Year of the Flood Project

This evening in class, we will begin our discussion of Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood. I have enjoyed reading the responses you have posted so far.

Tonight, Emily will also do a demonstration of Mural.ly, a collaboration tool we will use to discuss, draft, and plan your final project: a collaborative multimedia response to Year of the Flood. To complete the project, we will break down into teams:

• Chronology and Geography
• God’s Gardeners: Saints, Celebrations, and Beliefs
• Corps, Science, Technology, and Social Systems

Each group will brainstorm about possible responses and media to represent them (timelines? maps? short films? text? what else?). As you read, you should add notes about your area to our class planning mural. We’ll all add notes on major characters to the mural. In each class meeting, each team will give brief report back on their findings. We’ll use our mural help draw connections between ideas and events in the novel, and to determine the architecture and draft components of our final project site. A class wikipedia page is also available for drafting, and eventually, our class will contribute to the Year of the Flood page (and possibly more) on Wikipedia.

By next Thursday, Oct 31, your group should have an established presence on the mural, list out key elements of the novel for your area, and should make a blog post about your ideas for the final project. (One post per group is fine–within your group, you should decide how to allocate that job fairly.)

You should make updates to the mural often in the upcoming weeks. What you post there does not need to be formal; it should serve as a workspace, drafting, and note-gathering area. In class on Nov 7, we will wireframe the final project site together.