Starting Points for Project #2

Once you've picked your prompt, get started by recording some of your thinking:

• First, try fastwriting out any experiences you've had that could work as relevant examples to share. After all, while traditional scholarship and other readings work as research, there are other forms worth drawing upon: memory, observation, interview. Seeing what you remember is a good first step toward collecting material.
• Once you find those traditional sources and have spent some time with them, do more fastwriting: what are some relevant FACTS you've discovered?
• For another fastwrite, record relevant IDEAS and THINKING your experts share in the research you are reading. 

Finally, after you've recorded that material, do another fastwrite to collect what YOU think in response to your chosen prompt . . . All of this writing should prove useful as we move on. A good next step would be to look at the prompt, and formulate a working idea in response. You could plan a sketchy, rough outline—one that simply presents some smaller points you have to make in order to explain that larger idea. That would give you something to work and write from!

On Finding a Topic and Asking Questions

Here are two slideshows from today, one on researching as a way of exploring topics as well as loopwriting as a means of exploring your thoughts, and one on formulating a good question to drive your project.

Project Ideas from Class Monday

Remember that initially, with any topic, we work toward building a "working knowledge"—a sense of what it entails, what is being talked about recently, and so on. Having a working knowledge can help us start to figure out where and what we can contribute to the conversation with our own take.

We'll add to this list I'm sure, but here's what we've explored so far with regard to personality and our attempts to understand what makes us work:

• Personality testing, how it’s useful, how it’s used and where and with what implications
• Other ways data-hungry culture uses testing to understand workplaces and interactions among people
• Giving versus taking and the dynamics of that
• Personality traits/trends in the culture (parenting), in the world (social perfectionism and male suicide)
• Personality privilege, i.e. being introverted in an extroverted culture