With midterms in full swing and Fall Break coming up, I’m setting up times for focus groups. Two different sessions with freshmen–one with those who were genuinely interested in the web forum, and one with randomly selected freshmen–and two session with professors–one with D&D English professors, and one with those who participated in the blog. If you’re reading this and have been following the project up to now, please contact me at zahrak@smu.edu and join one of the focus groups. The only requirement is that you must have heard or seen something having to do with Think Out Loud this year.
Once I get some good feedback, I hope to make different experiments based on challenges the project faced. I’ll do this by first laying out the challenges, then creating tests where every variable but one is different. My first one is going to be a change of book.
While I enjoyed The Big Short, I can’t say I thought it was a particularly fascinating book with a lot of different POVs to be explored. My plan is to work with the SMU Library Book group to find a book (possibly associated to a movie out right now) that they are discussing and English classes will be discussing next semester. I hope to have this next book choice well publicized by right before Winter Break, so that students have plenty of free time to log on and start chatting about it! Let’s hope things work out.
As Bill Nye used to say, “Science rules!”