To begin with my overall interpretation of this project of creating an anthology, I was immediately intrigued with the idea of working together as a class to create something larger than us and that would branch outside of the classroom. I thought that doing this was one of the first ‘real’ times I have felt a part of a true learning “experience” and not regurgitating information. The hands on aspect of the project was the most informative part, as I have never been to or experienced any historical society and in all honesty had never thought about visiting one. I was generously surprised at how ‘cool’ (for lack of a better term) having a 300+ year old document in your hands could really be.
The project itself could have certainly used a little more time for a more thorough and detailed finished product by a class. Understandably we were ALL working together in creating a method / assignment as well as the anthology itself. I think now that there is a more stable and solidified idea of what the assignment is, that another class could accomplish the anthology in the time we had. I think the added time simply figuring out what we were doing was what may have set us back in the sense of a thorough investigation of multiple topics. Some may have settled for topics although I still think most of us were extremely excited about what we got our hands on and what we chose to focus on. Finding documents was not as difficult as I had originally imagined. The people helping at the historic society, etc made it almost a breeze. Narrowing down a subject matter on the other hand was the more difficult task and then being able to narrow down good secondary sources that felt warranted and engaging.
It was beneficial to have the 2 separate days of peer editing. I think 3-4 of those days throughout / at different stages of the project would be even more helpful. I think even though a lot of the work seemed individualized, that as a whole we do (speaking for everyone here) feel a sense of camaraderie as a group and feel we have creating something together, which is really neat.
Besides having a more formulated assignment to start I think the project is worthy of half a semesters work and truly just to reiterate this is one of the first times I have felt a group learning experience take place. It was a great experience and I personally enjoyed it and would have loved to do more of it in other courses.
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