November 15

Today Dr. Preston told us about this weekend's mindmap collaboration. The class voted on MindMeister as the preferred platform, so this weekend Dr. Preston will send an email invite to everyone so we can all collaborate (if you didn't get an invite, just send an email to Dr. Preston and he'll [re]send it). The text of the article is copied to an etherpad for students to claim their paragraphs, and the mindmap itself lives here.

As for next week, here's an outline:

• Monday: it's an early out, so we'll have a rather short in-class review of "Allegory of the Cave." (Also, at lunch is the meeting for the new collaborative working group, "The Game.")
• Tuedsay: in-class essay on "Allegory of the Cave." (At lunch is the meeting for the new collaborative working group, "Mentors and Educators.")
• Wednesday: the official start of the literature circles mentioned in today's agenda. The first time Dr. Preston did this, the only two choices were A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations: two novels by the same author, but on very different themes. However, that was before Class of 2013's Sarah Gutierrez stormed into the room and declared, "I'm not done with Shakespeare yet!" So, Dr. Preston added Henry V to the list (in Dr. Preston's words, "Open-source learning is like your friend who always says 'yes.'") So, make sure your group agrees on a book (or agrees to disagree-- yet another option is to read two different novels within your group) by our class library trip on Wednesday.
• UPDATE: loljk. switch Tuesday & Wednesday (except for the lunch meeting).

Dr. Preston also said he was impressed at how many great articles everyone suggested for the mindmap, so we might also be having additional "Article of the Week" mindmaps in the future for anyone who's interested.