final project for this course will be a short video adaptation of Shakespeare. Begin thinking, if you haven’t already, about what you’d like to adapt. Perhaps, you’ll film an entire play compressed into under 3 minutes with a dozen actors, or maybe a single soliloquy with yourself as the only performer. Also, think about what tools you’ll use. A camera, an animation program, photographs, a microphone, video editing software. And don't fret and run for the woods, if this seems utterly terrifying. We'll also offer lots of alternatives, including audio-only readings, computers performing Shakespeare, etc. Share ideas or online tools you’ve found in our discussion forum. Consider some resources here: The DS106Digital Storytelling Handbook.

ACT V

Assignment

Performance/Adaptation

The final project for this course will be a short performance (of no more than 3 minutes) of a scene or adaptation of a scene from a play by Shakespeare. Film and upload your performance or adaptation to YouTube or Vimeo. Work on your own, or gather a group of friends or family and film a full scene or a partial scene (or, perhaps, a monologue or soliloquy). Adapt, stage, direct, and perform the scene of your choice from any of Shakespeare's plays.

For many years, R L Widmann and Jesse Stommel have been doing this activity in their Virtual Shakespeare class. Numerous examples are available on YouTube. Here’s one, an adaptation of Titus Andronicus, made by a group of University of Boulder undergraduates. And here’s a stop-motion Much Ado with LEGOs.

Your own video can be as low-fi or as hi-fi as you’d like. A single shot from a mobile phone. A narrated stop-motion animation. A series of images with your own voice reading over top. An elaborate film shoot with professional camera, lighting equipment, and a famous cast (if you happen to have those nearby). Don’t get bogged down in the details. Make something using the tools at hand in as much time as you can give to this activity.

If you're not sure if you want to put yourself on film, or not sure if you have the tools to do it, don't fret. Here are some other possibilities: Play around with xtranormal and have your computer read some Shakespeare. Use Soundcloud to share an audio-only version. Or make a picture story and share as a slideshow or series of images.

When you’re done, share the work on your blog, in the discussion forum, or link to it with #moocspeare on Twitter.

Self-reflection: At this point, you should also complete this final reflection on your work in the course. Completing this self-reflection is required to receive a Statement of

Accomplishment from Coursera.

The Coda

TO BE OR NOT TO BE ......................